Coffe Shop Sermon (Time is a twat and the dangers of AI)
Getting old sucks, especially as all those dire warnings about your teenage unhealthy lifestyle you ignored from your parents come home to roost. But with technology progressing at a faster pace than ever before, Generation X and those who follow are better equipped to witness and learn from the behaviour patterns of their fellow humans... if they can be bothered. Time is a twat, and then there are the dangers of AI. Let's have an unreasonable discussion...
The last month has been defined by biology falling victim to the insatiable march of time. My mother took a bullet in the game of cancer roulette, I randomly developed olecranon bursitis in my left elbow (no, I haven't bashed it, doc, and no I do not do 'sports') and most disturbingly of all, minime2 is now old enough to hold a provisional driver's license. The horror. I'm still waiting for the NHS to agree to shave off the bit of bone in my foot that is making walking a guarantee of discomfort and so, rather than take tablets in order to take tablets, I have given up on exercise and retreated into comforting weight-gain. Never has my personal path of good intentions been beset by so many crappy bits of biology.
Those teenage years warnings from my hard-working parents that 'if you look after your health now, your health will look after you when you are older' coming home to roost. I find myself in a position many will have encountered as they approach fifty, reflecting on how youth is indeed wasted on the young and that all the life I have lived to get to a position where I start to give less of a fuck is now being torpedoed by ignoring those warnings. It's a bit of a cunts trick, time. You utter bastard.
It has made me reflect on all the changes that I have witnessed growing up. As the first generation to live with a home computer in the house as a constant, I'm also of the generation that witnessed, possibly, the only development and backwards step of a technology in their lifetime - supersonic passenger travel - with Concorde coming into service in 1976 before being retired in 2003. With environmental concerns around travel being at the forefront of minds, it's difficult to see supersonic travel returning with current technology. Other human endeavours are depressingly familiar and regular, with a steady cycle of wars from the Falklands through any number of Gulf, Syrian, Libyan and now Ukrainian conflicts. The swing between far left and far right politics via crazed populists and a steady stream of get rich quick schemes as those at the bottom of the social pyramid seek to propel themselves to the top via the violent launchpad of the heads and wallets of those around them. With the rise of the information age and widely documented human actions; journalists, scientists, politicians and the general populace have never been better placed to observe patterns of behaviour and world developments - all stored for reference in the world's server farms.
If we can be arsed.
While the rapid cycle of these behaviours are widely documented, the sheer amount of information swirling around the world can be weaponised. When politicians repeat half-truths blended with selective statistics, reinforced by client media, algorithms and social media it can be increasingly difficult to research a topic to find unvarnished facts and establish your own informed truth. It's easy to just 'throw hands' and walk away, letting those sweet, sweet Tik Tok and Twatter feeds smooth away the brain worries. This is a huge danger facing current generations, but a worrying norm for the those that follow, as their attention spans are engineered to the length of an easily swiped video. If anything is to sink in, it needs to be punchy, entertaining and often stand-out/controversial. If unvarnished facts are hard to find and nobody has the attention span to question what they are fed, that's a combination that becomes terminally toxic to free thought. This engineered behaviour is fertile ground for future populists and truth-twisters of all persuasions. The fact people lie is not new - the battle has not changed, but the weapons and battlefield have.
The new player in the information game is undoubtedly Artificial Intelligence. Some see this as a technology that is developing too fast (though some because they missed the boat and want a pause to catch up and keep their own platforms relevant *cough* Elon *cough*). The Large Language Model AI employed by ChatGPT and Google Bard are not a threat on the scale of Skynet that some rabid corners of the internet seem to think, however their ability to manipulate internet news feeds with unsubstantiated crap is without doubt. When AI scrapes those half-truths and selected stats pumped out as a message and repeated on media sources as sound-bites, the AI bots are highly efficient at amplifying them. The real danger of the Large Language Model is humanity itself - it throws our own shit back in our faces, which starts to stick in places as fact. Forget Terminator - fear Colin from Nottingham and 30p Lee!
While it is difficult (er...impossible!) to speak for future generations and their choices, I am hopeful that they will be ok for a couple of reasons. Firstly, these modern weapons can also be mobilised for good - the campaign of Barack Obama springs to mind - and not all of the current generation obey social media feeds without exercising choice and critical thinking. As Generation X head towards retirement, it's easy to worry about how our kids and grandkids are going to handle the technology behemoth we have enabled. It is easy to lose objectivity when worrying about those you love and apply that concern to a whole generation, forgetting there is a whole generational hive-mind through apps and movements people of our age have never heard of or have little exposure to. It's also true that although Social Media is here to stay in some form, I should imagine, for the long-term, the means of its operation and delivery will undoubtedly change - the tech-scape we have now is transient, and it's easy to forget that. The big challenge for those who follow is to keep the megalomaniacs, fundamentalists and blinkered visionaries away from the steering wheel.
Over to Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha - the comfort of blaming those who came before has passed. The rapidly changing world needs you - just don't turn me into compost, please.