What will my kid's world be like?
AI, Climate Shock, Extreme Politics, and Other Baffling Points of Inflection
My parents grew up during the Cold War. Great changes took place during their life spans—the civil rights movement, feminism, the Sixties. Yet the world in which they raised me wasn’t that different from the world in which they were raised. And neither is mine, really; if, in the 1970s, my parents had to predict what my life would be like, they wouldn’t be that off the mark. Sure, they wouldn’t have predicted the internet, or the acceptance of gay people, or 9/11, Covid, or Trump. But the dreams they had for me—education, family, career—were not that different from their own, or how reality came to pass. My house isn’t that different from theirs. Nor is my world.
Not so for me and my seven-year-old daughter.
I have no idea what her world will be like in fifteen years, or how to prepare her for it. This past weekend, after sewing outfits for her dolls, she told me she would become a fashion designer when she grows up. I immediately wondered (but didn’t say): will there still be fashion designers in the 2040s? Won’t AI have replaced most of them by then, or at least taken over the lion’s share of their work?
For that matter, will only the top 1 or 2 percent of people have the luxury of following fashion, let alone purchasing it? What will most Americans do when their jobs have been replaced by AI and robotics? And what about climate: how many hundreds of millions of climate refugees will there be, and how far to the nationalist right will we rush in response? Will our world look like the dystopias of contemporary films, with a few elites living well and several billion living in hell?
And if there’s a significant chance of that, what values should I inculcate to help her be happy: the kindness and generosity favored by her school, or the do what you need to do to survive values favored by my grandparents, who lived in the shadow of war? Is ‘happiness’ even the right goal, given the trajectory of the 21st century? Maybe I should emphasize empathy, resilience, and not having such high expectations out of life.
I don’t write much about AI, because I don’t know that much about it. Everyone has their predictions, of course, but most of them just track people’s priors: optimism, pessimism, cynicism, whom to trust, what to value. As a non-scientist and non-computer-scientist, it’s hard for me to evaluate the seemingly hubristic utopian futurism of today’s tech elites, or the fears that Skynet or the Matrix will one day enslave us all.
The truth will probably be somewhere in between, right? Or not — after all, that just confirms my priors.
It does seem very likely that the skills required to thrive in the second half of the 21st century will be very different from those of value today. A lot of the work I do can be done by smart enough machines, and they’ll be here soon enough. And given America’s penchant for denial when it comes to macroeconomic change—witness ‘make America great again’—we as a society seem ill-equipped to handle such large-scale transformations politically, or to cope with them emotionally and spiritually.
At the very least, the information, culture, and “content” that my daughter experiences will be qualitatively different, and far less tethered to reality, than anything we’ve yet experienced. I assume it will become increasingly difficult to tell real from deepfake, and I assume that Generations Alpha and beyond will accept this as part of their lives, just as Gen Z has accepted always-online-ness as part of theirs. The massive squall of misinformation that haunts today’s internet will surely seem like amateur hour compared to what we’ll see in the next decade.
What even is ‘real’ in an environment in which a majority of visual and auditory stimuli are created by the imagination of a machine? Who knows, maybe our capacities for denying reality and co-creating matrices of delusion are well suited to one another.
And yes, I know this is already happening, with AI-powered pseudo-musicians on Spotify and AI-created or enhanced videos populating TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. As readers know, I use Midjourney to illustrate this very newsletter. But surely we ain’t seen nothing yet. I assume my daughter will come of age in a world in which — shall I quote this phrase in every essay? — nothing is real and everything is possible, at least from a media point of view. I wonder how thinking, how human nature itself, will shift in such a world.
And of course, we’re rapidly eroding the existing institutions that might hold that semiotic anarchy at bay, like the press, or a government that isn’t constantly lying or is regulating technological innovation. If January 6, 2021, is now understood as a “Day of Love” by 75 million Americans, then surely anything can be anything at all. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia Eastasia.
Just the range of possibilities is bewildering. It’s possible that better carbon capture and geoengineering will mitigate the effects of global warming, and the world of twenty years from now will just be like now, only a bit worse. It’s also possible that even the worst-case estimates of GHG concentrations were too optimistic, and life will look like a Mad Max movie. What are the right intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual toolkits for such a wide range of future possibilities?
Really: what do you think?
I can be mindful and present-moment-focused—I teach that stuff. I can try to equip my kid to be resilient, self-sufficient, and caring—my partner and I do that too. But I admit, sometimes, when I’m playing Mille Bornes with my daughter, mindfully focused on the present moment and appreciating the person she is becoming, a part of me wonders what the hell kind of world she is going to inhabit, and how irrelevant the skills of this one may seem.
I suppose none of us ever what our children’s lives will be like. Life has always been unpredictable: people get hit by cars, or get sick, or fall in love unexpectedly, or take a job that becomes their career. So in some ways, it has always been this way.
And even in our public lives, I remember, in the 1980s, that there seemed like a real possibility of nuclear war (and in the 1960s too). After watching The Day After, adolescent me really wondered whether everything I saw around me – my school, my neighborhood, my favorite Italian restaurant – would be reduced to fire and ash, potentially at any moment. Like the Rapture, this would be an instant apocalypse – save maybe fifteen minutes of air-raid sirens. Would I have the guts to kill myself rather than suffer decades of torment? This is what I wondered at twelve years of age.
So it’s not like the possibility of apocalypse is new. On the contrary, as I’ve written about many times (including in this book), it is always five minutes to midnight. If anything, the universal presence of end-times thinking consoles me, since it invites skepticism of end-of-the-world predictions.
But it does feel like this decade is qualitatively different from others.
Between AI, technology, climate, and extreme politics, everything feels like it’s at a point of inflection. My work at the intersection of psychedelics and mysticism feels totally on-brand for 2024; gnosticism, acosmism, and simulation theory make plenty of sense. What’s weird is how most people are just going about their lives same as always—going to ShopRite, working on budget projections for the next year, and now, this week, God help us, “circling back.”
In fact, maybe we’ll do this right up until the singularity, or until the crypto trillionaires seizing control of the world’s water, or until the transhuman uploading of our souls into immortal data banks, or the final reunion with Consciousness. Right up until that moment, we’ll be taking our kids ice skating and streaming Severance.
Which is fine. I’m going to get this piece ready for posting tonight, and then tomorrow I’m going to walk my kid to the school bus, and work on syllabi, conference planning and email. There’s a lot to do in this rowboat until we reach the waterfall.
Happy 2025, everyone!
I wasn’t kidding a few lines ago; I’m hard at work preparing syllabi, working on a conference I’m co-convening in March, and getting two (!) book proposals ready. I do have a couple new publications to share: a deep dive into the work of Jeffrey Kripal, a leading religious studies scholar who takes the paranormal seriously, and a short piece on uncertainty as we head into the new calendar year.
Also, here’s
on science and beauty, and telling a profound story by Tolstoy.Enjoy the circling back!