Being Human in the 21st Century #10 — Outlook
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The world around us is rapidly changing thanks to technological advances. I hope that you’ll join me on the journey of figuring out just what it is that we need to do to realize our full potential, understand our meaning in life, and leave society and the world in a slightly better place than when we got here.
Big thanks to my buddy Jacque Moodley for the logo — check out his Twitter
I also never gave a shoutout to Tory Novikova for my personal logo (footer) — check her work out here: Twitter | ToryNova
Outlook
I’ve been thinking a lot about outlook lately. For me, it works like this: we have a blank canvas that is our lives (at least the part that hasn’t been lived yet is blank); what’s already on the painting is our actions, which expose our patterns of behavior, bad habits, and an objective look at who we are based on how we spend our time (whether or not we can see it clearly is different); while outlook is the color palette with which we choose to paint our present and potential futures actions and the prism through which we view our past ones. I believe that outlook is the only thing that we truly control in life and our ability to master is key to finding happiness in a world that is chaotic as the one we live in today. The amount of questionable amount of bad in the world is in a never ending reminder as to the negative sides of human beings. However, with bad always comes good, and so we always have so much to look forward to if we can focus on the right things and take life in stride.
This week saw some lovely flooding of the Ohio Wetlands and not traditional water flooding at that. Thanks to the good ol’ folks working on the Rover Pipeline, over two million gallons of drilling fluid drenched the wetlands. We also saw more innocent civilians dying as the result of US military bombing. Some guy decided it was a good idea to shoot someone on Facebook. Bose headphones are now spying on us as well. The leader of our country supposedly had some difficulty understanding the whole EU thing, which is one of the many things that helps explain why nearly half of the country wants him impeached. The reality that women pay $1,000 in expenses after getting raped. The fact that scientists have to ‘wage a war’ against Trump given his policies. Even attempts at helping education with technology don’t always go as planned, with algorithms creating bias and laptops actually harming academic performance in certain scenarios. There are so, so many things to help pull us into the direction of having a negative outlook where we paint everything through a filter tainted with distrust.
At the same time, if we spend the time looking for it, there’s also no shortage of exciting news as well. The most exciting thing I read/watched this week related to Elon Musk an announcement of his, which, I guess, shouldn’t be surprising. If you watch the video, you’ll see him nonchalantly mention that 100 of the factories that he’s walking Leonardo DiCaprio through would produce enough energy to run the whole world. That’s insane. Did you know head transplants were possible? Not only that, there’s now VR software to help people prepare for changing bodies. Computers are coming up with new materials. There are more and more sustainable products and more research being done to understand our subconscious. Google is months away from a quantum computing milestone.
I think the piece of news that made me think most about my outlook was one about how driverless cars are learning from Grand Theft Auto. I’m not a fan of gaming and often wonder why people spend as much time on it as they do. But not only does it bring them joy, it also marks a general trend towards more and more providers of entertainment and experience. As ‘traditional jobs’ become displaced or reshaped by tech, more people will have time for content consumption. It’s gotten to the point where the AI’s involved in GTA are so expansive that they can help train other AI’s. Computers teaching computers, or should I say video games teaching cars. That’s the world we now live in. As long as we maintain an outlook where we find the unknown exciting, where we encourage ourselves to become nonemotional observers, and where we look at the world’s problems as things for us to fix not just to complain about, I think we’ll manage to find ourselves in a beautiful future.
Top Three Articles
Elon Musk: 100 Tesla Gigafactories Could Power the Entire World — Futurism
World’s First Head Transplant Patient to Undergo Virtual Reality Training Before Procedure — The Merkle
You can see a full list of content consumed here.
That’s all folks!
Happy learning!
