That is Megan McArdle, pictured above. She writes for The Washington Post, mostly about economics, finance, and governmental policy. Her column published on January 3, 2025, was headlined as follows: "On the brink of an unimaginable AI future."
McArdle's final comment, in that January 3rd column, reads like this:
I wish I had helpful hints for coping, a tidy message to carry into the new year. But all I have is a haunting question: Is humanity nimble enough to adapt to a technology that might deliver a millennium’s worth of change in the space of a few decades?
The premise of McArdle's "haunting question" is that it is our job to "adapt to technology," as though "technology" were the master, and we the servants of our own creations. In fact, lots of people act that way, so you can see why that has become a premise of McArdle's musings. For me, McArdle's most "haunting" statement in the column is actually this one:
Today, it’s no longer clear how much of ordinary life will survive the next 25 years.
Here is how McArdle follows up on the statement I have just quoted:
I’m talking about AI, of course — but even more, the entire digital world in which we spend an increasing share of our lives. People are struggling with the basic human practice of making friends: In 1990, only 3 percent of Americans reported having no close friends, while 33 percent said they had 10 or more. By 2021, those numbers were about equal: 12 percent said they had no close friends, and 13 percent claimed 10 or more. Now, all kinds of social activities are declining: dating, marriage, having kids, volunteer work, attendance at religious services and, of course, working in an office. I’m not sure what human life looks like if we’re all locked in our homes looking at our phones — and I’m not sure I want to (emphasis added).
The topics that McArdle is highlighting in her column are topics that I have been hitting upon in my blog postings over the past several years. We are, as McArdle notes, moving our entire existence "online." This is, whether we realize it or not, part of an effort to escape the truth that we are, ultimately, born into and responsible to the "World of Nature," or the "World That God Made," as I sometimes call it.
We do inhabit "Two Worlds," and we live most immediately in a world we make ourselves. Only recently, though, has our "technology" given us the impression that we can dispense with the constraints of Nature, and live entirely within a world of our own making. This is simply not true - we are utterly dependent on the World of Nature, a world that we did not create, and that we cannot replace. The sooner we realize that, the better off we'll be, the better our chances will be to provide an opportunity for our children, and theirs, to live at all.
One thing will help - and McArdle put her finger right on it. We all need to "find some friends."
I have been reading your words in an RSS feed, but for several days now they have not been coming through. Today I noticed and checked the web blog and it seems OK. But nothing in the RSS feed.
ReplyDeleteKal
Kal, I am sorry to say that I don't know what an RSS feed is. Maybe you are referring to the "subscription" option available through Follow-It. I have no control over that, so I don't know what to tell you. My own subscription to Follow-It does continue to work. If you want to read everyone of my blog postings, and the subscription system isn't working, I'd suggest that you set up a daily calendar reminder, and then just point your browser to www.gapatton.net, which will get you to the latest posting. Sorry for whatever is wrong! And thanks for your comment.
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