... I found that the future didn't have anything in store for me, because there are no such things as "the future" or "in store." Now, as every point in history, there are an infinite number of possible outcomes, each determined by the choices we make.
It's not surprising that recommendation systems and frictionless design have caught on, given the way they can strip complexity out of our chaotic, fast-moving lives. And, to reiterate, not all personalized recommendations or frictionless apps are bad. But we have to be careful about giving too much of ourselves to our tools. Because the philosophy that gives rise to machine drift is, fundamentally, nihilism. It's an attempt to persuade us that there is nothing important about us that cannot be quantified or reduced to a series of data points, or any inner life worth protecting from machine influence. Recommendation engines and frictionless products offer us their help, but their ultimate goal is surrender--a swimmer caught in a riptide, who gets tired of fighting the current and simply decides to float.
Prisons and cops survive only in tales for the young like twin Atlantises or two drowned boogeymen.
We're training people to do machine things. We shouldn't be doing that. We should be training people in uniquely human capabilities.
The world is in travail, and its agitation waxeth day by day. Its face is turned towards waywardness and unbelief. Such shall be its plight, that to disclose it now would not be meet and seemly. Its perversity will long continue. And when the appointed hour is come, there shall suddenly appear that which shall cause the limbs of mankind to quake. Then, and only then, will the Divine Standard be unfurled, and the Nightingale of Paradise warble its melody.
There is so much suffering, such a great and desperate need for a true remedy and the Bahá’ís should realize their sacred obligation is to deliver the message to their fellowmen at once, and on as large a scale as possible. If they fail to do so, they are really partly responsible for prolonging the agony of humanity.
The day is approaching when that which God hath proposed will have prevailed and thou shalt behold the earth transformed into the all-glorious paradise.
How can we have enough freedom to imagine and articulate a real historical newness in our situation? That is not to ask, as Israel’s prophets ever asked, if this freedom is realistic or politically practical or economically viable. To begin with such questions is to concede everything to the royal consciousness even before we begin. We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought... The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing... The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.