Joining Jimmy Church (email), journalist Jason Louv examined the effects of accelerating technology and how to re-establish our humanity in the face of a relentlessly dehumanizing future. "I truly believe that we live in a crisis point right now... we have ten years to sort out AI, we have ten years to sort out the ecological crisis, and we're not going to get another chance," Louv warned. The current rate of technological change is phenomenal, and nobody really knows what is going on, he explained, pointing out how much worse this can become when computers and software begin to accelerate themselves.
According to Louv, the big things set to change every facet of society are machine learning and big data, which means, unlike humans, algorithms that process large amounts of data will be solely able to make sense of our brave new world. "We're not prepared for how society is going to change," he suggested. Commercial trucking will be replaced with autonomous vehicles, intelligent software will replace white collar jobs, including lawyers and doctors, and it will hit overnight, Louv predicted.
Curiously, the enormous challenges facing humanity with overpopulation and the environment may only be solved by artificial intelligence, he proposed. So, how do we keep our humanity during these great changes? Louv proposed looking to esoteric wisdom and spiritual traditions to provide a guiding light to what's happening now. "Our wisdom should be accelerating as fast as our technology," he said, noting consciousness and awareness matter. Louv called out society for being used by the technological tools and electronic media it has created to keep everyone amused and distracted. "With every little tap and click... we're bringing this AI future closer and closer, and that's not a human future," he cautioned.