WILL OF THE PEOPLE or WILL OF THE ROBOTS
Thursday, March 4, 2021 - daily column #6686
Early morning, my foggy brain starting …
Starting. Quitting. Re-starting.
These terms can be statements or posed as questions. It is my view that how we react to them says something about us. Not only today but with a view to the future.
Are we starting something, quitting something, or re-starting?
And wherever we are on that elongated continuum, where are we headed in the long run?
Is our destination a known inevitability, a high-road, a deep ditch, a cliff to be leapt from or an ultimately unknowable long-distant future?
And then another morning of uncertainty begins.
Wavering is, I expect, pretty much de rigueur right now.
It’s 2021; we’re all stuck somewhere between 1945 and 2525 …
The REAL future isn’t here yet, but the path is murky, and the trenches are full of muck like a ripe horse stall. A century or two from now, we’ll not be viewed as leading-edge anything – people will simply marvel at how primitive we were in the days before inter-planetary travel, a single world government, a single monetary and currency system for the entire Milky Way galaxy. They’ll roll their eyes – aghast that there was a time when people lived to be less than 200. They’ll still have pizza, and Mozart, and Maui – but life, as we know it now, will be a faint picture in old history books. Books, in some form, will exist electronically, and old-fashioned ‘printed on paper’ ones will be as lost to history as was Guttenberg’s first press …
Where am I going with this?
Everyone from Bay Street to Wall Street to Main Street is ensorcelled by ‘what happens next’ and how to prepare for and capitalize upon opportunities while avoiding calamity. This pandemic did not start as a financial crisis but rather as a medical one. But it has become a gripping force that has put pressure on far more than economic issues globally – it’s about rights and wrongs; it’s about race, religion, and politics. Yes, in the midst of it all, ventures are journeying to Mars, and drug companies have never had such an easy time raising money.
The iPhone is 12. The internet, as we use it, is in its early 20’s. A hundred years ago, the world was just learning about aviation as a thing, most of the world didn’t have a phone or a party-line connection, horses were out in front of their carriages rather than under the hood – the news was old when readers got it, and they trusted it. Radio and television as we now know them had scarcely been thought of conceptually.
So, where will we be, and what will life be like in the future?
It will be so different that we won’t recognize it. Fear mongers suggest we won’t recognize the landscape either because they fear a climate and pollution Armageddon. Whatever predictions you hear or read about – should be ignored if they look more than five years out.
Nobody knows, and we should spend less time fretting about it.
Let’s do what’s next.
Let’s return the next call, attend the next meeting, tackle the next piece of paper or file on the pile.
Knowing exactly where we are going individually is a decision. One that can be changed, and we often change whether or not change is called for …
Knowing exactly where we are going as a society is a decision too – the collective wisdom of 8.5 billion people making their way in the world. Change might appear chaotic, plagued by violence, mistakes, manipulation, and lacking fairness or equity. It always has, and always still – but that doesn’t mean people who care about something cannot make the world change.
The car, it seems, is well on its way to being electric – but as long as I drive in snow and ice, I’m sticking with my gasoline engine. Computers, phones, and sensors of many kinds will get smaller in size while massively expanding their capacity. We won’t live in the cloud or have our heads in the clouds because the cloud will shift from servers in a server-farm to low-orbiting satellites. And we’ll eat foods we don’t recognize, and our doctors will be a combo of sensors and robots.
Instead, our robots will be our doctors. It’s the only way to break the monopoly doctors have – convert them into customer/patient services rather than seeing us collectively as an ever-ringing cash register attached to their medical degree.
Of all things I imagine never changing in coming centuries will be writing and writers. And moms and dads. And kids, and play. These are all we need to know. The rest will be figured out by the collective ‘will of the people.’
Worth noting, in the post-Trump, post-Putin, post-Ping, times – the age of tyrants is fading fast and won’t last past the end of this century. Check with me in 2199, and we’ll review how things worked out.
Today is March 4th.