Here’s to uninteresting times
So here we all are heading into the closing stages of 2024. Does it feel like nearly a year has gone by since last Christmas? I suppose it all depends who you are and what’s happened to you.
Personally, I feel that we are all currently living under the curse, often attributed to Confucius but which, according to some, may only have originated in the 20th century. You know the one: “May you live in interesting times.”
Having lived a substantial part of my life in that century, I thought I’d already lived in times that were quite interesting enough, thank you, but it would appear not.
And the thing is that, in the context of the curse, no one really wants to live in “interesting times” because, at its heart, that means periods of upheaval, war, pestilence, disease, hunger, chaos, economic depression, mass unemployment. You get the picture.
Uninteresting times, by contrast, are those brief periods of human existence when all is peace and harmony.
The problem is that this particular century seems hell-bent on giving us largely uninterrupted periods of “interesting” and not enough “uninteresting”.
Technology could have played a part in making the times uninteresting or interesting. Sadly, for the most part, it has been firmly in the latter camp. Yes, we have achieved a lot of great progress thanks to IT but we are only starting to appreciate just how “interesting” it can be and how detrimental that is for us all.
Disinformation and misinformation have become endemic thanks to the wonders of technology and they have had very serious consequences for us and the world. Now, we’re grappling with the consequences of artificial intelligence and its potential impact on us all. Will it be interesting? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be “yes”. I’d love for AI to be uninteresting, for it to do the jobs and tasks that we didn’t want to do, to make the jobs and tasks we have to do easier and to free us all to live better lives. But past evidence suggests it won’t.
Why? Partly because the tech world is headed by people who think “interesting” is a mantra to live by, a feature not a bug. The evidence suggests that many of the world’s tech titans have a view of our world that is completely detached from the experience of most people who live on it. Look at what’s happening in the US right now. Elon Musk, poster boy of the tech world, has become the self-appointed co-president of the country and is busy showing his complete lack of understanding of the real world as he pontificates on what parts of government spending can be cut.
He is not alone. Many other tech bros (and yes, they’re nearly all men) are exactly the same. And it’s amazing how often people who make a virtue of how complex and advanced their technology is, can’t also help telling all and sundry how simple everything is to fix with the aid of that technology. It’s not. It really isn’t. You only have to look at how hard it can be to implement technology to achieve what the people fronting it promise it can do, to realise nothing is as simple as they tell you. That’s partly why the channel exists.
And this is the curse we all labour under, living in “interesting” times because the people who tell us every issue or problem is simple to fix with technology are now in positions of great power and influence but completely detached from the most basic facets of everyday human existence. The world we live in today is only simple if you’re ignorant.
I have a terrible suspicion that 2025 is going to be far more “interesting” than any of us would like but I also can’t help wondering if the tech bros (or broligarchy) may have done us all a favour in the (needlessly damaging) long run by showing everyone who might have believed otherwise that, actually, they are not all-knowing visionaries and their technology doesn’t have all the answers to the world’s problems. In fact, in some cases, it’s helping to create even more.
Interesting.
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