Tag Archives: internet

Time to Grow Up

Our species has had a wild and crazy adolescence. These days we’re facing the consequences of our irresponsible behavior. We can now see that our bad habits will kill us if we don’t quit. It’s time to grow up.

Can we stop eating too much meat, using too much fuel, buying too much stuff we don’t need? Can we stop using plastic? Can we stop making war?

Many of us believe that only the rich have the power to change anything. This sense of insignificance is a delusion. Every person is just as significant as every other. Each of us offers a unique perspective that adds to our common understanding of our world. Whenever we listen to a new viewpoint, our culture shifts a little. We grow. Barriers fall; we make new connections. And anyone who has managed to kick an addiction knows that it’s not easy to change, but it’s possible.

We have a tremendous amount of work ahead of us. There’s no guarantee we can make the necessary changes. Maybe the civilization we have built is too powerful and its inertia too great, our addictions too ingrained. Maybe people are too greedy and violent to change our ways.

But we are much more than our bad habits. Every human survives infancy because someone fed us and wiped our little bottoms; such ordinary kindness is the neglected background of our lives. Nearly all of us are capable of caring for others, creating beauty, inventing new ways of doing things. And for the first time in history, we have the tools to take full advantage of these assets for the sake of all humanity: the internet and Artificial Intelligence.

In recent years, our culture has focused on our differences. We needed to understand how the spectrum of race, gender, and wealth affects individual lives. We needed to hear more voices than those of rich, straight, white men. With the internet, finally, all of us can speak. AI can tell us what people have already figured out about how to fix things, if we ask it the right questions. We are barely beginning to understand the power of this new tool.

The next stage of evolution is looking at common ground – what we share, how we’re all alike – instead of only at our differences. We can feel this common ground in a movie theater or concert. Everyone in the audience is at one with all the rest, in a way. Our attention has a common focus. Changing our culture means changing what we pay attention to. It’s time to focus on human survival.

Our attention is our singular gift, our most valuable asset. We can choose what we look at, what we like, what we buy – in both senses of the word. This is our vote. This is the direction we’re taking the culture, whether or not we want to admit our personal responsibility for it.

Status, wealth, nationality, and religion are things we made up, stories we tell ourselves about who we are. It can be hard to admit that we’re really just a bunch of panicky primates trying to figure out how to run the planet before we ruin it.

Our world is changing quickly. We now have the tools we need to organize ourselves for survival. Whether we can manage this or not is an open question. Let’s not give up before we try.

Not the 99% but the 100%

Ants, zebras, monkeys, snakes: each member of a species looks and acts pretty much like all the rest. They can tell one another apart, but we can’t, unless we study them closely. The differences are tiny; the similarities, vast.

The same goes for humans: each one of us is unique, but we’re as alike as snowflakes. No person’s history, character, or appearance is the same as any other’s. These variations are endlessly fascinating. We need them; they are how we tell one another apart. But they form only a tiny fraction of what we really are.

Science tells us that all humans are almost exactly the same. Day to day, we ignore that knowledge, though it explains a great deal.

Why can a good actor portray a wide range of characters? Why, when we go to the movies, does the whole audience agree on who is the good guy and who is the villain? Why do we laugh and gasp in the same places? How can good novelists get us to understand people we’ve never met, and who in fact do not exist?

Because people are pretty much all the same: variations on the theme of being human. Shouldn’t we be talking about this theme and not only its variations?

Our dominant culture emphasizes the individual — one’s career, one’s wealth, one’s behavior — even though these things usually matter only to that individual and perhaps a few relatives and friends. We pay much less attention to our behavior as a species. Yet it’s our bad behavior as a species, not as individuals, that is endangering the future of humanity.

There’s a lot of talk lately about “transhumanism,” the attempt to transcend human limits. I believe that before we can transcend humanism, we must achieve it.

The problems that threaten human survival arise from our refusal to acknowledge our behavior as a species rather than as individuals. The only solutions to them are global — in other words, species-wide.

The internet is revolutionizing global communications, maybe not a moment too soon. Now people can communicate across the world in real time. You don’t have to be rich to do so; all you need is access to an online device. The barriers of personal appearance, location, and circumstance vanish, leaving only your words, and images (mostly) of your choice. Being online is as close to becoming a spirit — transcending material limitations — as we are likely to get.

Of course we use the internet mostly for sex and music. This is typical behavior for our species. Without regulation, we also use it for insulting one another, showing off, lying, and gossiping. Also standard. We form interest groups; we make friends as well as enemies; we come to the aid of people in trouble.

What we don’t do online, at least not yet, is run the planet.

Right now, humanity is poorly organized for survival. So long as we primarily identify as members of subgroups like nations, religions, or ethnicities, we will find it hard to deal with problems that pertain to all those subgroups. Our organizations focus on issues specific to themselves and compete to place those issues above the rest. Even though, as individuals, most of us want to end hunger, war, and environmental devastation, our organizations have different priorities.

We are such a creative, adaptable species that we manage to live in every environment on earth, the deep sea, and outer space. The climate change our bad behavior has engendered is creating a new environment for us all. It’s impossible to predict whether, much less how, we will figure out how to survive this different world. If we survive, the global reach of the internet will have everything to do with it.

One thing is certain. However humanity re-organizes and adapts, everyone alive will be involved: not just the 1% global elite, or the 99% of us who do not have illusions of limitless power, but 100% of us. None of us stands alone. All of us need other people. Our individual lives will end one day. In the meantime, though it seems unlikely, don’t give up hope that humanity itself – our pattern, our theme, our weird and wonderful species  –  will find a way to endure.