A few days ago I looked at how easy it is to get sucked into all of the misery and despair going on around the world, to the exclusion of life itself, and all we have to be grateful for.
This is not to say we should bury our heads in the sand when it comes to the world's goings on—far from it—but simply to remain aware of when we're innocently attaching our sense of wellbeing to external circumstance… which is very easily done.
(It's what this entire website's about!)
It struck a chord with a few of you, and I just read something the other day that slotted another piece of the optimism/pessimism jigsaw into place for me, so I shall share it with you.
It's about AI, so if that turns you off completely, you can stop reading now.
🤓
Doomed, I tell you!
A large part of my job in Health Informatics, before I ditched it all to help people quit the self-help hamster-wheel once and for all, involved keeping up with technology. I enjoyed it, and still do – I am a self-confessed tech-geek, and relish tinkering around with computers and devices in general.
But the algorithmic nature of social media these days means that anything we show the vaguest interest in will get shoved down our throats ad infinitum, so some of my feeds have a fair bit in them (more than I'd like) about AI – what it's up to and where they think it's going.
(As an aside, being aware that what you read online is a bit of an echo-chamber, subtly reinforcing your existing beliefs, is definitely a 21st Century skill to cultivate!)
Anyway there was a viral post doing the rounds recently, which was rather bullish on the future of AI… and this led to all sorts of fear-mongering about the future of humanity in general. It got a bit out of hand, as these things tend to.
You know, the usual.
And I probably paid a bit too much attention to that (it's compelling, isn't it, fear-mongering?) and it probably fed into the mind-darkness I experienced last week.
Common sense prevails
And then someone whose Ghost blog I follow, penned something that put things into perspective for me again. Slotted it all into the bigger picture.
So if you're worried about AI and what it means for the future of humanity in general (especially the workforce aspects), you could do worse than to read it yourself:
JA Westenberg
Joan's posts are longer than mine (13 min read) so grab a cuppa
The reason it resonated with me so much, was because it echoed a great bit of the book RESULTS by Jamie Smart, where he's talking about how revolutions work – not so much the bloody ones, but the big societal shifts we've experienced over the last few hundred years: agricultural, industrial, information, that sort of thing.
Because while each of these shifts brings huge benefits and moves us forward as a species, each of them has un-predicted side effects… which society then has to deal with (and which the next revolution often addresses).
And AI is no different. It has huge potential, it's going to change our lives irrevocably (already has, for many), nobody actually knows where it's all going to end up, and it's definitely going to cause some problems too.
But, as Joan maps out in her very well-reasoned piece, we'll figure it out. Because we always do!
As always, that's the thing—our innate health, wisdom and capacity for resourcefulness—nobody talks about all that much, and is so easy to lose sight of.
For me, for you, for all of us.
A reminder
This might be a good time to remind you of this rather excellent quote from Jiddu Krishnamurti (one of my favourites – really slows you down when you think about it)!
“One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.”
That's just what minds do!
💟
Giles
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Giles P Croft
More on the nature of evolution & societal revolution