Now that A.I. seems to be taking over our world, and the electronic gadgetry we carry in our pockets is an essential fact of life, I keep wondering what we can do to preserve the best of the old, as we’re propelled at warp speed, into the new.

I have a feeling – somewhere between curiosity and foreboding – that this brave new world we’re plunging into headlong will be long on technology and short on humanity.

The “Before” Time

Life was softer and sweeter before cell phones, iPads, computers and a wretched economy sucked us all into a machine-made world in which speed and efficiency seem the only coin of the realm.  I think it felt that way to us because it was so very human, so very geared to making a life as well as just making a living.

I remember when few were forced to work all day at a computer screen in a cubicle smaller than a coat closet.

When jobs hadn’t been outsourced to other countries and the next wave of  jobs might be outsourced to robots!

When people wrote letters with pens on paper – letters that could be saved and savored years later, or maybe even passed on as wisdom to bolster another generation?  Will the Library of Congress catalog wise emails in days to come, I wonder now?  Or will the remnants of the humanity part of human history be left to the NSA and Google?

Rebellious Me

So, I’m rebelling on behalf of the children!  The ones who will need to be computer-literate from infancy in order to compete or even function.  The ones who will play in virtual simulations, not playgrounds… who will be long on data and short on knowledge and wisdom.  The ones who may never know the sheer joy of helping Granny knead the bread, or Daddy fix what’s broken, or sitting in the crook of Grandpa’s arm, listening to him read a favorite story, rather than seeing it all on a video screen.  In the next generation, I’m afraid Artificial Intelligences will have taken over these familial “chores” and with them the love and interconnectedness that was the corollary to the work.

Technology vs. the Heart

I’m not opposed to technology – I’d better say that right out front, lest I sound curmudgeon-y.  I’m just opposed to taking the sweet human connectedness out of everyday life and experience… opposed to substituting circuitry for humanity, and greedy machine-consciousness for the soft, strong, surprising infinity of the heart.

I welcome advancements, provided they actually advance humanity, not simply replace it with something far less good.

Advancements?  Really?

I’d like our future children to be able  savor what life was like before kids sat at the dinner table, their thumbs racing over tiny digits on a pulsing umbilicus of a cell phone… before driving and texting made parents’ worries about kids in cars all the worse… before cell phones became appendages as essential as a new prehensile thumb.   When you could add and subtract in your head, not just on an electronic device.  When Moms and Dads taught kids how to make things besides money!  And how to separate what was truly valuable, from that which was simply expensive.  A time when we measured the success of a life in integrity, honor, decency, accomplishment, not merely by the size of a bank account.

Computers

And yes – before you ask – I do know how useful and essential computers are now.  Try to live without your cell phone for a day and that becomes clear!

Truth is, I’m thrilled to be able to communicate with you through whatever device you’re reading this on! Computers allow me to write my books efficiently and run my business from home most days. My website allows me to blog and converse with a worldwide audience, my researching for books is made easier and faster, my astrological charts take a fraction of what they did years ago – it’s hard not to welcome all that goodness and I do!

But there’s a lot I don’t welcome.  Like the fact that

• We now live our entire lives in a sea of microwaves and radiation, good for wifi but not for human brain cells and soft tissue that’s now forced to swim in electronic soup from long before-birth to death.

 

• Cancer levels and birth defects are rising, and a number of European countries are more honest than we are about the dangers posed by our devices and our wifi world. Rather than hiding the truth, they’re taking steps to protect pregnant women, infants and children under 16 from very real dangers of cell phone usage.

 

• Cell phones are causing an upswing in reproductive problems. Sperm damage and infertility all actually threaten the continuance of the human race, nevermind  the concept of family.

 

• And don’t even get me started on the dangers of the Smart Meters the electrical companies are busily installing all over the country! Smart meters  not only raise the danger of brain and other cancers but also alter sleep and brain wave patterns 24/7 so there’s never a way to escape the damaging micro-radiation they zing throughout your home.

 

• The overwhelming bombardment of information that’s zinged in from cyberspace on a minute to minute basis via electronic devices is worrisome, too. Endless data glut is no fit substitute for the generous sharing of human to human wisdom and knowledge that was the lifeblood of other generations.

 

• The constant staccato distraction-blitz offered by ever-present devices, is also contributing to a generation of anxiety-ridden kids with attention deficit disorders. These are the same kids whose developing brain was ultrasounded over and over again while still in the womb, something Mother Nature never had on her agenda.

 

Disconnecting and Skimming the Surface

Beyond the health issues, maybe the worst of it is the visceral disconnection of human beings from one another.  Interposing an electronic device between humans doesn’t bring people closer, it keeps them separate – protected behind an electronic, invisible wall.  Sexting?  Seriously?  How sad and lonely is that?  But maybe not so strange for a generation that’s learning to make love by watching porn videos.

There’s a fragmentation and superficiality of information that troubles me, too.  Being bombarded by endless random input a thousand times a day doesn’t increase knowledge, it increases anxiety, chaos and stress.

This generation knows a smattering of surface data about a million things, yet it’s seldom encouraged to plumb the depths of any one of them other than tech and science.  But how could they find time for in-depth knowledge when new data is pouring in on them minute to minute, in an avalanche that crushes the spirit as it overwhelms the brain’s capacity to mine, sort or use it all appropriately.  It’s no wonder anxiety is a national disease and opiates a national disaster.

We Can Never Go Back

There’s no way back, of course.  It would be preposterous to imagine that.  I’m just lobbying here for a way to monitor the changes and mitigate the most dangerous ones.  It’s very clear that for the immediate future, technology will dictate pretty much everything and will all but consume our lives and a large percentage of our livelihoods.

This is cheerful news for some of course, because it means we can be data-mined, surveiled, assessed and catalogued every minute of every day to feed the  maw of big business and the perfidious greed of governments that wish to spy and ultimately control. It means that corporations can substitute machines for human workers, big cost saving.

I’m not so sure it’s good news for us mere mortals.

Predigested Knowledge

Did you know, for example,  that if you and I each ask Google for an answer to the very same question, it will pop up different answers for each of us, because our buying habits have been assessed and our financial capability has been assessed and our previous computer searches have been assessed and it has all been filtered through an algorithm that determines which answer you want to hear!

The answer that pops up on your screen has been curated to give you only half the truth.  We aren’t being given more choices by wider access, we’re being given fewer, pre-selected ones.

Eight giant corporations now control the news content of the whole wide world and feed us only what they want us to know.  Does that sound at all suspicious to you?

Everything’s Under Control

We’re being watched, calculated and processed for commercial purposes, political expediency and God knows what else.  Where’s the heart and soul in that, we need to ask ourselves, and what can we do to salvage the precious human factor?  If we can’t stop the electronic barrage, how can we at least keep it from derailing our humanity?  How can we tailor it to our own desires, not those of some faceless, hidden entities with an agenda that serves their benefit, not ours?

So, What on Earth Can We Do?

I wish I had some brilliant solutions to offer ..  I freely admit that I don’t! But I do know that acknowledging the existence of a problem is the first step toward finding a solution that can at least help mitigate it.

If we put our hearts and heads together we can alter the future, we always do. Maybe awareness of the dangers of this brave new techno world can help. Maybe not embracing every new gadget  without researching its downside is a wise choice.  Maybe a New Year’s resolution should be to try to recognize genuine progress, and separate it from the perfidious autonomization of our lives.  Maybe simply not accepting the inevitable tech as it assesses us,  but assessing  it right back would give us a chance to decide just how much of our privacy and humanity we’re willing to share and fight the proliferation of the rest of it.

Because in this faster-than-the-speed-of-light world we now inhabit, it’s terribly easy to run so fast to just stay in the race, that important observations flash past without our meaning to let that happen.  We have to help each other stay alert and aware.  We have to help each other let the light of truth in through the cracks in a system that profits from keeping us ignorant and controlled.

7 Generations

It isn’t only corporations who need to ponder what the Futurists, businesses and governments are planning for us – it’s us as individuals who have a stake in humanity’s future because we love our children and their children to come.  And because we love what’s best in humankind:  our capacity for love and compassion and connectedness… our courageous hearts that let us love beyond reason and fight beyond endurance…our unpredictability that lets us spit in the eye of tyrants when we must, and fight against the odds for an ideal.  And not one of these so-valuable human traits is dependent on being tethered to an electronic umbilicus that predigests data and feeds us only what it wants us to know.

The Indians Know

Our Native American friends tell us we are responsible for the wellbeing of the next 7 generations – each of us equally responsible for the legacy we leave behind.  “Did you think you were put here by Creator for less, in such dangerous times as these?”  Chief Arvol Looking Horse, visionary Chief of the Lakota Sioux, asked in his heartfelt plea to the United Nations.  He cautioned all of us to be aware of the damage we’re doing to Mother Earth and to each other, to act boldly and relentlessly to preserve what’s best in our species and our world.

Courage

It’s always individual acts that change the world for better, after all.  One tired woman won’t go to the back of the bus… one ascetic sage defies the British Empire… one brave man leaks the truth about government corruption… one cell phone message gets out of Cairo.  And then another and another.  All are cracks where the light comes in.

We’ve done it before… we can do it again

I believe we must help each other let in whatever light is possible – and to the best of our ability fight against that which curtails our freedoms, compromises our knowledge of the truth, or has the potential to enslave us.

I’m hoping you’ll think that’s a worthwhile endeavor, too, so we can help each other keep a weather eye on the supposed “progress” we’re being offered by the self-serving salesmen of a future that defines us with algorithms.

We need to pick and choose among their “advances” and welcome only that which advances  our human potential, without compromising our humanity.

All thoughts on this subject, welcomed with open arms!

Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, electronic devices, Internet of Things, IoT, Politics, technology

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