Our human existence has never been so cossetted; in the parts of the Western world free of wars, we are so unbelievably comfortable, supplied with warm homes and distracted by every gadget imaginable. Contrary to what we see on the news, there are actually less wars than in our historic past - measured by head of population - than when we were warring tribes competing for our daily subsistence.
This is not to dismiss the impact of the global war machine. I am aware that this is a particularly turbulent time in certain countries and this could escalate globally. For anyone reading this in a place riven by these terrors, I apologise for my stance. But let’s look for a moment at the human species as a whole, with the perspective of an anthropologist.
Those of us in these comfortable bubbles and who choose to engage online, use our survival instincts to war verbally and daily; in fact a distressing amount of our time is spent bickering on social media. (Add stats here, but it is inarguable.) And what is this achieving? (More on the global impact of this in a later chapter).
Along with using our intellects to ‘opinionate’, we have the vast internet of Googleable content at our disposal, along with an AI guide, so we rarely ever need think too deeply about anything before being satiated with an answer (of sorts). Past high school, past degrees and doctorates, the average citizen has little need for real learning of the kind that amasses knowledge. We don’t even need to retain the geography of our local area thanks to SatNavs. If we wish to garden or bake, fix or decorate, we can follow a step-by-step video to almost any minor goal. We don’t need recipe books, car manuals or textbooks. We can maintain our brains with a minimum of stored knowledge as we have it at our fingertips instead.
So, are we widening the education gap, along with the poverty gap?
Since the earliest moving pictures depicted slapstick lovable idiots (Chaplin) or Dumb and Dumber (released in 1994, grossed $247 million at the box office and has since developed a cult following) we have enjoyed the notion that we are the intelligent class, and others are stupider. Over time we have elevated that education gap into a vast yawning cultural divide so huge we may not be able to close it before it devours us. Populations have voted not for the cleverest leader, or the most exalted and responsible among us, but instead the most idiotic, flawed and damaged individuals who have been able to become leaders (Trump, Musk, Johnson) so that we can laugh at their antics and continue to feel superior. We consider them to represent a kind of Everyman (certainly not an Everywoman!) who must surely know what it is to be human, look at them, with their poor haircuts, rumpled clothes stretched over beer bellies or dad bods, their lack of facts and figures proving them to be one of us, broken as we are.
Yet this is a con. We know it.
Billionaires are not suited to taking responsibility for others. Have they not trodden upon everyone in the way to climb to the top of the haul and claim it for themselves? Why would we think they will govern well? Have our movies and books not been shouting for years about the dangers of an unregulated, irresponsible madman with his finger on the button?
People of Science and Reason have been made to take a backseat at this point. Don’t be reminding us of our gullibility and vulnerability. You experts hold on one damn second while I check if you are right on Facebook. Hmm, there are some suggestions that maybe climate change is real, vaccines work and we really did get a man on the moon, huh?
Perhaps the Experts have been quietly engineering a solution with their huge intellects. As long as there are SOME clever people out there, we won’t let the world fall into rapacious, rampaging chaos, will we? Movies have pretty much reassured us of this with their happy endings. Perhaps with a return to power led by the most eminent and educated we can engineer our way out of the problems that currently beset us. Why the reasonable scientists won’t let us down, surely, even though we scotched their funding, ridiculed their predictions and ignored their warnings?
The Lovely Robot
Failing a human intervention of scale large enough to save the planet, we have the Lovely Robot. AI is a human-designed tool, but how we choose to use it may well be the real measure of our humanity.
I can sense that some of you are feeling despondant at this point.
Our track record isn’t great. We know the incredible benefits of time spent in Nature, but we continue to want new phones with the latest apps in order to record just how chill we look in Nature. Our phones contain 16 of the 17 rarest earth elements, and mining for them causes deforestation and pollution on a grand scale. Many people have more than one phone, with the advent of the work phone, (not including ‘burner’ phones that we imagine every hood has piled in his/her drawer) and often use them in conjunction with one or more laptops, and a gaming device or several. Are we actually insane?
We may use AI just to keep track of all our other gadgets, linking them with our fridges and spa baths, our garage doors and doorcams. The hilarious vision of the wobbly guy on his solo hovermachine in WALL-E (his helpless obesity due to microgravity and laziness) was pretty prescient, eh?
While we invent ever more precise LLM (Large Language Models that train AI) to mimic all that humans are capable of, will we continue down this path until we eventually teach AI to become as dumb as us? Or will AI take a clever detour and stop at the part where we hit the peak of human evolution. Probably around 1964 when Nina Simone recorded ‘Feeling Good’.
[Note to self: There is no such thing as a peak with evolution, as evolution is goalless, directionless, and doesn't stop (until the lineage is extinct). ….Ah…]
I should probably admit at this point that I am exhibiting all these traits of human idiocy myself in publishing such a doomladen epigraph as one of my first Substacks. I have combined all the horrors of my own ponderings — pointless ‘opinionising’ online, referenced with quick Wiki checks for dates/facts, and navel-gazing into a dystopian future that I have contributed to by my very daily existence. (Recycling and seed-swopping notwithstanding).
I should aim for a happy ending.
?
For years, I’ve barrelled through life with the kind of optimism derived from the Fake It Til You Make It school of thought. Oddly enough, it helped. You can rise above being labelled Year’s Favourite Weirdo at school, if you look resolutely confident in your abilities. People are attracted to confidence and optimism, as though it might rub off on them. (See earlier points about Trump/Johnson). It enabled me to work in jobs I enjoyed, with communities of lovely people, until I actually learned some of the skills I really needed and managed to be useful.
By which I mean, I am not a nihilist. Even if we are becoming more un-evolved (I know it’s not a real word, but its quick shorthand) there is a point to doing the best we can in the circumstances.
It’s always possible that evolution is a stronger force than we understand, and that our collective consciousness has learned something from humanity’s weird journey thus far. The darkest night comes just before dawn, if I haven’t completely misquoted.
Should we continue to ruin this planet, it is possible that we may colonise others. (Yeah, I know, I feel kind of guilty even suggesting it too.)
And meanwhile, we have communities of people who need our help right here, whether they are good vegan recyclers or not. I have found some amazing people doing interesting things at a local level - building community resilience, informing, supporting, self-educating. There are children growing up who need actual adults to begin the clean-up of the mess we’ve made. It’s not good enough to leave Greta and the Gen-Z-ers with all the inequities and polluted landscapes to repair.
And we need to fake a smile to bring people along with us to do this.
So a life isn’t wasted if you have contributed to someone else’s happiness in some way. You may think it’s weird to talk about compassion after the awful picture I’ve just painted, but really, it is what humans are good at. We may just need to remember how to be compassionate while standing firm against bullying. And all the allyship in the world is no use unless we bring some of the hard-to-reach on board with us, and that’s an interesting job.
Anyone feeling like joining the AntiUnEvolvers? —Uha, I can see I need a better gang name for us. I’d be happy to hear some of your thoughts on any of this.
I could do more, and I am working on that. I’m writing another novel that will include some of the deliciousness of the world in it as an antidote to some of the despair. And I am loving the people near me even harder.
And that is all we can do in this hellish handbasket.