This piece was originally published in March.
Today marks my 28th revolution around the sun on this tiny blue dot we call home. In some regards, I feel older this time around.
But in other regards, I feel incredibly young to be a part of this ancient world. A new season gives way to a daffodilian display of colors and I’m excited about this spinning world that I’m a part of.
There’s a truism I often heard growing up that’s grown weightier as the years have flown by.
“You’re the oldest you’ve ever been and the youngest you’ll ever be.”
This is one reality to consider when we look at the span of our own lifetimes. But it’s another when we consider that we exist alongside an entire species of others who are living that very same oddity. We each revel and wallow in the latest day that’s ever occurred, and the earliest one that will ever occur again.
It’s humbling to remember that it’s every person who navigates the world in this way — from one fleeting moment to the next. The ticking clock is nothing new.
But there’s something different in the way we move through time. The planet spins to a faster cadence than it once did. Not all moments are created equally. We haven’t transcended the flow of time; we’ve only accelerated it.
There was an era when centuries passed without the planet undergoing twenty thousand tectonic changes. Throughout most of history, whole millennia could lapse and the world would remain a familiar place.
In the modern age, we’ve harnessed the ability to cram eternities into each passing minute. History now moves to a beat too frenetic to dance to. The leisurely carousel from bygone times has evolved into a raging roller coaster tossing passengers at every new bend, twist, loop, and gyration.
For years now, I’ve spent almost every second in perpetual awe of this strange place that we call the present day. But it’s an awe that rarely comes without a little fear and disorientation. I feel as though I’m constantly reaching out at a moment that flees a millisecond later.
Ever-accelerating change is the only constant we know. The only passage of time that anyone alive can recall is a parabolic slope into a brave new place. We live in the era of exponents.
These times are impossible to keep up with, no matter the lens or where it’s pointed. There are just too many issues that demand our attention.
Politics is one of those points. In the United States, people are dizzy trying to stay up to date with current events. No matter how many words are written, there will never be a magnum opus that solves our dissensions. Essays and articles will be buried by new politicians and presidents.
As long as the world keeps spinning, the inner workings of government will remain in relentless motion. Election cycles will come and pass. Some people will try to follow each key player of each new race. But at a certain point, it’s futile. Keeping up with the conveyor belt of shifty senators and congressmen grows gratuitous.
Our nation is one of over 190 others, and each one suffers from a cycling palette of problems. Almost every issue has a wide enough berth for entire lives to be channeled into.
Climate change is another one of these issues we struggle to grapple with in real time. Even trying to do so runs the risk of drowning in rising seas. It’s information we can scarcely fathom. The collapse of our planet’s biodiversity is something most labor to see as more than a hovering concept — a dystopian movie to be observed at a distance. We have a hard time comprehending the very real threats looming over our horizon.
But likely nowhere is our inability to wrestle with our present more plain than in our relationship with technology. A bizarre future has already grown into something mundane for most of us. A boundless reservoir of knowledge floating through the air around us is a mere afterthought — the advent of artificial intelligence a dull roar of white noise in the background of our collective minds.
We struggle to process the brave new world we’re prying open. We struggle to realize that the future is now our present, and with each day we verge on more and more of the breakthroughs once reserved for sci-fi movies.
Most of us are at least obliquely aware that the age of artificial intelligence is upon us. Scrolling through the feed of any app reveals a world far different than the year before it.
AI-generated videos and images and voices have begun to carve more and more real estate for themselves on platforms once dominated by authentic people and personalities. Artificial intelligence has permeated nearly every app and institution. Even the creation of music no longer appears an ability unique to humans.
Within one year, the leaps in AI image generation alone are staggering. The pictures that looked rudimentary a year ago have evolved into eye-popping works of art. Full-fledged HD video generators have made their way into the mix. They can make sense of even the most elaborate prompts. Demo’d for the world this past month, OpenAI’s latest leap in the world of AI video generation, called Sora, seems poised to usher in another watershed moment.
But in a time where we consume paradigm shifts like colorful pieces of candy, these are waters we’ve already begun to brave. We endure revolutions with a mounting numbness. We hear earth-shattering news and a quiet denial kicks into gear once more. Vertigo goes full-throttle for the fifteenth time in a single year.
We never find the time to sit with the colossal shifts we incur or the new inventions we release. There’s no pinning down and analyzing what moves at the light speed of our digital lives. Each development is lost in a blur of motion. We assimilate it and mad dash onto the next.
Many issues of our time feel as though they just move too quickly for comfort. The turmoil is constant. To try to keep up with one dilemma is overwhelming. You’re not wrong to see that. Others see it, too.
It seems like a law of life that we remain spastically spinning. And yet, a cosmic force keeps us mired to the ground beneath our feet. No matter our velocity, we’re the passengers sitting coolly in an airplane as it careens over the Pacific.
There’s no way of disembarking the ride. And that ride is pointed into the misty sky above us. We’re shooting for the furthest star we can find, but we’ve lost all aim of the aircraft.
We don’t know what the future holds, but we keep adding bricks to the bridge toward it.
Whatever strange and mysterious somewhere lies ahead, we’ve never sprinted toward it faster than we do today.
We pry open different Pandora’s boxes and genie’s bottles with a grating regularity. We careen together up this hazy mountain of fantastical innovation at a whirring speed.
Sometimes the truth traffics better in a repeated metaphor. Speaking figuratively makes it easier to digest the indigestible. But even metaphors can seem nebulous when we approach such foreign lands. They fall short. There’s hardly a simile under the sun that does justice to our gaping moment.
If you feel overwhelmed, it’s because the only world you know is in unceasing movement. If you feel like you can’t keep up with the digital life you’re leading, it’s because few of us really can. There’s more on any app than a million fingers can scroll. There are enough reels and TikToks and YouTubes to waste entire lifetimes.
There’s no reckoning with this sort of societal acceleration. We’re a species of cells and synapses confronting increasingly surreal scenarios and going faster by the day.
Even if the world froze on its axis until next winter, we would still toil to come to terms with our perplexing present: the one in which Vision Pro headsets can be bought in stores, Apollo mission-sized files can be iMessaged, and AI threatens the future integrity of our elections. The one where we launch satellites and space telescopes, do Zoom meetups, reanimate dead pig cells, AirDrop memes, decode genomes, and build subatomic particle colliders.
The place where you grow up can make just about anything feel normal. Each region and family develops their rules and customs. And for the children who know no different, that becomes their “normal.” They largely accept their own realities as how life ought to be and rarely consider the possibilities beyond.
Growing up on planet Earth can be a similarly desensitizing experience. We accept this world in flux because we know no different. To pause and reflect on the magnitude of our seismic leaps forward would feel stranger than it does to keep interminably marching.
This “faster, faster, faster!” existence that we’ve cultivated is our normal. That’s why we fail to accept the changes in the world for what precisely they represent. Why we can never quite clasp onto a moment. Why we can’t reckon with what it would mean for the wealth of human creativity to enter some robotic other. For the machines we create to develop consciousness — or something akin to it.
Many people believe that there must be life outside of planet Earth — that the universe is simply too large to be otherwise soulless and cell-less. Some find it a stretch to believe that we haven’t come across aliens already; seeing certain footage I can’t help but wonder myself.
But one aspect we often neglect to take into account in our search for life isn’t just the vastness of space, but the vastness of time. We consider the universe so enormous that intelligent life beyond our planet is all but inevitable. But we often forget that it was only a few dozen centuries between the discovery that fire could be harnessed and the invention of nuclear weapons and space-bound rockets.
It isn’t only a matter of discovering life in the right place, but discovering it during that short period in which it’s discoverable. We may have already probed planets that once housed flourishing civilizations. But if we found them a few eons too late, their cultures could have already been lost to the celestial sands of time.
Once a species advances to a certain point, it’s sometimes assumed that it can go no further. It tears itself apart. It wages war against itself with more and more powerful weapons. It creates tools well beyond its ability to wield reasonably. It creates intelligence that surpasses its own. Fates could take any number of forms.
Looking around at our world today begs dire questions about our remaining time here. The advent of AI and virtual reality may very well be among our final chapters.
The Doomsday Clock makes no specific wagers about how our world will end, only that it will soon. It predicts that, in the grand clock that represents our species’ time on this planet, our tenure is ticking closer to a cut and defined close. What that final terminus will look like is still anyone’s best guess. But that we stand before a precipitous crossroads is undeniable.
What comes of artificial intelligence, technology, and virtual reality in the decades to come will change what it means to be human on planet Earth.
It may be in our lifetimes that we bridge the gap between brains and computers. We might unravel the puzzle that is consciousness. Record our experiences with digitized eyes inside our heads.
We might be the first humans to store our minds to the cloud — back up our most important memories and delete our most painful ones.
Or will our digital lives come to cataclysmic ends? Will a freak solar flare eradicate this electronic world we’ve erected?
Will the oblivion we face be climate-based?
Is a faraway future at our doorsteps already and we’d rather not hear its thudding knocks? Is that future a sublime one?
Is interstellar travel within our grasp? Will we build colonies on Mars?
Or will we drift quietly off into the singularity?
Will we solve the riddle of aging? Rid the world of war as the algorithms we code find cures to our diseases? Will the ills that plague us here today all become problems of the past? Distant memories we can reflect on and romanticize? Will the masks and wars and chatbots be warm little tales we tell our grandkids as they sit on our laps?
We might build a utopia. But we could just as easily crumble and fall from our unthinkable heights.
How the future from today will come to pass falls on us to answer, and the answers will change what it means to exist. It’s a privileged burden to bear. It’s the grandest questions yet that we now stand face to face with. Finding the answers is a scary prospect, but it’s also an opportunity that it’s tantalizing to share with 8 billion others.
It would be very interesting to me to see what you think 10 years from now. Were your prognostications accurate and appropriate? Or will you find your statements in ten years do not really reflect where you will be. When we are young we think quite a lot about ourselves. It is only time that begins to expose what reality will be for us as we grow older. I know for me I never expected in my 19th time around the sun to be saddled with a life long time non-curable disease like so many of us have been. Such events temper the way one looks at life throughout life. In any event I wanted to offer a view of someone that has taken my own trip around the sun 70 times. That alone is a humbling thought. For me these humbling thoughts make me take pause and reflect. Offered in peace, Randy.