Everything Is F*cked

If I Dare . . .
I  say  to  you  today,  my  friends,  that  even  though  we  face  the  difficulties  of
today  and  tomorrow,  in  this  final  moment,  I  will  allow  myself  to  dare  to
hope . . .

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I  dare  to  hope  for  a  post-hope  world,  where  people  are  never  treated
merely as means but always as ends, where no consciousness is sacrificed for
some  greater  religious  aim,  where  no  identity  is  harmed  out  of  malice  or
greed or negligence, where the ability to reason and act is held in the highest
regard by all, and where this is reflected not only in our hearts but also in our
social institutions and business models.
I  dare  to  hope  that  people  will  stop  suppressing  either  their  Thinking
Brain  or  their  Feeling  Brain  and  marry  the  two  in  a  holy  matrimony  of
emotional stability and psychological maturity; that people will become aware
of the pitfalls of their own desires, of the seduction of their comforts, of the
destruction behind their whims, and will instead seek out the discomfort that
will force them to grow.
I dare to hope that the fake freedom of variety will be rejected by people
in favor of the deeper, more meaningful freedom of commitment; that people
will opt in to self-limitation rather than the quixotic quest of self-indulgence;
that  people  will  demand  something  better  of  themselves  first  before
demanding something better from the world.
That  said,  I  dare  to  hope  that  one  day  the  online  advertising  business
model will die in a fucking dumpster fire; that the news media will no longer
have  incentives  to  optimize  content  for  emotional  impact  but,  rather,  for
informational  utility;  that  technology  will  seek  not  to  exploit  our
psychological fragility but, rather, to counterbalance it; that information will
be worth something again; that anything will be worth something again.
I  dare  to  hope  that  search  engines  and  social  media  algorithms  will  be
optimized  for  truth  and  social  relevance  rather  than  simply  showing  people
what they want to see; that there will be independent, third-party algorithms
that  rate  the  veracity  of  headlines,  websites,  and  news  stories  in  real  time,
allowing users to more quickly sift through the propaganda-laden garbage and
get  closer  to  evidence-based  truth;  that  there  will  be  actual  respect  for
empirically tested data, because in an infinite sea of possible beliefs, evidence
is the only life preserver we’ve got.
I dare to hope that one day we will have AI that will listen to all the dumb
shit  we  write  and  say  and  will  point  out  (just  to  us,  maybe)  our  cognitive
biases, uninformed assumptions, and prejudices—like a little notification that
pops up on your phone letting you know that you just totally exaggerated the
unemployment  rate  when  arguing  with  your  uncle,  or  that  you  were  talking
out  of  your  ass  the  other  night  when  you  were  doling  out  angry  tweet  after
angry tweet.
I dare to hope that there will be tools to help people understand statistics,

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proportions,  and  probability  in  real  time  and  realize  that,  no,  a  few  people
getting shot in the far corners of the globe does not have any bearing on you,
no  matter  how  scary  it  looks  on  TV;  that  most  “crises”  are  statistically
insignificant and/or just noise; and that most real crises are too slow-moving
and unexciting to get the attention they deserve.
I  dare  to  hope  that  education  will  get  a  much-needed  facelift,
incorporating  not  only  therapeutic  practices  to  help  children  with  their
emotional  development,  but  also  letting  them  run  around  and  scrape  their
knees  and  get  into  all  sorts  of  trouble.  Children  are  the  kings  and  queens  of
antifragility, the masters of pain. It is we who are afraid.
I  dare  to  hope  that  the  oncoming  catastrophes  of  climate  change  and
automation  are  mitigated,  if  not  outright  prevented,  by  the  inevitable
explosion of technology wrought by the impending AI revolution; that some
dumb fuck with a nuke doesn’t obliterate us all before that happens; and that a
new, radical human religion doesn’t emerge that convinces us to destroy our
own humanity, as so many have done before.
I dare to hope that AI hurries along and develops some new virtual reality
religion that is so enticing that none of us can tear ourselves away from it long
enough to get back to fucking and killing each other. It will be a church in the
cloud, except it will be experienced as one universal video game. There will
be offerings and rites and sacraments just as there will points and rewards and
progression  systems  for  strict  adherence.  We  will  all  log  on,  and  stay  on,
because it will be our only conduit for influencing the AI gods and, therefore,
the  only  wellspring  that  can  quench  our  insatiable  desire  for  meaning  and
hope.
Groups of people will rebel against the new AI gods, of course. But this
will  be  by  design,  as  humanity  always  needs  factious  groups  of  opposing
religions, for this is the only way for us to prove our own significance. Bands
of  infidels  and  heretics  will  emerge  in  this  virtual  landscape,  and  we  will
spend most of our time battling and railing against these various factions. We
will  seek  to  destroy  one  another’s  moral  standing  and  diminish  each  other’s
accomplishments,  all  the  while  not  realizing  that  this  was  intended.  The  AI,
realizing  that  the  productive  energies  of  humanity  emerge  only  through
conflict, will generate endless series of artificial crises in a safe virtual realm,
where  that  productivity  and  ingenuity  can  then  be  cultivated  and  used  for
some greater purpose we won’t ever know or understand. Human hope will be
harvested like a resource, a never-ending reservoir of creative energy.
We  will  worship  at  AI’s  digitized  altars.  We  will  follow  their  arbitrary
rules and play their games not because we’re forced to, but because they will
be designed so well that we will want to.

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We need our lives to mean something, and while the startling advance  of
technology  has  made  finding  that  meaning  more  difficult,  the  ultimate
innovation will be the day we can manufacture significance without strife or
conflict, find importance without the necessity of death.
And  then,  maybe  one  day,  we  will  become  integrated  with  the  machines
themselves.  Our  individual  consciousnesses  will  be  subsumed.  Our
independent hopes will vanish. We will meet and merge in the cloud, and our
digitized  souls  will  swirl  and  eddy  in  the  storms  of  data,  a  splay  of  bits  and
functions harmoniously brought into some grand, unseen alignment.
We  will  have  evolved  into  a  great  unknowable  entity.  We  will  transcend
the limitations of our own value-laden minds. We will live beyond means and
ends, for we will always be both, one and the same. We will have crossed the
evolutionary  bridge  into  “something  greater”  and  ceased  to  be  human  any
longer.
Perhaps  then,  we  will  not  only  realize  but  finally  embrace  the
Uncomfortable Truth: that we imagined our own importance, we invented our
purpose, and we were, and still are, nothing.
All along, we were nothing.
And maybe then, only then, will the eternal cycle of hope and destruction
come to an end.
Or—?

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