Remember the Apple Intelligence commercial where a pile of instruments, paints, toys, statues and other creative tools and objects are crushed and flattened by a gigantic, ominous compression machine leaving only a tiny little iPhone as the result? Or the Google Gemini commercial where the father asks the AI to write a fan letter, on behalf of his young daughter, to a soccer player she admires rather than guiding her to write the letter herself?
This morning I sat out on my deck looking over my vast lawn and the landscaped shrubs and trees marking the edges of the yard. I started to imagine communities of tiny little people living at the base of the grass and wondering what their lives must be like. What do they delight in, what brings them joy and pleasure? What do they fear?
We live in a world full of prescriptions. You must be this kind of husband, this kind of dad, this kind of employee, this kind of leader, this kind of voter and on and on. On one hand, “keys to success” can inspire and motivate us to be better people. But for who and by who’s definition of “better”?
Modern civilization continues down the fasttrack of technology dependence, AI media generation, and advanced mass communication, persuasion and manipulation techniques, which has me thinking a lot about trust and what that means in our current culture, institutional environments as well as for our future.
When the deconstruction of the concept of principles, themselves, serves as the basis of progress, we are irretrievably lost as a people. Without a central and universally embraced code every act is both permitted and prohibited simultaneously. That is anarchy.
The current media environment seeks and rewards conflict. Naturally that leads to hate. Hate leads to action, and action inspired by hate can never lead to anything good.
The foolish mind believes eliminating one’s enemies will result in victory and peace. But he cannot truly envision nor describe that future state brought about by these destructive means. It is out of his hands. He cannot even assure himself that he will be among those who survive to experience such a place. Still he is determined to fight for the concept.