There Is No (Human) Future

It's sometimes said that American youth overwhelming want to be social media influencers when they grow up while Chinese youth claim they want to be scientists and astronauts. This, allegedly, means that the future belongs to those smart young Chinese. To me, however, it simply means that the American youth are more realistic than their Chinese counterparts.

If those kids are ten years old now, and it takes them another fifteen years to get the degrees they need to be scientists, then what will be left for them to do? Unless they have an IQ of 200 or more, these new scientists will have been replaced by artificial intelligence systems running algorithms. If they're lucky, they might be able to secure a job as a lab technician. As far as being an astronaut is concerned, that was only an acceptable career goal fifty years ago when it was reasonable to believe that an era of space colonization was fast approaching. China's space program is little more than a vanity project intended to show the world that China can copy what the United States was doing in the 1960s. 

The broader problem is that our society is running up against the limits of what humans are capable of. Perhaps humans will have something "productive" to do for decades to come, but that productivity will increasingly look like the boring grunt work needed to maintenance the machines that are involved in the real action. 

The rise of social media has already created an eerie post-reality world in which everyone lives inside cyberspace. When I ride the subway or bus, I find myself looking out over crowds of people starring blankly at their illuminated phones while mindlessly swiping as the algorithm manipulates their every thought. Endless articles bemoan the fact that youth are losing the ability to interact face to face and some have been written about men losing the ability to perform during Tinder hookups (due to porn addiction). 

One data point that I constantly return to is the one about how nobody with an IQ lower than 85 can productively perform any regular job in the modern world. Even the military won't accept them. This category of people includes most of the world's population, and nobody has found reliable ways of permanently increasing IQ. But with the rise of AI, the necessary IQ for productivity will continue rising until nearly everyone is "useless." Perhaps worse, higher IQ jobs are also being replaced by algorithms. So the human population is being made redundant from both the top and bottom ends of the intelligence spectrum.

The only "forward" is backward. Either we move further into this post-human world, this post-work world, or we try moving backwards into something more human. The problem with moving backwards, however, is that we can't move backwards into the world that was, because that world was headed towards the world we now have. 

It's been widely discussed that the world seems to have run out of new style and fashion ideas, and we're now just stuck recycling the trends from past decades; but it seems we have have no other choice, because it's not like we can look forward to something human in the future. People long for the past, because the past was where there was something to do, places to be explored, real communities of people to interact with. The past was where history was actually moving towards something instead of terminating in perpetual online boredom. 

The only real solution is for us to encounter something more transcendent than material progress. We need to move beyond accumulation by diving deeper into ourselves. We need to start reorienting society and identity around the internal struggle towards higher planes of spiritual development. Only when this reorientation occurs can we regain a sense of historical meaning. 

However, as we close-in on the singularity and technological "fountain of youth", we may soon see history end, in a way. The last generation may be alive right now. The generation that will never die, the generation that will never fall from power. In that case, perhaps only the Second Coming will restart history.