Future Here Now: Optimism <> Action
If you’re in the Dayton area, I hope you’ll join me for a special discussion and workshop on June 27, 5:30 at The Spark, in downtown Fairborn, Ohio. I’ll be unveiling a new talk and workshop on building Future Ready Businesses, and giving away a new guided journal!
The event is free, but space is limited. Learn more and sign up here.
We’ve become quite accustomed to the-sky-is-falling media coverage, especially of new technology. We hear on the daily about deepfakes and AI falsehoods and troll farms and misinformation. I have correspondents who tell me that a hopeless inability to tell the truthful from the false, the lie from the manipulation, is — and will be— impossible.
There’s a reason dystopian science fiction sells better than stories where everyone lives in happy peacefulness. And part of it is the same reason why media feeds us the worst case scenarios. It’s the old saying about man bites dog being a news story:
Optimism is boring.
What we seldom hear about are the benefits - some of the most immediate causes for optimism. The accident victim who regains the ability to talk in her own voice when that has become physically impossible. The person on the autistic spectrum who could never speak, but can now write about how they see the world. And the hustling, under funder, un-advantaged, determined entrepreneurs that I know who are using AI platforms to accelerate their business growth in ways that they never could before.
Advances in technology are just that. They’re neither good nor bad, and they can be used for good as readily, perhaps more readily, than for bad. As we explored in my last post, when the major forces of an era are pushing in the direction of increased transparency, inclusion and network connections, it’s a lot harder overall to maintain a falsehood or a fake for the long term. The same tools that you can use to create those flimsy barriers can knock them down once we know how to use them.
None of that means we don’t have problems right now. None of that means that we can be blase about people and organizations that are trying to erode women’s rights, or sweep racism under the rug, or hurt people who identify differently, or perpetuate violence and oppression. These are hurting people right now, and that’s not excusable. Those are fights that demand us today.
But I think we need to engage in those fights with a full awareness of not only how the tools are being used today, but the direction that the forces under those tools are pushing us, It’s a whole lot easier to float with the current than to paddle against it. And if we understand where those currents are heading, we can choose our actions today to work with it, not against them.
So yes, we need to take action, whether that’s something simple like staffing a tent at a Pride festival this weekend, or fighting regressive legislation, or learning how to sniff out manipulated images.
But we do that with the knowledge that you can swim with the tide, or against it. And one of those two gets you there a lot faster.
And the other one eventually wears you out.
But the tide keeps going anyways.