A pastor, from the pulpit this month, mocked young adults who use nouns as verbs: He said a generation of people found the basic tasks of adulthood too difficult, crying over "adulting" because they had idolized youth to the point of mental illness.
Reality Check: New generations face societal upheaval and the loss of social structure and community support like never before.
Think that's not true?
Scientific observation reflects that technology alone is advancing at a rate exponentially faster than humankind can adapt to it. That means children are now born into a world to which they will never be able to acclimate: the rate of change is beyond human capacity to understand and integrate in a comprehensive, productive, and meaningful way.
Want the technical explanation? Our brain development, identity, and survival is based on the creation of schema, categories by which we organize knowledge about the world, and attachment, internalized experience and images of environmental constants. But change - not knowledge - is now our constant, and the rate of change surpasses our ability to create schema or internalize experience on a daily - if not hourly - basis. Authors and scientists writing about this subject warned that mass amounts of humanity would be "left behind" this technology curve. But the truth is, we are now born "left behind," born into a world that the human mind and body is biologically unable to process and adapt to. We cannot process technology fast enough to make a coherent, emotionally and mentally stable whole.
We often think we're adapting. When brains are growing and learning at their most accelerated rate, we can look like we're keeping up, but that's part of the maladaptation: we can only keep up with a sliver of what is changing, and the harder we work to maintain our edge on that sliver - an imaginary edge, mind you - the farther behind we get on everything else. Thus, we produce the coding genius whose body wastes away, who cannot navigate human interaction, or who becomes less and less capable of empathy each day. Or we produce a crop of CEO's who master momentary economic waves, make more money than they can spend in a lifetime, but all at the cost of human lives, the environment, and their own families. Wealth then creates a buffer for these people until they become less and less connected with reality and more and more driven to recreate the world in their own image, all while sacrificing themselves to the advancement and profit god that swallowed them whole a long time ago.
In fact, technological advancement is the embodiment of Cthulhu in our time: it is an alternate universe, an entity far bigger than we can fathom, and it feeds on us, our time, our attention, our sanity, until we are consumed. Yet we worship it as a god because it mesmerizes us. It is all-encompassing. It is all we know. It is the very structure of our world. And as far as we know, it's what we are here for in the first place: feeding the beast. And the puppet-masters of the world are Cthulhu's priests.
People have long written stories and still mutter about the "dangers of AI." Our mistake is thinking that AI is a physical or ideological entity, something we can conceptualize and point to, even if what we are pointing to is an abstract like the "world wide web." AI in these stories was only ever a symbol of something we intuited but could not begin to comprehend. There isn't an intelligence, an entity, or even a conglomeration of entities that are going to take over the world and enslave us. No, it is something bigger than that, and we are already enslaved. AI was the icon, the metaphor, the token we used to represent something that was happening but was too large to articulate. AI was our shorthand. We wrote scifi stories to represent a vast reality that was reordering and is reordering our world as I type. The concept of AI was to alert us to an ethic, an ethos, a mythos, one that we made and that surpassed us, creating a world in which we can no longer thrive. And here we are.
Dear Pastor: The mockery is not a generation of people clawing at a world that wasn't designed for their good but devours their hearts, minds, and bodies even while they are alive. The mockery is the man who sits in judgment of those dying all around him as if he is superior, as if he isn't dying, too.
