How do you tell a kid he’s going to become an android?
I don’t have any kids. None of my own anyway. My girlfriend has a boy. I’ll name him “G” today. We all live under one roof. He’s almost eleven. He’s home schooled due to some minor autism and his mother’s choice to keep him out of a broken and bullying system. A system she knows well as a high school art teacher. (His autism has been cured by the way. He’s gone from being on the spectrum, to losing his diagnosis completely. His mother did this by just a change in his diet. Pro tip: stop feeding kids with behavior issues so much sugar and gluten!)
The things she tells me after a day of “teaching.” It sounds more like babysitting anymore. Our educational system does not make good citizens. It does not make critical thinkers that make informed decisions. It churns out cogs for a broken machine concerned only with GDP and suicidal infinite growth on a finite world. More and more, her days include constant new state tests that do nothing to add to education but only steal her time to educate. Tests that only care how well the “cogs” she’s “producing” meet government “specs.” Her only ability to discipline are threats of bad grades. Threats made to kids that have little hope or belief that a single thing they are being forced to learn, will in any way help them later in life.
In my opinion those kids are probably correct. Educators will be faced with their own extinction soon if they don’t start considering the exponential changes about to happen to the human condition. We need to become wise enough, quickly now, to guide them into this, preferably more successfully than we have lived ourselves.
If any futurist worth his bitcoins is right, we will probably see a fully artificial “converted” human in our lifetime, maybe in the next ten years. Certainly in the lifetime of any eleven year old today. See “the singularity.”
Like I said, G is homeschooled. That often means a computer and an attempt at supervising his you tube searches. He’s a smart kid and makes mostly good and useful choices. He’s got an incredible memory. He has much of world history memorized, as well as “the canon” of Star Wars and Legend of Zelda, of course. He’s working on math and language still, but will get there in plenty of time to be called “a normal adult.” He’s doing fine or better than anyone his age.
When among other humans and kids, he seems more adult than most of them. He has confidence, empathy, and negotiation abilities that I never had at his age. (I still struggle myself in comparison actually.) He’s a sweet kid. He is already slightly aware that he may become an android someday and live longer than we can imagine. He “wants to live forever.” What has not sunk in yet is that, perhaps, becoming an android will just be the first stage. How does he navigate the knowledge that he may become something that we have no definition for, something that does not at all resemble what defines humanity now?
Our future will be a collective mind. It seems inevitable. We strive for it all ready in our spirituality. We desire connection. We desire acceptance from groups, tribes of like minds. An unsocial human is a human not long for this world.
There are places in the world where it is easier to get a phone than clean water. What ever analysis you put that fact through, we appear to have chosen shared expression and paths to legacy over sustenance and survival. We will continue to do this through technology. Not by praying hands or mass meditation and chanting “we are all one.” We will just “become” one, as a machine that will be as alive as anything now by any definition.
The rate at which we “digitize” may happen faster than most feel comfortable predicting.
We are killing the biosphere by choice but for a subconscious reason; to force our hand into no longer needing it.
Our western worldview, unfortunately, has never seen us as “connected” to nature and the disconnection will continue.
Be aware I have no personal desire for any of this. I would rather we find some balance with Gaia but I feel we’ve gone too far now. I am just being the ultimate pragmatist now. The rise of the machine, the singularity, is already happening and will continue.
We will either commit suicide, clinging to our flesh, or evolve and adapt to a non biological life form of existence and intelligence. Our kids will take this form when the only other option is maintaining a suffering body that experiences nothing but pain and hunger.
Technological life will end the human condition and allow us to customize what ever condition we desire.
How do you teach to kids that nothing they know and learn today will matter in a world where reality will be customized by the will of a single mind that they will be a part of? The fact that they may unexplainably feel this all ready and have no clue how to consider it, may be the cause of all the angst educators now witness.
STEM is already dead. Science, Technology, Engineering and Math will be the pastimes for our new base subroutines. These will no longer be our intellectual concerns. We will become a mind so powerful that any equation needed for “work” will be answered as if we asked our brain to move our own hands. The answer to everything we desire will “feel” more like instinct than conscious consideration. How does God make a tree? Even he does not know. He just does it. What will matter is how we choose to express the considerations of this level of consciousness and ability.
These new instincts will evolve though. Just like what allowed the lizard brain to evolve toward success, so shall our base subroutines now. They are taking form now. They will be subroutines based on ethics, morality, and philosophy. There will be nothing more for this singularity to consider with the exception of how it decides to express itself to a universe that may still not want to take notice. If we care or not, is being shaped in the zeitgeist now.
If it were me, I’d begin moving all of education toward the arts, philosophy and ethics. Should we become an immortal entity, I would hope we be more concerned with those things as opposed to chasing other first world dreams of conquest and consumption. I would rather we venture out into this universe in the spirit of creation, unity and discovery as opposed to reproduction, pretension, and invasion.
Our children will not be served well by us until we accept that their fates will look nothing at all like ours today. The spark of their enlightenment will be digital. They may teach this to us before we do to them. Let’s hope somewhere, deep in their mighty and gleaming algorithms, they remember we wanted only happiness for them, even if our definition of it was sorely misguided.
And finally, if you liked this, then please heart and share it. I need to make a living at this “writing thing” someday soon. Thanks.
