WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE ARE DONE?
Tuesday, February 9, 2021 - daily column #6663
As we embrace artificial intelligence, we should also consider the organic kind, the only kind we used to rely upon – as we now rely more and more heavily upon things working automatically, in the background, and while we are sleeping or multi-tasking …
I’m inclined to wonder, one day soon, will anyone know that I was here?
Will anyone care?
Who?
How?
What will the miss when I’m gone?
Everyone asks these questions – perhaps more so as we get older, as the lasting value of anything we’ve done weighs on our mind, as we wonder what we could have done better, or done more of, to leave this place better than we found it.
Which begs the question of whether that’s our job – to leave things better than we found them? Who made that a rule? Which implies a further question about those whose deeds we admire or aspire to, whether leaving things better than they found them was ever their goal or ambition?
Or did they do what they seemed to want to be doing?
Frost’s path wanted wear, Mozart needed to explain the sounds in his head, and Van Gogh had a similar problem. Columbus, what did he want? Was his sense of adventure and yearning for discovery rooted in how he might change the world? I don’t think so. He knew how to captain a ship, and he wanted to see what was over there, across the water, that he could find and bring back for those how funded the trip.
Discovery, of this planet we know so well is more well-financed and focused than ever. Microscopic things are on everyone’s mind as viruses, DNA, disease, and health is front of mind for everyone. And space – both our upper atmosphere and away-places, like the moon, Mars and beyond are gaining interest. Technology is being harnessed to do more of what used to be done by inventors building prototypes and experimenting.
Someday there will be a statue somewhere, an award, or a prize in memory of the greatest intellectual and breakthroughs in humanity.
As time passes, I wonder how many will still be human work alone vis-à-vis how many innovations will be generated by software that recognized a pattern nobody saw, a program that designed a structure nobody could have imagined. The future is not so much in microscopes or telescopes as in computer programs that design computer programs …
I don’t know anything for sure, which is odd considering it was only a few years ago I felt cock-sure about everything.
I don’t think my computer knows anything either – when it’s turned off.
It only works when it’s turned on.
What turns you on?
That’s where we need to focus our attention, don’t we?
To things that excite us.
Whether they last is not for us to know or direct.
Let’s just do good work and see what happens.