Why We Need To Get Out Of The Survival Mode ??
“Is this what I evolved for?”
For ages, we were some mere nomadic tribe, wandering here and there with no purpose in mind, just trying to make ends meet. There were around five species quite similar to us doing the same stuff we did back then. Eventually, some of them vanished, some we had to kill, and then we ultimately inherited the world.
After all this Darwinism, some 12,000 years ago, a woman(or a guy?) thought of growing her own plants and boom, agriculture had entered the scene. The nomadic life settled. Many people broke their backs tilling the field. Some got super rich, made their own kingdoms. Some became super poor, also broke their backs.
The main thing that came out of all of this was that we, as a nomadic species who ate all sorts of things, became nutritionally deficient.
The world evolved rapidly after all that ‘power’ some people gained from the agricultural revolution. The remaining history was quite varied and interesting as compared to all the dumb wandering in the jungles by our ancestors.
Various doctrines, ideologies came into the picture to keep order in the people. Never in the entire history of this planet had so many organisms gathered together into civilizations, at least organisms who did not eat grass.
I mean herbivores stay together to protect themselves from predators of a different species. We had to come together to defend and fight against our own species all the time.
[Insert, countless wars and battles, huge empires which collapsed sooner than people thought and some religions here and there, here]
Soon, came the scientific revolution and with it, the industrial revolution and the world became a hot place. Literally.
By the 20th century, as we thought we were becoming the smartest species on planet Earth, boom two world wars occurred and we went back to the 18th century.
But we recovered faster than ever. Patted our shirts, made many reforms. Dreamed about making the world a beautiful place for all to live. Still in the process, but things are changing. Faster. Than. Ever.
But you already knew all this. What I am trying to prove then?
All of the history which I just mentioned was a quick overview of our past. The things we had to do to survive and thrive. Some of which we are proud of and other things which we should not even mention.
Humans were cruel at times and cruel at others. But we suffered. We suffered enough. Countless times during our evolution.
But for the first time in our entire human history or any other history you can think of, we have received this opportunity to fundamentally change everything. We have reached a point in our evolution where our ability to predict things and act accordingly has drastically improved.
The knowledge we have collected over the past couple of centuries has completely changed the track of our evolution. Nothing can wipe our species out except our own counterparts living beyond the borders.
The wealth of information we’ve been accumulating has grown exponentially over the last decades. This has revolutionized the way we live and cooperate with each other which has also led to the largest collaboration that the planet had ever seen before.
The technological revolution that previous decades have brought to us made us more connected than ever before. It has also led to the economic and cultural globalization and to the economic upliftment of billions around the planet.
The cost of accessing this knowledge pool has drastically decreased too. This has increased the accessibility of various progressive ideas to people previously living under worse conditions and has led to various political and cultural revolutions all around the world.
The number of wars taking place all around the world has drastically reduced. People (normal ones), at least in developed economies, are living a life with such a luxury that a ruler of the biggest empire in the past could not have even dreamt of. They can sit all day and get things done from the confines of their house. (But this too broke their backs. BACKS!!)
Going towards the future, the lives of people is going to get more luxurious (take luxurious with a pinch of salt). Automation and the AI revolution is going to play a major part in this.
“The machines are coming.”- Tony Stark of House Stark
The machines are coming and some are already here. But they have been replacing us in every field since the 18th century.
All the hard, manual, and labor-intensive tasks were replaced during the first and second industrial revolutions. People lost jobs and people gained jobs. All systematic and repetitive tasks were again replaced by computers during the third industrial revolution. People lost jobs and people gained jobs.
But this century marks the start of the fourth industrial revolution where the whole business can be run by machines with some required human attention here and there. People are again going to lose jobs and quite a lot this time.
We have always thought some human-like robot is going to come and then do our jobs, but that’s not the case. A simple app can make thousands go unemployed. An autonomous car ( and yes without a robot driver sitting in it) can make millions lose their job overnight.
The more depressing it sounds though the more opportunistic it gets.
The situation looks grim but I’d say this is the luckiest time to be alive for a human being. I say so because never in the history of mankind before there has been a chance to give up the survival mode that we’ve been living in since the beginning of life itself.
OUR DIFFICULT MODERN LIFE IS WAY EASIER THAN IT LOOKS.
All of our natural threats have long gone. Our food security is out of the question. Our standards of living are at an all-time high. And our political scenario, well that is still a work in progress.
But never have we ever been so free, and creative in our ancestral lifetime. And the AI revolution is going to make us freer than ever before by automating every other dumb task that we had to focus our intelligent minds on all the time.
We can work on all sorts of projects all around the world. We can use our natural curiosities to fuel science and technology forward. We can use our innate creativity in solving the actual problems affecting the world currently and saving the natural world from the destruction we’ve caused.
We can bring in various plans to help poor economies grow and help other humans who are still left behind in this revolution.
We can create and innovate things in all sorts of fields from arts to science, from engineering to philosophy, from geology to space.
But, this will only be possible if we accept the change and convert it to our benefit. By becoming free from the trivial tasks of daily lives, which not only includes chores but also being free from the jobs which an AI can easily do, we can achieve things of astronomical proportions.
Our brains will be doing things which it is actually made for, that is finding solutions to difficult problems and creatively solving them and we will not be focused on things which are irrelevant and dumb.
As the current jobs disappear, we will have an opportunity of a lifetime to look for the ‘not jobs’ which make us happy and creative.
‘Not jobs’ is a job where you work but it doesn’t feel like work.
With certain policies such as Universal Basic Income, people can be freer to start up their own little ventures and use their creative powers to do more innovations.
So moving forward we’ve to make sure that people are getting educated on the recent technological trends. Our education system should generate humans who are more creative and ready for the future. Also making sure they are not just being made into a computer but an active, alive human being who is empathetic, futuristic, and creative.
And as we evolve even further, the more difficult the problems will be, but as long as billions of minds are working on it, it will be dealt with.
Hence, now is the time to get out of the survival mode.
“My back doesn’t hurt anymore because the machines do my work while I think about colonising Mars.”-This guy below.
