TECHNOLOGY | DIGITAL LIFE
Artificial Intelligence, Humanity and This Frozen Moment
An anthropological inflection point
“What nukes are to the physical world… AI is to the virtual and symbolic world.” — Yuval Harari
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the early days of the pandemic. Not of the masks, or the lockdowns, not of the drive thru testing or the wiping down of groceries, but of those earliest days. Those days in which you’d turn on the news and hear some vague talking head chatter about the mysterious illness making its way through China. The mentions were mostly light and brief. Each time the topic arose, it wasn't long before their focus would just shift back to the scheduled programming.
“Did you hear about that virus spreading around in China?” a neighbor might ask you in passing.
“Oh yeah, something about a food market in Wuhan, right?” you might have replied. Or maybe you hadn’t heard the news yet. A lot of people still hadn’t. But in those early days, before the lockdown, that was about the extent of it. We stood in an eerie before with enviable naivetee. In the months to come, though, the world as we knew it would change forever.
It feels now as though we’ve reached a similar point in time. When I bring artificial…
