How We Destroy Our Humanity
Community and collective humanity are dependent on individuals, but will too much freedom to be an individual destroy both?
If you could have all music you listened to personalized to your own tastes, would you? If you could be a character and immerse yourself in your favorite movie genres, would you? How about your living space? Do you want to be able to customize on a whim the colors, the decorations, lighting, smells, and ambient sound? Most people would like to have more control over what they hear, see, and do. The question is, would you share this with someone else, make compromises to consider their tastes and desires, or would you want it all your way?
Such choices are becoming increasingly possible as networking, automation, AI, and on-demand manufacturing become increasingly better and widespread in the not-too-distant future. Machine learning has already created programs that can create music in the styles of famous composers. As technology increases in capability, it will be possible to have a service that creates music specifically for you based entirely on what you like and want to hear. Although you would be able to share your personalized music with others, why would they listen when they have their own customized playlists.
Don’t like the movies or shows on the e-tainment web? Tell your personal intelligent assistant (PIA) what you would like to see, and it will assemble a short play or long movie just for your tastes. Want to have a part in it? Through (initially) augmented and virtual reality and later direct CI (consciousness interface), you can star in it. Perhaps you will be the only character to survive your own personal Game of Thrones. Unfortunately, your friends will be too busy starring in their own hero’s story or romping through a rom-com to want to hear about yours.
Want to personalize your space to your liking? Do you want to replicate a drizzly day in Seattle or a sunny day in Las Vegas? New building materials and construction techniques will enable your PIA to change the ambient lighting, colors, smells, artwork, temperature, and humidity to fit your desired environment. But will your partner want the same ambiance? Or will you forgo a partner to live in your preferred atmosphere, with your entertainment and personal choices?
By creating such fantastic individual worlds, will we choose to stay within them and eschew the messy world of personal relationships and having to deal with people of varying opinions and the annoying (to us!) choices they’ve made? As the options available to us multiply, we increasingly choose what we want to see, hear, and feel. We’ve already started the process with choices in entertainment and politics. In politics, we have already seen how we segregate ourselves into echo chambers so far apart we even get different ‘facts’ from each. Each dose of confirmation bias we receive drives us farther apart from others, and in the process, destroying our empathy and shared understanding of other humans.
By choosing to put our individual desires, needs, and prejudices above the need for shared understandings and mutual dependence, aided by technology, we move farther apart from collective human experience. When we can thoroughly choose the human experience we want, instead of the collective experience of family, friends, and even strangers, how can we begin to understand and confront the issues of society? Losing those common bonds in pursuit of our own individual existence is how we will lose our sense of community, and eventually cede our humanity to artificial intelligence.
