The days ahead: what might emerge?

 Welcome to my blog!

This is my attempt to make sense of the changes we are seeing around us today. Things are happening quickly today; some would say too quickly for us to try to make sense of what is going on in the world. 

 Think of what happened in the year 2022. We began to come out of the Covid menace. Economies were beginning to come back on track. But then Russia invaded Ukraine and the two countries became locked in an extremely destructive conflict that continues to this day. It was unthinkable for many people that a war in Europe of this scale would break out. 

At the time it first broke out, and perhaps even more so as the Delta variant began to ravage countries, people thought that Covid would change everything. Yet despite the obvious destruction it caused, we are already moving beyond it. A lot of people naively began to believe that the threat of a common global foe, a virus, would bring the world together. That didn't happen, even at the height of Covid. Countries took vastly different approaches in trying to control it. Countries blamed each other for allowing the virus to spread out of control. 

As the disease recedes from memory, so too the world is going back to business as usual and hostilities that had been temporarily buried are resurfacing with a vengeance. Who knows what the future will bring? Some prominent authors such as Yuval Noah Harari, believe that AI will be the ultimate gamechanger. AI will give corporations and governments the means to control human destiny. If you think this is far-fetched, consider that research suggests that we are far less in command of our own selves than we would like to believe. We humans like to believe that we are ultimately free, but the weight of the evidence increasingly suggests that we are not as free as we think we are. We can be conditioned like Pavlov's dog, and indeed are being conditioned even today. But Harari argues that in the future, we will be conditioned far more effectively than we already are. 

Will we? Who knows? While we may be eminently 'hackable', to use Harari's term, it is not clear that AI will be able to do it. Big claims have been made about AI, but in the real world their performance has often been subpar.