the future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed
When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance; We've learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we haven't learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters...
... I prefer to talk about "digital discernment," which reflects the fact that learning to navigate our way through a hazy, muddled online information system is a continuous, lifelong process that changes as technology shifts, and as media manipulators adapt to new tools and platforms.
We now know some of the unintended consequences of planetary-scale AI systems like Facebook and YouTube, and how the engineers and executives who conceived those systems failed to appreciate the ways the products they built could be misused, exploited, and games. Most of these systems, I believe, were not intentionally designed to create harm. Instead, I think their founders and engineers were idealists who thought that having good intentions mattered more than producing good outcomes.
We all inhabit this new regime of digital data, but we don't all experience it in the same way. What made my family's experience endurable was the access to information, discretionary time, and self-determination that professional middle-class people often take for granted.
In his famous novel, 1984, George Orwell got one thing wrong. Big Brother is not watching you, he's watching us. Most people are targeted for digital scrutiny as members of social groups, not as individuals. People of color, migrants, unpopular religious groups, sexual minorities, the poor, and other oppressed and exploited populations bear a much higher burden of monitoring and tracking than advantaged groups.
Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.