This is a follow-up AF to The Cost of Convenience. Call it a rant, if you want. More than anything, it’s a warning to myself, made public.
We might be experiencing a comfortable extinction of human agency. We might not even notice until there’s nothing left to decide for ourselves, as it presents itself as the most silent threat of all: convenience.
Convenience is corrosive: it erodes muscle, our mental strength and everything brain-related: creative intuition, memory, the hunger for discovering new things.
Asimov saw this coming back in 1956, way ahead of its time. The Last Question is prophetic, because it maps out exactly where we’re headed: blind faith in the machine, delegating 100% of our human responsibility, until humanity fades out. The machine answers, and no one’s left to care.
Multivac becomes God, but only because we gave up. We outsourced not just our decisions, but our curiosity, and the desire to even engage with problems because something else is better and faster than ourselves.
Instead of wrestling with ideas, we wait for the answer to be generated for us. Instead of buil
...