It’s not just all the war, injustice, ecocide and dystopia that hurts. It’s knowing it didn’t have to be this way. It’s knowing what could have been.
It’s funny the things that get to you when you’ve been at this for a while.
Today the thing that smacked me upside the head and made me lay my face in my hands for a minute was a viral video clip of Canadian politician Bill Oliver accidentally reading out text from the AI chatbot which had authored his speech before the New Brunswick legislature.
“Public confidence in the office of an advocate matters,” Oliver said while reading from his prepared statement, before blurting out “Here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points.”
I mean, damn dude.
I can’t get over how this is the future we wound up in. Things could have been so beautiful, and instead we wound up with this.
It’s not just all the war, injustice, ecocide and dystopia that hurts. It’s knowing it didn’t have to be this way. It’s knowing what could have been.
All this innovation that’s being poured into finding new ways to conduct mass military slaughter, to surveil and control our entire society, to restrict and manipulate the flow of information, to create artificial scarcity for products that people need, to create artificial demand for products that people do not need, to compete with rival corporations in order to turn billionaires into trillionaires — none of that needs to be happening. Humanity could be using its creativity and cleverness to make the world a better place instead.
If we were pouring all our resources, time and energy into collaborating with each other for the common good instead of competing with each other for power and profit, we could easily create paradise on earth. If all our brainpower was going toward improving life on this planet without worrying about our competitors or overlooking any possible advancement that doesn’t generate value for shareholders, our innovative potential would easily increase a thousandfold.
We could heal our biosphere while ensuring that everyone on earth has what they need to live. We could provide healthcare, education and rapid public transportation to everybody while using automation to eliminate the need for human toil. We could be living lives of ever-burgeoning leisure, wonder, and satisfaction, assured of a better future for our children and grandchildren.
Instead we get this shit. Mass murder and exploitation in an increasingly dystopian civilization on a dying world, where the front line of scientific discovery is the military-industrial complex and the construction of an AI tech surveillance network.
All because we haven’t yet managed to unplug ourselves from the abusive system of capitalism and its outgrowth into global imperialism. We’re being held strangling at this self-destructive chokepoint humanity created for itself a few hundred years ago, and soon it’s going to squeeze the life right out of us.
And it could have been so good. It could still be so good. We’ve just got to find some way to use the power of our numbers to throw off these oppressive chains and build the kind of world that needs to be built. Because the current system clearly is not working.
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