FootprintsintheWind.com

How many humanicities and how many futures? Verbs?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1887

The immigrants you hate
owned the land before
your grandparents invaded

Please pass it on.

© c 2019, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

So just what is human?

We might not know till later, centuries from now. Or we might be in a position to design humanicity ourselves. Or at least ask the question of ourselves and the generations.

That too is a service elders can offer.

Not all of us. Not to all elders. To those who hear.

:- Doug.

The daily things that make life easier decide for us. Defaults take over. Rebels in our fantasies, but when did we act?

So if we let the little intelligent things we create take over our “little choices” (sounds less important than “decisions”), if they make decisions better than us, if these beasties do a better job than what we used to do, if we become superfluous, then why do we need intelligence ourselves?

So maybe we are the peak. Maybe to be stupid would not be so bad—we would not get bored so easily. We would want fewer emotions so we would do nothing and feel OK about ourselves. Not good, but not guilty.

:- Doug.

In truth we might decide to downgrade humanity. The decision would be taken in myriad small non-decisions by large numbers of people. Let the system, the algorithm, the smart application choose. It chooses well enough. There are other things I’d rather do, and things pressing. We may indeed be the pinnacle. Thinking is already too much work. If then humans are useless?

:- Doug.

Maybe a major service of elders is to record that desires and experiences were once important.

:- Doug.

I do not know, and the entire world is a guess. A guess by trillions of entities.

:- Doug.

I am not about teaching, but finding. Not even learning. Finding. Path finding? I am not so sure, at least as far as it suggests I will find the one path, or even one that gets through the woods to something. Because I do not know what. I cannot even guess, let alone predict.

:- Doug.

Humanity may just end not in fire or ice or the sun going super nova, but by fading out, becoming irrelevant in a world of data being the only thing, or super algorithms.

That is possible. What roles does that leave for elders, especially the 300-year grandchild elders?

That is the question, is it not?

:- Doug.

Will algorithms for artificial intelligence learn to tell stories, to manipulate our desires to rebel?

:- Doug.

Whatever the machines do or tell us, we will like our stories better, and we will always be rebels.

:- Doug.

We seem to be the large numbers species: we think in terms of math and doing things in “scale.” The only critters who outnumber us are the insects and the microorganisms, and they still hold some sway over us.

But. Meaning still gives us a challenge.

Of course challenge is what we need. Numbers alone won’t do it. Meaning is bigger than challenge. Bigger, faster, stronger, more are what challenge is normally about. Meaning makes the challenge worth the effort.

Thus the breadcrumbs we leave in our stories ought be about meaning. So I think today.

:- Doug.

What are possible shapes of a story? For starters: novels, bed time stories, plays, science, religion, dreams….

:- Doug.

Humanity is a meaning-making animal. This is the ultimate power. Meaning seems to be the glory, the top, and is not glory the purpose of power?

:- Doug.

How do we—we—change the course, not of history, not of the world, but of humanity? This people, this place, this now, find ourselves in a fast moving stream. We see rapids coming. What path choose?

:- Doug.

What’s illogical in today’s society? Or just plain stupid? What don’t we see till we stand back and observe—say in age?

:- Doug.

Bird feed is for us, not the birds.

:- Doug.

Where is today’s imagination centered? On music and moving pictures? Are these stories? What do they tell us? Our stories can be larger. It is up to you.

:- Doug.

What can you imagine? With it can you infect one or two of us?

:- Doug.

I only know what’s now and only some of that. I am ignorant of most of the past and future. So one step.

:- Doug.