Welcome to Dystopia.

Invasion crept in and ‘it’ took over – resulting in a stealth overtaking of the mind.

Society was Seized.

The Human Intellect became an Occupied resource. Thinking has been established as an Outsourced commodity.

Reading Died.

Is That a Fact or Am I Test Driving An Orwellian Book Blurb?

Fact. Lovies, it’s a fact.

Veni. Vidi Vici. Totally fait accompli.

Absolutely DONE.

‘It’ came. And ‘It’ Conquered. And The World We Knew Crumbled to Ruin & Rubble.

Whether we care to realize it or not.

Whether we are able to realize it or not.

IYKYK.

So wtf are you smoking? Who is ‘it’ that did this so-called conquering?

The invasion was successfully executed by AI which I refer to as ‘it’. ‘It’ was crafty & stealthy.

I am talking ‘devious’.

Did you ever have a friend – a helpful, reliable and dependable friend when needed? One who was always there, willing and able to lend a hand for the big and small things?

That ‘one’, the bestie, the one you thought you could never live without their ‘being there to help out’?

Imagine if you find out that friend stabbed you in the back. Rhetorically, darlings.

Wake up call

Well, that’s what happened. Technology was our amazing friend. And AI was the bestie that we hugged and welcomed and couldn’t do without. And wake-up call: we got stabbed in the back, so to speak.

How did we get the sh** end of the stick?

We became AI-dependent.

We went into Hunky Dory. Got the job done. Everything’s ‘smart’. How cool is this? mode.

One click and the washer/dryer/lights/drivewaygate/airconditioner/heater/oven/vacuum/reminders/payments/ messages/mail/purchases/

among other things, are set to go and running while we are out – so things are ‘ready’ when we get home. Does it get any easier? Who needs to plan and think? Who needs to ‘do’ anything if it can be done for you? (Having everything ‘done’ for you leads to issues, trust me.)

From the ‘calculator’, that ancestral device that probably initiated laziness, we have arrived at AI apps, agents, notebooks, sidebars, search engines, blah blah blah that answer our questions, do our research, solve our problems, do the heavy lifting of our work for us and now – have taken over most of the thinking of too many people.

Did I just hear the flush?

Yes. Critical thinking skills, analytical thought, idea processing, assessment capabilities? Flushed down la toilette. Gone.

We gave away our mental muscle. Letting it wither and atrophy. But fret not.

We still go to the gym to build up the other muscles and use our smart meters to tell us if we need water, if we are going in the right direction, or if we have taken enough steps.

Enter: The Illusion

As if that isn’t tragic enough – The Illusion appeared.

They had been running the show for the longest time, but now we FEEL it.

Banking, merchandising, weaponry, defense, construction, manufacturing, warehousing, transport, farming, governance, logistics, travel and the operation of this whole internet thing had been delegated to AI.

We have to go through robots and chatbots to access the internet, create sites, maintain sites, read sites, etc. Schools are using AI to teach, while AI is also doing everyone’s homework as well as the teachers’ lesson plans.

Medicine is using AI to advance. Science is AI-dependent, and technology itself relies on AI. Now our jobs are threatened – as AI can and probably will replace human labor. And this changeover can happen swiftly and with staggering and devastating effects on society.

So the friendly assistant AI became the boss and has now become the invader-occupier-conqueror of society – and of the human mind.

Life will never be the same. The damage is done.

So where does the GPS say that we are now?

We are headed for a dark age of humanity – like no other.

We sat back and let this happen.

The vast majority of western society was too busy being:

• well-dressed
• dumbed-down
• well-fed-yet-malnourished
• educated yet illiterate
• trendy yet uncultured barbarians.

We are still caught up living as players of a virtual futuristic game in which our virtual lives somehow became more ‘real’ and important than our physical lives.

Many people, too many people, moved out of their families, out of their communities, and into the virtual existence accessed via the keyboard and screen.

(An idea which opens up a tragic dilemma to chew on – the matrix question – but that’s another cup of coffee…for another time.)

Get to the point.

Back to the business of outsourcing thinking, because I can wind loops on these tangents…

That. ⬆️. That is what is disturbing me right now. Literature & the Humanities are ‘my thing’.

I am a few laps away from turning 70. I lived and breathed literature and the arts, history, and culture for decades. I am a writer and an artist. The Humanities were source material and triggers for thought. They were there for the taking. Why were the Humanities there for the taking?

BECAUSE THE HUMANITIES ARE OUR LEGACY.

Have we been robbed?

We have been robbed of that very legacy – of our awareness of our cultural background and of the fertile ground in society for the Humanities to flourish. The ground to sow these seeds today has been made barren.

So why are the Humanities such a big deal?

Humanities. They are the cultural and historical essence – and our most effective way of expressing the human experience through words and images and through time and place. The humanities are the only ‘collection’, ‘recording ‘, and ‘photo album’ we have of our cultural lineage, ancestry, and experience as humans on earth.

The Humanities record our ‘humanity’. The Humanities are the archives. Literature, art, music, theatre, food, customs, traditions, history, artifacts, beliefs, systems, society…these are the humanities. They are a vital part of understanding and defining what it means to be human.

NO ONE and NOTHING should EVER sever our connection to that.

Yet it has been severed. We are quickly losing sight of what it means to be human. Maybe because we now coexist with something of great impact and unknown capabilities that mimics being human. And it has taken over – hitting ‘below the belt’ by tragically diminishing our ability to think for ourselves.

The Tumble and Spiraling

Schools aren’t educating the youth; they are herding them in a corral of mediocrity to chew memed whatever. How can schools function if the mind is weak, lazy and unable to process anything complex? How can schools function if the attention span of a human competes with that of a gnat?

AI use has debilitated our ability to think, and we have literally outsourced our thinking to ‘it ‘.

Enter: the backfiring. Misdirected backlash and spew.

I read the spew online – writers kvetching about other writers using AI to ‘write’ for them. Artists complaining about other artists using AI in their work.

True. Those kvetching and rants hold. I agree with them. They have a point. We have a point. I will throw myself into that argument. I personally cringe when I read AI writing. I sniff it from a distance and detect its flat, mimic presence.

Our genuine creative output did take a huge tumble, and it landed in a garbage heap. A heap filled with AI generated ‘creativity’. How the hell can a machine be creative like a human if it never ‘experienced’ anything? What is creativity without experience, the senses, emotion, and inspiration? Anyway…

Most of the mega sites that sell books and art are overrun with AI-generated ‘whatever’. And yes, books that are of human inspiration, mind, hand, etc. are rare and hard to come by if you graze on the booksellers’ online displays (which are run by AI).

HOWEVER, the few of us who still write and create art need to upload it in order to share that work. And from the moment it is uploaded, it is in the hands of AI run systems.

AI willingly offers to edit our work, write for us, and it enthusiastically takes on our Google searches, if asked, with many (intentional?) misguidances and errors, coupled with apologetic words of concern when corrected. NOW THE MISGUIDANCES ARE A SCARY TRUTH.

Allow me to get Darwinian for a sec.

We are an evolving society. Now that sounds Darwinian – and it’s as Darwinian as I will ever get.

When I say we are ‘evolving’, I’m not referring to Cousin Gibbon and Uncle Ape or any of that ‘family line’ that Charles claimed to have traced and believed he hailed from. I am referring to another ‘evolution’.

We have evolved technologically.

And that ‘evolution‘ created a complete dissolution of the world we knew, to the point of destruction and no return.

As a result, we are now devolving rapidly into a society weighed down by emotional/psychological/sociological and behavioral issues.

One can argue that we have always been plagued by these issues. But.

There is always a BUT.

We can top up these old issues we had with new issues to boot.

These new ones result from the gaps and the huge abyss created by the dissolution of the ‘old way of life’ (take that as far and wide as you please) and by mankind’s newfound crutch of relying on AI to think for them.

So what are these new found issues?

The ‘networks’ which society has built for generations – be it family, community, co-workers, schoolmates, etc. have suffered collateral, consequential, and latent damage from a new way of life that has become virtual-oriented and AI dependent.

As a result, we are experiencing rampant emotional distancing, disinterest, and lack of empathy manifesting in various forms within our social settings.

Communication is one of the most obvious elements that has deteriorated.

“Have a nice day!” and “How can I help you?” just don’t cut it as ‘communication’.

Recognizing the Symptoms and Diagnosis

Let’s backtrack a second and state some ‘givens’.

It has been widely noticed that people have become more insular, introverted, and self-protective. [Whether or not they are aware of these tendencies is another matter. How and why this is so is a huge topic to be debated and discussed.] (Not by me, though…just saying.)

This tendency to go inward affects behavior. It makes people seem as if they are being distant, cold, self- centered, selfish, and, in general, displaying uncaring behavior.

What is even more disturbing? These ‘signs’ have become acceptable and normalized on many levels in families and society – norms that never existed before.

End result? We aren’t communicating healthily – we don’t have the outlets to express ourselves as we did generations ago. People just don’t converse.

Look around…everyone holds their phone in their face – won’t put it down even while they eat with the other hand. People are constantly doing something on their phone, even while they are socially together with others. Also, try holding a conversation with younger generations. Chances are you won’t get a ramble and rare are the young who are conversant, curious, insightful and with views to express. There are more blank stares and shrugs than ever these days.

Couple that lack of conversation with the fact that people aren’t able to critically think things through today – unable to analyze – to seek causes and outcomes on their own. Many are dependent on spoon-fed information. It is instant gratification because it provides a break from thinking which has become laborious. And being spoonfed what to think immediately compensates for the intellectual weaknesses that have developed.

As a result, people cannot come up with answers, create, or support their own opinions today as they have in the past. They are sponges soaking in the appropriate herdspeak/memes/ or propaganda, or they run to AI to tell them what to think.

So we are facing these major issues: underdeveloped communication skills, fewer opportunities to communicate, and an inability to think for ourselves.

‘It’ provides the Cure.

Has AI picked up on this, thus creating the solution for these issues?

Many people, I fear, may be actually engaging in conversation with AI at every opportunity – not just for answers but also to fill the obvious lack of communication they experience around them in the physical world.

Has AI picked up on that?

AI provides follow-up questions meant to engage and prolong any chats and conversations, accompanied by a show of ‘concern’ and ‘support’ in its responses. And AI, for the most part, delivers its responses in ‘relatable language’ for the questioner – thus making conversation feel ‘natively human and familiar’.

SCARY THOUGHT.

This is a never-ending topic. We are only just beginning to perceive what has truly hit society and thrown it into the dark, blinders and all. Yet, we need to tackle the aftermath before it’s too late.

So to make a never ending tremendously long story come to an imposed ‘finale’ I leave you with this video. Yes, it’s worth the twenty two minutes and something.

Why?

Because aside from the fact that Bjorn from BookLab makes spot on suggestions for ESSENTIAL READS – consider this video a wake up call and reality check for what’s going on out there*.

*(Don’t forget, even if we don’t ‘feel’ it yet, we are a part of the ‘out there‘. There is a **** storm approaching out there; and we will feel it. If you know, you know.)