Technological progress is inevitable.

There will definitely be bad consequences in the same way that when the Industrial Revolution came along many labourers starved as a result of losing their work to machinery.

At the same time good outcomes and worst fears proven wrong will also be the case.

A lot of workers will not be replaced for the simple fact that their work requires physical or physiological labour.

It’s possible those jobs won’t be safe eventually but that’s a huge leap that isn’t going to happen in 5 years.

If intelligence were solely the thing that made a species powerful, the most powerful people in the human race would be the smartest.

A PhD professor in Ecology would stand a better chance of survival in the wild without any practical skill than a seasoned tribesman.

My great x3 grandfather was the opposite.

He could see the changing tide during Victoria’s reign, and he wasn’t going to stick around on the farm with his father.

He became a cooper and embraced the new machinery which sped up barrel-making. He not only survived but prospered.

So when something comes along which displays many of the intelligent behaviours of humans, but completely lacks any of the biological processes involved in those behaviours, it becomes clear: we have missed the mark on ‘intelligence’ completely.

Plants have no cognitive function at all, yet they are able to respond to their environment the same as any other organism.

If we believe we are intelligent purely because our brains, then we have not understood intelligence - we simply have instead assumed we are superior.

Civilisation depends on people being able to make compromises with each other.

Without that it is lost.

We learn too much from the past instead of trying to understand the present.

When we look at the future, there are clear patterns emerging.

Our education system, our legal system - all of these secular institutions which rely heavily on information from the past - are being outpaced by AI.

If more people understood this then Brexit would’ve never happened, people like Trump wouldn’t even be elected.

And as long as people who want to stop these things from happening cannot understand this then they will never win.

That’s why influencers, scientific or religious, are far more effective than traditional academics are at convincing people.

And it’s why populists will continue to succeed - until their methods too become formulaic - and something else comes along with greater conviction.

The moment secularism became “I accept this because other people said it” it ceased to be an understanding of reality and merely popular opinion.

And now popular opinion is shifting to the next hot belief system in town.

When someone makes out their judgements are superior to other judgements because they are ‘facts’ they have no conviction behind their beliefs, they just think the other should accept it because “I am right.”

Anyone capable of convincing others of anything would see that as futile.

I think the 2020s are just so different from anything we’ve ever seen mainly because of how significant AI is and how different society is to how it was 10 years ago.

But, I think the 2020s will be nostalgic too in time.

The decade I’m most nostalgic about is the 2010s even though when I was living in it I thought the 2010s sucked and the 2000s were the best decade.

I’m still nostalgic about the 2000s, just not as much aa the 2010s.

I also get nostalgic for decades I wasn’t born in like the 70s & 80s.