I originally set out in this essay to articulate how impressed I have been while working with OpenAi’s API. In particular how I believed that the sort of information economy most of the readers of Voyagers work in will be decimated, but I was struck by a feeling of doubt. How could I make such bold claims about the future? I would never have been able to predict ChatGPT, Neurolink, or any of the other advancements which have happened in just the last two years.
What aside from hubris would give my perspective any weight? These thoughts sparked a series of questions about what life as someone in their mid 20s even means. Questions, but not answers as I stare up the exponential curve of our future.
Even just in my own short lifetime the society I live in has profoundly changed. America has been transformed demographically, socially(1,2,3,4,5) and technologically to such a profound degree that it’s hard to imagine what this country will even resemble in my old age. Pointing out these changes is difficult to do without coming across as a contentious conservative but they simply exist. Often I get the impression from people either in my own life or online that some of us don’t even seem to want to admit the world has actually changed and the era we live in is truly unique.
Part of this hesitancy is that most of the changes have been – at least individually – a welcome improvement over the stifling, cruel, and boring world of the past. Thus, opening a broader conversation about the desirability of change in general endangered those changes in particular. But an underlooked aspect is the degree to which these changes are simply an inevitable feature of modern life. Thus, criticism of them is tantamount to screaming into a hurricane – not something a reasonable person does. Because at its core modern life is one where our existence is marked by a continuous process, I like to call, “the three mothers of progress”: deconstruction – breaking something up, individualization – isolating it to the smallest possible unit, and reconstitution – assembling these differentiated things into a more effective whole. There is no alternative, as to slow down and to breathe would spell ruin for our civilization. Since all that it would take is one small part of our planet to remain on the exponential and given enough time they would steamroll us all; bringing the change with them anyway.
As this process accelerates what is remarkable is the degree to which young people – at least anecdotally – largely seem to behave as if these changes are not happening. In just my own social circle there is little discussion about if and in what form the jobs we currently hold will still exist in our 50s; only a passive assumption that they will remain virtually unchanged. In my mind this is primarily caused by the fact that the future has become so totally unpredictable no one can reliably tell us what it holds. We are on a ship which is steering itself and whose controls are so complicated it might be impossible to control. I do not know if the career I’m signing up for will even exist as I age – or even if Human labor as I understand it will exist at all! In Oswald Spengler’s 1918 tome “The Decline of the West” he compares the religions of Stoicism and Buddhism and argues that both represent a sort of final religion of every society. Since as the social organism ages and becomes rigid people lose agency over their own lives. With this loss of agency there is an increasing emphasis on the “internal” world of human experience – which people can control – rather than the rigid and often oppressive external world. Like much of what Spengler wrote in that book there is a seed of truth to this. My fear is that the recent rise in Stoicism and other ideologies of the internal world is our society going through a similar – albeit ironically reversed – process. Where the unpredictability and rapid changes of life have stripped us of agency over our future and thus led to many of us rejecting even trying.
Personally I think this is bad. I believe the only solution is to live as if the world wasn’t changing at all. I have no choice but to behave like I know the future with certainty. I have to save as if the next 50 years will be as stable as the last, I have to study like the job market which exists now will exist in 5 years. In short I must plan for a future I can have no way of knowing will exist and behave as if I have agency I do not. Because there is no alternative, I cannot change the flow of society or the trend of technology. Instead I can only enjoy the ride. We must be like a leaf on the stream, neither a part of the progress or opposed to it, instead carried by it. The future will never exist, the only place you will ever live is the ever present Now; all we can do is find meaning in it.
2. See https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx
3. See https://news.gallup.com/poll/394202/record-low-extremely-proud-american.aspx
4. See https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx
5. See https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/03/07/millennials-in-adulthood/
