We Are Looking Backward
By: Mike Meyer
Tags: Culture, Politics, History, Climate Change, Future

We Are Looking Backward

We need to turn around to see the future

Photo by Sinitta Leunen on Unsplash

By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ December 15, 2020

We are not polarized but shattered as gaps widen in our societies. We operate as bipolar creatures based on dyadic comparisons and contradictions. While we can, with effort, handle a range of gradations, we gravitate to white and black with grey and silver following, at least for car colors. By preference, we are either all together or clustered in two opposing camps.

Because we are dyadic, we constantly face the hard decision between one and its opposite. The car color problem shows this. If you can’t decide between white and black, you choose grey (or silver). If the problems and the groups' positions are not easily clustered into one or the other, we struggle. It takes work to handle a mental array. Many people cannot do this.

I’ve discussed this previously, attempting to understand the nature of the cultural and political collapse. We deal with this constantly as a growing threat to countries experiencing reactionary nationalism, racism, and ethnocentrism. This is an effort by the marginally privileged and those most threatened by any change to reject the future as to them the past is the only other option.

As we are faced with a growing range of threats and disasters, it is natural to focus on the negative reactions. In the US now, this is brutally apparent at the intersection of scientific denial of both the pandemic and the climate crisis with reversion to racism and fascist opportunists seeking to destroy representative government. Otherwise, there are too many possible futures with too many types of people when there should be only us and the unspeakable others.

We have slowly realized that this is not a rational debate but the emotional rejection by a portion of our population of any future different from a mythical past. Even if existing, such a past is no longer sustainable, leaving people who understand this depressed and angry. The death of over 300,000 people in the US alone to COVID-19 because of this denialism shows how our future will die. This requires a hard choice with no option for grey or even silver.

But this shattering of the old paradigms also opens the field for even faster change and greater diversity. That this diversity of thought and identity is exactly what has triggered the reaction of the predominantly older and less educated or insecure people leaves us with a conundrum. Rapid change is tough and has not been a common reality for the history of our species. We are in very new and unpleasant territory.

While we are inevitably focused on the threats to our planet and our oppressed populations, the rapid growth of technology and scientific innovation offers us a cascade of options. These offer answers to most of our problems but requires seeing the universe and our planet in complex and new ways. Many people aware of this consider humanity doomed, but the answers to so many questions are within reach. We are just looking the wrong way.

A major challenge is that we need to have a majority of our population to have a broad understanding of 21st-century scientific developments and the technical implementation of those developments, and a grasp of diverse philosophical thinking. Industrialized and post-industrial nations are at this point. Still, a major minority is entangled in old ideologies and religions manipulated as political strongholds at war with all around them.

This is part of the background complexity that is the very nature and challenge of our species' world. In any direction, we have not two poles but great diversity in how things are changing. This is an aspect of the hyperobject basis of our greatest challenges, such as climate warming. In that complexity, we are also in new territory at the edge of our abilities to understand.

Denial of scientific knowledge is an obvious reaction for people who have struggled to maintain a late neolithic model of the universe due to various historical accidents. For centuries what the farmer and craftspeople thought beyond their immediate, practical work area didn’t matter.

Even though the entire industrial revolution, the changes, while massive, were the substitution of different power sources and increased productivity from the great majority of people's perspective. This continued right through the 1960s.

While there was a growing percentage of the population involved in technology and engineering, these were still based in classical, Newtonian physics. Most people were not involved in rocket science, but even that was still a continuation of the Newtonian and Copernican Revolutions of three and four hundred years ago.

The growth of electronics and telecommunications was also still in the theoretical world of the 19th century. Nuclear physics for weapons and energy-producing reactors was at the edge of the paradigm but still broadly understandable with familiar metaphors whose errors were not important in society. While these things were expanding and taught in high school science classes, they were not obviously destructive of neolithic mythology. Most people did not need to make a drastic choice of a new paradigm to operate in society. The old model still worked for most people. But that is no loner possible.

This is the problem of large paradigm shifts and has resulted in the steady growth of reactionary attacks on higher education. That education has replaced people's paradigms that, inevitably, alienated those from the less educated population. The old wisdom that you cannot go home again has become true now of language. You cannot go home, and you may not even be able to converse with your family members who stayed there.

I do not mean that ordinary people were not aware of things changing and some of the implications. Still, these did not become transformative until rising to the dominance of the information revolution from 1980. The changes that shattered the Western paradigm can be seen as a slow-motion explosion of that paradigm over thirty years.

The ability to access the deluge of information was the force behind this and well noted by the late 1990s. But the process of that rapid expansion, like the Big Bang that was not a cosmological but a hyper expansion, changed the relationship between the universe's components in the world we knew. This made the old paradigm's components visible from new perspectives as it steadily tore the pieces apart. I’m old enough to have watched this happen while studying this process's first great studies in the 16th and 17th centuries courtesy of Thomas S. Kuhn.

Information was the force behind the explosive expansion that exposed the structure of what it was destroying. For part of the population, the walls were blown down, creating a new landscape with growing awareness of new rules that did not make sense in the old paradigm. For another part of the population, there was only destruction and what they knew being discarded because they had no means of understanding those incipient new structures and, in some cases, were still denying the Scientific Revolution.

While things are polar and can only be one of two things in the American political system, the entire universe was blown apart, but people are still struggling to put the pieces back into the same two boxes. This is totally hopeless as the pieces are moving farther and farther apart and are being pulled into new clusters and relationships with nothing to do with what they once were.

That confusion is the stock in trade of opportunists looking for suckers to fleece. People desperately wanting the old structure back again as the new world is rapidly coming together in forms they cannot comprehend is the consequence. There is nothing left of the old to go back to, and the new is stressing us with decades of struggle to adapt that is only beginning.

To get some relief from this chaos and the human tragedies beginning to overwhelm us, we need to look not at the past but at the future. Here are some examples coming right now but often lost on those who need most to see them.

Artificial Intelligence is at the core of the new world. This is becoming the dominant force now, very much like gravity. Like gravity, it is neither good nor bad, moral or immoral, pro-human or anti-human, although the initial reaction is to put it one of those simple categories. This is also hopeless and prevents the logic of deciding what parts are positive and how to deal with the negative once defined. That defining process is not easy.

We are, in the industrial and post-industrial cultures, dependent on AI for information interaction. People constantly work with voice recognition systems that replace people in taking orders, answering questions, identifying things, or being reminded of things that need doing. Most people don’t even think about it.

Face recognition and the ability to create realistic images and voices for artificial people are very much part of that. This is a threat to privacy but also an incredible tool to provide services to people. Accelerated by the pandemic conditions and the need to vaccinate the human population, digital identities are being rapidly expanded. With planetary level controls under the UN ID2020 program identity and population-wide guaranteed delivery of services, strong protection for abuse by governments and corporations can be provided.

This would provide the means for delivering all health, education, and humanitarian services while providing the right to vote without dispute. Expect a massive effort to block this by groups dedicated to voter, ethnic, and racial suppression. India has proven the power of this for a large population. Africa is adopting digital citizen identities rapidly as they have been successful in controlling the COVID pandemic while Europe and, especially, North America has failed.

After years of excitement followed by slowdowns and disappointments, self-driving cars are moving onto the streets. Not as high-level human-style intelligence but as capable assistants in the operation of trucks, cars, and equipment.

This with the fast expansion of electrification will allow the elimination of fossil fuels by 2035. As people wake up to what is happening, they will climb onboard electric transportation while moving farther from metropolitan centers as they work remotely. The consensus seems that the pandemic has tipped us into action that has been delayed by antiquated political squabbling and refusal to see reality.

This month we have a breakthrough from Deep Mind on a tough cell folding issue that will accelerate new pharmaceuticals and better understand tissues. This comes on top of the speed of the COVID-19 vaccines, specifically the new mRNA vaccines created by AI-based genetic engineering. This is how we will control the accelerating spread of deadly viral diseases generated by planetary warming and crowding.

Electric cars are now expected to dominate the streets of cities in the next ten years. This is critical to reducing carbon, although the production of electricity to charge the batteries, which are rapidly changing, needs to be addressed. We now realize that air travel must be reduced until we have either electric or, initially, hydrogen power to reduce carbon. Electric aircraft will be servicing short routes in the next five years.

We have realized that the pandemic had forced our entire population, particularly in post-industrial states, to rethink their lives and needs. There is a new commitment to act on what we have learned as the new vaccines free us from our lockdowns. That commitment will combine the technological acceleration to make the old political reactionary rehash of early 20th century ideologies ridiculous.

It can’t happen soon enough, but it is now in reach. Let’s go for it.