The driverless vehicle of progress.

The world has changed; it will never be the same again. 

But isn’t that how it has always been? Yes, but now it seems more fundamental; it’s more of a ‘throw everything out that you thought you knew about the world, and start again’.

The coming of AI and its taking over everything from government to creativity and most of our daily activities will change the world and eventually create a new type of human.

I’m not a tech person, and I’m not even that well educated, so I panic easily when confronted with change on this scale. Sorry, ‘tech bros,’ but I don’t see the upside. 

All I know is that we seem to have sleepwalked into a world that is topsy-turvy, to say the least. It’s a mirror reflection. Nothing is certain, nothing is how we knew it, and we are all as confused as one another.

There are no truths or lies anymore, just ‘alternative facts’ (what we used to call lies). Many people get their ‘awareness’ from a handheld device that feeds them what they want to hear; they live most of their lives in ‘online bubble communities’, blissfully unaware of what is happening around them. Human empathy is being replaced by pure individualism. Empathy is a ‘sometimes used emoticon’ to get more ‘likes’ and move up that invisible ladder of ‘like’ success. 

That is the way of life for the affluent few on this planet, of which I am part.

Meanwhile, millions and millions of people live in poverty just to sustain our level of self-gratification. They mine and get poisoned from the minerals that make our phones and laptops function, sweat making our throw-away garments, and toil picking the fruit and vegetables that are our new favourite ‘things’ in the coffee shops we frequent. They cycle around our cities delivering food.

They drive the trucks that deliver all the needless shit we order at Amazon (the irony of that name). Society is becoming increasingly split between the ‘toilers’ and the happy few. 

How long can this unbalanced world carry on this way? More and more wealth(which brings power) is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. 

Here in the West, we rock ourselves to sleep with the ‘democracy’ mantra; we kid ourselves that we live in a society where the majority have the choice to do and say what they want, to elect (freely) the governments they want. This is what we are led to believe. ‘Freedom’ has become a hollow word; it’s the ointment we rub in whenever we get that ‘itch’ that something is not right. The thinking human is left with an enormous feeling of being powerless, unable to affect anything that is going on. 

We seem to be on this ‘Tech-progress’ bus, the brakes are fucked, and we just have to sit out the ride and see where it takes us. Will we land safely? Or will it be one big crash where a lot of us will get killed, maimed or become brain-dead screen-scrolling dribblers? 

The bus is driverless, obviously.