On Fearmongering | Y2K & The Human-Machine Interface

#JournalingJuly - July 18th & 19th

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[1,150 Words — for Today & Yesterday, July 18th]

Everything is Y2K. We take the bait. We fear monger. We anticipate the worst & do so in a way that outweighs our faith in the best. How so? We fall victim to speaking of our circumstances & stressors, articulating ways in which we perceive it has some form of control over our lives. We soak up the drama & fear, then miss the substance & calls to action from the less-than-optimal  sources of news.

We let the cautionary tales of fiction speak us into unexpectedly deep levels of chaos & dread, as if to say we in this current existence have no influence over the reality we partake. We play telephone with the details, not caring for the specifics, & haplessly hand off the little drama of what we know to our circles of influence.

It’s important to shift perspectives. The scare of Y2K, the new millennium & the end of the world. The scare bomb was a dud. 2012, end of the Mayan calendar, end of the world. Also a dud. 1984, came a bit late but wrote itself into existence while simply tracing the technological trend lines that had already started at the time of writing.

Now, we’ve taken the quite reasonable bait of AI, Robots, mind-control, human-machine symbiosis, brain interfacing and more.

It’s wise to be cautious & considerate, it’s unwise to fall victim to the symptoms of chronic fear & fear-mongering. Even in a state of caution, most still default to presuming the worse, rather than formulating mental connections on how a scenario could play out positively, & articulating those ideas & strategies to a forum, community, or specialist who has a more direct influence with the choice-makers who inevitably guide the direction of an innovation that can radically shift our society... our civilization.

In “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly (which I'm sure I've mentioned before), the author proposes a concept he refers to as “The Technium”. Essentially, he has considered the possibility that technology is the seventh kingdom of nature. Pretty wild right? Yet & Still, the “inevitable” factors of certain technological advancements, coupled with his ability to formulate & portray those intrinsic lines of development, really open one’s mind up to the possibility.

Kevin does well to address the ethics of the inevitable innovations that will permeate our world & way of being in the very near future. He took a very balanced perspective on it, which you know I certainly love because I always want to illustrate the balance in duality. It’s good to know where you stand, but it’s even better to triangulate perspective & agree to disagree if need be.

Kevin emphasizes that new technology does not simply create negative outcomes. He acknowledged that with each new adopted innovation, there is the ability to use it for harm & the ability to use it for good. AI in & of itself is not inherently bad or inherently good, it simply increases the amount of options in which we could choose to do good or bad things. While that is generally highlighted as all the more reason why it should be stifled, that perspective undermines just how much GOOD it could present to the world. We have a habit of psyching ourselves out of the benefits of a new technology, before we’ve ever made proper sense of it, simply for hearing it’s list of cons. EVERYTHING has a pros & cons list. There are some things that will simply require a choice to accept the pitfalls attached in order to take advantage of the benefits it has to offer.

Often times, we say “absolutely not”, because we believe those pitfalls will only befall us. We’ve seen the history. We know the extent of privilege, hatred & bigotry. We see these new technological advancements as threats, & shun the idea of ever using them to their fullest potential, in fear that we will be too easily in their clutches; a sheep in the herd of device-dependent perpetual adolescence, skimming the surface of adulting only as much as necessary. It’s at times painful to consider that many of us have let ourselves be caged out of the possibilities of innovation, by allowing the mental barriers that fear-mongering has granted us to remain in place.

Now though, there are growing numbers of us determined to answer the call of human curiosity & wonder, that also see the many positive benefits of freakishly futuristic technology. They see the sustainable, scalable, easily-accessible, morally-aligned, privacy-protected & eco-friendly possibilities of these inevitable inventions. They see the possibilities of a globally connected internet for all. They dare to manifest the pinnacle of all human imagination & ideation by creating something that will far outlive us.

Truly, it’s a wonder. Many of the amazing things that bring us a life of ease — more so than we could have had on our own — were brought to fruition by the fringe thinkers that are on the bleeding edge of the technological development of our world. The daily experiences we have must not be taken for granted.

If you have a smartphone or computer, & can access the internet & youtube, you are fully capable of increasing your level of awareness of what is currently happening in regards to cutting edge technology, & how they correlate with a path of your choosing. You can find out the companies developing them, you can read their roadmaps & visions. You can find a means to communicate with them & share opinions, suggestions, concerns, questions & more. There software may even be open source. You can become a direct influencer to the outcome of what they are developing, even without any experience. This is a way to ensure that your interests are at least up for consideration & acknowledged in the process in some way.

By simply being curious, & finding a connection point, you may propose an inquiry that sparks a whole slew of ideas for the developers deep in the thick of it. Website forms & chatbots, email, phone, forums, conferences, facebook pages/groups, local community-events, etc. These are all the many ways openly available to just about anyone with an internet connection to truly find out what’s happening with the development of cutting edge technology.

At this point, it’s beyond us. The future that you have dreaded coming to existence is already here. With companies like Neuralink co-founded by Elon Musk, & the likes of Facbeook & MIT already developing mental-implants, mind-reading &/or human-robot symbiosis, there’s no escaping it as an indisputable fact of our reality that these things exist & will become far more prevalent as time continues to whizz by.

Moral of the story is: Surprise. The future is here. Dooms Day is still on the horizon, as it’s always been. The forecast is anticipating it doesn’t take us all out. Most of us will live to experience the benefits of successful innovations — & birth generations after who will continue to expound upon these rapidly evolving developments.

Don’t count yourself out of the possibilities. Create the path for these innovations to reach you & your community for it to do some good.

All the Best,

Sean aka Mr. Wildenfree

#LiveLifeWell

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Neuralink IImage Source