Someone Wanted this Ship

Imagine you are riding in a large ship. A Ship that is moving slowly, but steadily through the water, under control, but not spectacular.

The elites are up in the top cabins, drinking white wine and eating cheese, thinking everything is fine and feeling that they have earned their place.

You and your struggling friends, who do not write software, and did not get fancy degrees at elite colleges, are stuck under the waterline, looking out of the few portholes. You’ve been given a few cases of stale beer to share, but are otherwise ignored.

You’ve had enough. You get pissed-off. It’s time to do something about this situation.

So what do you do? “Let’s take down the whole damn system” yell you and your friends. We don’t care what happens. We want change! Anything will be better than this! You drill holes in the sides of the ship.

Where does the water come in? Who drowns? Who gets in the lifeboats goes home and dries off.  Who then goes off to design and build a better ship?

The old captain, a captain from the old school, goes down with the ship. “She deserved it.” She had her time.  We want ours! “ you say, as you struggle to keep you head above the in-rushing water.

Soon the new ship gets launched.  You survived, and so did some of your friends.  You have a job now. It is back down in the bottom of the boat. This time you will be given oars to keep you busy. The new captain, the guy behind you with a whip, will keep you motivated. He has left the elites  on the shore. That makes you happy.  The top decks are now loaded with a new group that is older, richer, meaner, and more controlling that the last group. They are fighting with each other because they don’t know how to run the ship.  Most of them want to turn it around or make it go backwards,

This new group likes to stand on the high decks and piss on you and your friends. They tell you to be happy because you are better off than the Blacks and the immigrants who they threw overboard.  You have a job.  just keep rowing, and watch out for the lash.

Repeat: Redux

Lou Reed’s “Dirty Boulevard” popped up on Pandora. I hadn’t heard it for a while so I pushed the “repeat” button. It brought back a rush of memories, strangely memories about my mother.  She didn’t like Lou Reed, she was a Ray Charles fan. But it wasn’t the song that reminded me of her, it was the repeat button. My mother was almost ninety when she died. During the last few years of her life she told me often that she was tried of seeing the world repeat itself.  She would say, “I was born when there was a war in Bosnia, and I will die during a war in Bosnia.”  She outlived that conflict by a year.

As I enter my later years I am beginning to feel as if I have gone through this kind of wash and rinse cycle too many times before.  However, this time seems more disappointing because we are part of a time of exciting changes.  New technologies have brought enticing and exciting changes to the way we live.  We are now have access to anything we want to know any time we want to it.  If you don’t think that is an amazing benefit to us old folks just ask us the capitol of South Carolina, or who played Carla in Cheers; you know, the curly one, you know….

Technology has opened the gates to new discoveries in science that were unimaginable twenty years ago.  What we are seeing is how complex we are, as is the world we live in.  There are no simple answers to anything, a lot of what we thought was accurate is only partially so.  There are many debates about which parts are true, which will be resolved through more research, but until then we are kept wondering and looking. It’s a fascinating time, unless you are bothered by unfinished details and ambiguous results.

Yet, many of the innovations which are being applied to solve so many problems are also being used to tear us apart and create deep divisions.  It has become very difficult to tell the difference between a half truth and a total lie. Information comes rushing at us so fast that it is difficult to sort out what’s real.  One trait we humans have is to see confirming evidence for what we already believe.  That makes us feel more comfortable to think that we have it right.  It also leads us to hold fast to ideas that are not true.  We get angry at those who disagree with us, or show us that we are wrong. When his half-truth contradicts my half-truth I know he’s an idiot.

For almost forty years I was a psychologist in beautiful Lowell, Massachusetts. I opened my practice just as the first of the Wang Towers was being built.  Does anyone remember the Wang 1200 WPS? it was at the beginning of our transformation into the digital age. You could type a page, and move the words or paragraphs around.  You could delete things and put them back.  Amazing!  But Wang filed for bankruptcy in 1992.  It couldn’t keep up with the development of computers by companies like Digital Equipment, and IBM..  Digital was acquired by Compaq in 1998.  Compaq was taken over by HP in 2001. By then everyone was getting connected to the Internet, and soon we all had the capability to go mobile and stay connected every minute of the day.

This history of companies rising and falling in Lowell is not new, it dates back to Lowell’s founding.  The mills were new technology in 1840, used to turn cotton into cloth.  The looms were first run by women who came from the farms of New England.  When they felt exploited by low wages they were replaced by the German immigrants, who were replaced by French Canadians.   Eventually the mills moved south for cheaper labor, and now most of our cotton clothes are made in Asia.  You’re probably aware of that.

For a while it looked like the digital revolution would be different than that industrial revolution. Instead of long hours and harsh conditions that came with the industrial revolution,  the digital age was eliminating many of the harsh repetitive jobs and offering thousands of new ways to make our lives easier.  At work, at home, and at play, little bitty chips will do more and more of the repetitive, mundane tasks of our lives, such as shopping, banking, cleaning, turning out the lights, playing music, setting appointments, meeting new partners, even driving, drawing and drooling. Surely all of this will help us improve our lives, make better decisions, and understand and appreciate each other better. 

Well, yes and no.  

Remember that exactly one hundred years ago the new engines and mechanical marvels of that industrial transition helped bring about the biggest, most meaningless waste of human life in history: The First World War.  We don’t want to go through that again.We don’t want to be blaming innocent scapegoats for all of the disruptive changes. We don’t want modern day Luddites attacking the machines, or being afraid of new knowledge. We know that once new genies are out of the bottle there is no way to put them back.

As those thoughts raced through my mind I heard the words from Lou’s 1989 song and they caused me to shudder.

“Give me your hungry, your tired your poor I'll piss on 'em

that's what the Statue of Bigotry says”

As a psychologist I have seen every day that people don’t make changes easily. When things are changing all around us it leads to uncertainty.  Uncertainty causes anxiety.  Anxiety creates resistance.  There is always a backlash. It seems as if it is in our genes.  Whenever human beings are threatened they lash out.  I have seen so many patients who have turned their lives around, but then, when hit with an unexpected stress, such as a lost job, a break-up, an illness in the family, they revert to their old, dysfunctional ways. They get angry, they go back to drinking, they don’t show up for work.  They mess up their lives all over again. That seems to be what the whole world is going through now.

But the backlash doesn’t have to destroy everything.  In fact it can’t.  The world will keep rolling on creating new and better.  We will have better medicine because of Watson making diagnoses.  We will have self-guided electric cars that will reduce accidents, eliminate traffic and reduce pollution.  We will have algorithms that keep us healthy, help us make smarter decisions, and foster better, clearer communication. We will keep blending the white, black, tan and brown skin tones until it is difficult to tell the difference. Maybe we will invent even more genders.

But right now, we have to deal with the backlash.  We have to find ways to spread the benefits to everyone.  We have to help everyone choose the changes that they find useful, and not just be sold crap they don’t need or want.   We need to find ways to expose manipulation, fear and false prophets.  Under stress it is easy to get people to trade freedom for security.  People will hold on to what they know, even when it doesn’t work any more.  That’s why so many cultures aren’t here any more. I want my children and grandchildren to live a world that can deal with reality.  I want them to have a world that values all people equally.  I want them to live in peace — a wish that has been repeated in vain for five thousand years.

Transitions are never easy. To paraphrase George Santayana, it helps to learn from the past so as not to repeat it.  Or to quote Mark Twain: ““History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Let’s not go back to The Dirty Boulevard, except to listen to the guitar riffs.

I’ve Been Replaced!

Even doing a most Human Task

For that last fifteen years I‘ve been waiting for this to happen. I could see it gaining on me, but following Satchel Paige’s advice I din’t want to turn around. I began to suspect this was coming when the fees that insurance companies paid us for psychotherapy began to drop.. My colleagues thought it was due to the cheaper costs of people with Masters’ degrees, but I what knew better: chat bots and A.I.

In 1966, before there was a word for “chat-bots,” Joseph Weizenbaum at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created Eliza, a computer program that was designed to respond to typed questions with simple responses, mostly repeating what the typer said, or saying “tell me more.” You can talk to a slightly improved Eliza on this web-site: http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3

I’ve been a psychotherapist for over forty years. I can look at people and tell when the words they are saying are covering up what they are feeling. I’ve learned how to gently push people to look deeper into themselves and open up.

There were many times when I sat with couples who were trying to sort out the difficulties in their relationship. Often one of them had been caught acting like some of our past or future Presidents, which the other partner found upsetting. The guilty party would be very apologetic and swear on their children’s heads that it would never happen again.

After years of witnessing these acts of contrition I can accurately determine whom to believe and who was still attempting to deceive. I had developed two methods which aided my intuition. The first was that I became a close observer of faces. There are very subtle differences in the coordination of the muscles between the eyes and the mouth. I’m not sure if I could tell from a picture. I think it was more about how they move, or don’t move, together.

I also had the advantage of working in a small city in which everyone knew everyone else’s business I often had either the third member of the love triangle, or her roommate, or his sister, or someone else who was bothered by what was going on, who was also seeing me for psychotherapy. They had no idea that I was seeing this couple, but it bothered them enough to bring it up in their own sessions.

However, those years of experience; that unique talent, has now been learned by a tv camera that is connected to a computer that runs a “deep learning” artificial intelligence program. I saw a demonstration of one of them two months ago at The Harvard Innovation Lab during Hub Week in Boston. The program, developed by a company called Affectiva,, would focus on a person’s face, and determine their emotional state. According to their marketing materials it has developed “norms built on the world’s largest emotional database of more than 25,000 media units and 4 million faces analyzed in 75 countries.” They also state that “we are humanizing technology.”

I my view they are taking a big step towards dehumanizing psychotherapy.

There is a lot of research that shows that we humans are social creatures. We have evolved to care about each other. Those of us who have better social relationships, especially close ones with partners, family and friends, do better in life. Those people live longer, happier, healthier lives.

One of the major healing factors of psychotherapy as been that the patient feels a connection to an understanding, caring, non-judgmental person, especially one who has some knowledge and status, like someone you call “doctor.” Would it be possible to “transfer” such feelings of trust and hope onto a machine?

Apparently, it is. In fact, there are studies that have been done with war veterans who have stated a preference to talk to a responsive A. I. program. When asked why, many of the veterans explained that when they would recount some really gruesome battle field experience, such as having to shoot an eight year-old girl in the head because she was carrying a bomb, they could feel the reaction from any human counselor, even another vet. But a machine could be empathic and still not be upset.

Also, during the years of Facebook. Twitter, Snapchat and even Medium, people have been conditioned to seek “likes.” Those little electronic bits of encouragement evoke the positive feelings of accomplishment, hope and happiness in response to any kind of feedback on social media. It keeps people coming back. It keeps people wanting more. Each little thumbs-up, heart or smile, makes us feel a bit more connected, clever and important.

During the last ten years there have been over a dozen companies that are using artificial intelligence and deep learning to not only monitor human emotion, they are building machines that can respond in an artificial empathic manner, reflecting the emotion of the real human. In addition to responding to facial features these programs can respond to the tone of voice and the content of the conversation. There is a program that goes deeper than the facial expressions and monitors the blood flow in the muscles of the face. They feel that this can reveal when someone is trying to hide there emotions. There are also new ways of tracking other physiological components of emotions, including heart rate, neurological responses, stress and arousal levels, and other physical activities.

Could this be psychotherapeutic?

The technology is probably available today for you to sit in front of a screen, and by talking to a deep learning machine, you could diminish your emotional difficulties and improve your life. The machine could watch and listen to you, monitor the content of what you say and determine the emotions that you are feeling. It could probably tell if you are angry with your mother, have suspicions about you spouse, are exaggerating your accomplishments or are lying about your drug use. It could offer soothing, compassionate responses, as well as questions that would push you to explore the origins and complications of your difficulties. It could point out your errors in judgement without insulting you, and probably help you sort through ideas and find better solutions.

What is new about this is that the more these deep learning machines “practice,” just like a good clinician, they get better. They would learn more about your emotional patterns and your responses. You could report back and tell them what you felt was successful and helpful. In addition, they could also get information about your physical conditions to see if your blood pressure was staying under control, or your cortisol levels were diminished. It could know if you sleep better after your sessions, and if you are generally happier and more productive. It wouldn’t have to depend on your verbal reports during the first fifteen minutes of the session. If necessary you could have a breathalyzer app added to the protocol.

Another big advantage is that your virtual, deep learning therapist would always be available, and the sessions could be as long or short as you felt necessary. You wouldn’t feel you were intruding on your therapist over the weekend. The therapist would never be tired, preoccupied by the troubles in his own life, or worrying about the fees. It would come with graphs and analytics that would help you monitor your own progress, and it could give you smiley faces and heart emogis whenever you did well.

Fantastic! 😀

Fantastic? 😟

Are there dangers with this? Sure are! Many.

So much depends upon the values and philosophies of the programmer. What gets reinforced? Does it just allow you to go down your own crazy path? Does it have a goal of making you a better cog in a conformist society? Those things are not yet clear.

The big question is: what about people? Will some people become much more comfortable with a compassionate machine and still find ‘live” people to anxiety provoking, too demanding and too annoying?

Life can be tough. Each of us “live” people have our own agenda. We want something from you, just as you want from us. That’s what relationships are. That’s why they work. That’s why they don’t work. If the machine annoys you you can unplug it. That’s not good to do to a partner.

Remember, technology is a tool. Many new innovations are offered to us every day to help us live better, easier, happier, healthier, more efficient, creative, productive and satisfying lives.

But what all those words really mean is up to each of us, individually and as a society.

Choose wisely my friends.

Tools that Think for Us

Section - A  — Big Data and Algorithms

In March of 2016 a computer named Alpha Go, took another big step towards showing that our new tools are capable of solving more complex problems. It beat the world’s best GO player at that ancient game which has almost an infinite number of moves. This was more difficult than just combing through tons of data like Deep Blue did when it beat the worlds’ best chess player, Gary Kasparov, in 1997, or when Watson beat Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings at Jeopardy in 2011. In this contest, Alpha Go beat Lee Se Dol four matches to one.  It showed that a software program developed at Google could learn from experience and improve its own performance.  

The program was designed to improve itself based upon it’s successes and failures, even in very complex circumstances. That’s what smart humans do, but the machine’s approach was very different.  Another major difference between the machine and human competitors, is that the machine was unaffected by fatigue or psychological pressure.  Lee Se Dol emphasized that difference in his post-match interview. "It is different, there's no doubt. First of all, its not human. It took time for me to get used to its playing style," Lee said."It's not shaken up psychologically and stays focused right until the end," he said.  

It seems that one of the reasons that Lee is such a great champion is his ability to read his opponent and to push a person to his limits. People react when they feel they have made a mistake or if they think they are beginning to lose (see: Trump).  That was not true with Alpha Go.  Observers felt the machine made a strategic error early in the last match, but that didn’t upset it  — it was unaware of it really, since it is not really “aware” of anything, and it never gets “upset.”  As play continued it was able to make the necessary corrections.  

Besides the obvious advantage of computing power, it is this  lack of emotion that is the major difference between people and our machines and tools.  Machines have no prejudices or biases; they just look at the data.  And the data is another big difference.  The start of the new millennium was the time that the term “Big Data began to gain a lot of traction.  People in many fields were realizing that the amount of information that was being produced, and the amount of different factors that computers could collect and analyze, was way beyond what any human mind could keep up with, or make sense out of.  

“Big Data” is now the term for how machines do that job for us.  Big Data is the answer to the problems of being overwhelmed by the five “Vs” of information: Volume, Variety, Velocity, Variability and Veracity.  What many people don’t realize is how pervasive the use of Big Data has already become in our lives, and it will play a much greater role in the future.   It is what every retailer uses to follow what we have looked at, what we bought and then determine what they can sell us next.  It is what every political party uses to see who we may vote for, and how they can try to change our mind.  It is how sports teams decide what players deserve a lot of money.  It is what your insurance company uses to decide how much risk there is in your life. It is what doctors are using to help with diagnoses and treatment.

For several years now I have been trying to persuade my colleagues who do psychotherapy to take advantage of the capabilities of Big Data to improve their diagnostic skills and clinical interventions.  The overwhelming response I’ve received has been that would be one of the most counter-productive and anti-clinical actions anyone could take.  It would remove the element of therapy that is most important to making it work, the “human” element.

I strongly agree with that.  Because what  the “human” element really means is to make a decision based upon intuition, and emotion.  A person’s intuition comes from his or her own experience and that experience is very limited compared to all the data that is complied by a super-computer.  Likewise an emotional decision, which is a major element in almost all human decisions, is very biased as it is based upon that person’s immediate, protective needs, or short-term desires. This is true, even for therapist (imagine that).

Big Data takes the huge volume of data that is feed into it.  Sorts through it all with great speed (velocity). It finds regular, reoccurring patters in the Variety of the data, and can check on the Veracity of those patterns.  It does this with no pre-conceived ideas ( If it had a mind it would be an open mind, but of course, it doesn’t have a mind), and it does it all much faster and more accurately than any person can.

Big Data can find early indications of depression in ways that no clinician can.  In fact it can detect signs of depression even earlier than the person who is becoming depressed. There are examples of machines showing that when a person’s activities show minor changes, that it could either be a good sign or a bad sign.  If a man has been going to Home Depot, or Auto Zone almost every weekend for five years, and then he stops going, it may indicate that he has found a girlfriend who he values more, or he is getting depressed and no longer cares about his home or car as much as he always had.

There are many such patterns that Big Data already has about all of us.  We all have generated data that gets fed into huge data bases that are kept by retail companies, credit card companies, governments, political parties, and who knows who else.  It is not hard to track what we buy, how we spend our disposable income, what books and movies we watch, how much we exercise, what kinds of foods we eat, who we spend time with, and what vices we enjoy.  From all that it is easy to generate what we are about to do next. “People who listen to David Bowie also like David Bryne” is one of the more innocuous examples. If anyone could access the data you have voluntarily complied on you phone they would know much more about you, and be able to make more accurate predictions about how you will behave than you probably could for yourself.

But the main advantage / disadvantage of Big Data is that it doesn’t care. It shows things that are counter-intuitive, or that people don’t want to accept, for example that children who are raised with two parents of the same sex grow up to be heterosexual at the same rate as children of children raised by heterosexual parents, or that Republicans have the same general IQ level as Democrats, or that it’s better to have LeBron on your team than Stephan Curry.

These computer tools we have created will only get better at what they do. As we can see from the GO game, they will improve by correcting their own mistakes. Many more of our decisions will be guided by computer algorithms. This will be true for large scale decisions such as finance, city planning, health care, and elections, as well as individual decisions, such as our choices in music, restaurants, schools, or job fitness. 

Do we want this kind of guidance?  Will we accept it and use it?  Will we even be aware of how much we are being influenced?  How many of these algorithms are made for our best interest, or are the there to promote someone’s profits?

Coming Next:  Section B: But We Are Human

Tools 2: Tools That Do Our Work

Anyone who is working at a job in any scientific field is aware of how new technological tools have increased their ability to explore almost any question, and to do so a thousand times faster than anyone could thirty years ago.  Genetic studies that would have needed thirty years to observe twins to grow-up can now be done in a matter of hours by looking at their DNA.  The availability of techniques such as CRISP-R are dramatically changing the way people are attacking genetic diseases.

The Super-Collider is another widely-publicized research tool that is allowing cosmologists to answers questions about the formation of our universe. We are beginning to get answers to questions that had previously been based only on faith.

Watson computers are not only playing chess and Jeopardy, they are being used as a “clinical decision support system.” This machine can process four terabytes of information in the a tiny fraction of the time that it takes your doctor to stare at the ceiling and try to recall what he knows.

Advances in brain science have are being done using improved FMRI machines as well as PET scans and variations of electronic brain stimulators.

The list of fields that have been totally changed since the start of the new millennium is endless.  It goes from the examination of ancient scrolls to the exploration of asteroids. No one who does any kind of research or scientific inquiry today does it in the same manner that their predecessors did as little as twenty years ago.  If they are they are wasting time.

Of course, it isn’t just science, technology has now disrupted almost every job in every field: farming, journalism, law, music, art, even waiting on tables and doing dishes. Delivery services such as UPS now not only monitor their trucks and packages, they can monitor how fast each driver is driving, and how many packages they deliver in an hour.  Almost every job, from analytics to zeppelin construction, has their own specifically designed software packages to guide the workers.  The trend is that the software and hardware is quickly replacing most of the workers, and doing a better job.

Increasingly, unpleasant jobs are being done by bots and robots. Assembly lines, which are full of repetitive tasks, such as those that build cars, sort medicines, and fill soda bottles were one of the first adaptations of using machines to replace workers.  Machines don’t  get tired, don’t take breaks and remain accurate.  Robots go into burning buildings,  Robots disarm bombs.  Robots clean-up hazardous waste. Robots go into battle,  Drones observe, track and can kill enemy combatants, (and sometimes their families).

Robots are being designed to take over more tasks. It has become clear that any job that pays under twenty dollars an hour can probably be performed better by a robot.  That includes the cooks at McDonalds and home health aids.  There are studies the show that many elderly and somewhat demented people respond very well to being guided, reminded, and talked to by robots. There are also robots that can take a person’s blood pressure and monitor other important bodily functions.  They can do this while the persons sits at home. Many people do this for themselves with small devices such as Fitbits or other health apps, of which there are now thousands. Once any doctor, insurance company or therapists gains access to the information on your cell-phone they will know much more about you than you know about yourself.

A self-driving car, which is right on the horizon, is a specialized robot.  In fact, they are here, just waiting for the laws to catch-up.  Eventually, these will be easier, safer, more fuel efficient, more time efficient, and cost less.  Self-driving cars will probably eliminate traffic jams, as they will be in touch with each other, know alternate routes, and not be subjected to the random actions of individual drivers. They will put hundreds of thousands of people out of work.

All of these things are just the most obvious kinds of technologies that will all almost certainly become part of our lives in the not very distant future, probably within twenty years.  They will alter the kinds of skills that will be necessary for people to successfully run their lives. There will be a need for physical exercise, but that will  be in the service of keeping your body healthy or for athletic pursuits.  The need to use human muscle power to do manual labor will be greatly diminished.  

This will change the nature of human bodies and, since we know there is a strong mind/body connection, that will change people’s thoughts and emotions..  For me, as a psychologist, I have no way of predicting if people will feel more relaxed, capable and able to enjoy themselves, or if these changes will result in more obesity and sickness. Will we develop an awareness that our lives are so much more dependent upon different kinds of machines, or will this just happen, drop by drop, until many of us think differently, solve problems differently, and slowly change into a different form of our species?

There will be a continued deterioration in many skills that were very basic to human adaptation.  I suspect that people will lose the sense of where they are in the world, how to get from place to place, how to traverse difficult terrain, and how to find your way home on your own.  All of these will probably become competitive sports, but most people won’t bother to learn those skills.

I am just one or two generations away from the time when people had to grow their own food. Many also hunted, fished and trapped for protein, or else they raised and slaughtered animals themselves.  My generation saw the rise of supermarkets, shopping malls, and strip malls, all with huge parking lots. I learned how to drive when i was sixteen and that gave me the freedom to live on my own, go anywhere I wanted, see friends easily and get myself to work.

The next generation who comes into the developed world will probably not have to shop, cook, or drive.  They will probably not even have to keep track of what they need, as all they will have to do is ask the descendant of Amazon’s Echo to make sure that they have all their supplies of food, milk, bread, wine and wafers.  Most of the usual supplies will be on a regular delivery schedule and be put on the shelves, or into the refrigerator.  Many of our meals will be specifically designed for us and come completely prepared and placed directly on the table by a friendly robot. All of these things are very possible, but only for those who can afford them.

The effects of all of these work saving tools are two-fold.  They make life physically easier for people, both at work and at home.  There will be no need to carry heavy parts and tools, to use a hammer or saw, or drive or fly hundreds of miles.  No need to vacuum the floor, walk up and down the isles of supermarkets, or clean-up after grandpa.  It will all be done by robots and the Internet of Things.

Another positive effect will be to eliminate human error.  Self-driving cars will be safer and more efficient than human drivers.  They will not be affected by bad moods, loud music, texting, traffic, or road rage.  That will be true for trucks and planes also. Already, computers tally bills more accurately, make change, keep track of who is buying what, give out rewards, and keep records, with no mistakes.  They are unaffected by fatigue, repetitive actions, ADHD, the urge to steal, or flirting with customers. They are vulnerable to hacking.

The unintended effects of these technological advances will take place in our brains.  It will be more pronounced in the brains of the children who will be raised surrounded by all of theses robots, interconnectedness and embedded artificial intelligence.  What skills will they need besides coding, wanting, and fending off social media attacks?

Other questions revolve around the unresolved issues regarding if machines are doing all the work, what will people do? If people aren’t working, how can they afford these devices?  Will we just play games or will we learn to get along with each other?  

Or, will our primitive urges still be the most powerful and we still divide into tribes and use all of these new tools to destroy each other?

What is clear, especially clear at this moment, is that our so called leaders are pretty clueless and unprepared for what is coming.  Most politician don’t understand the technology and have trouble using email.  They all, from your town council member to the President of the U.S. are talking about creating better jobs when they should be thinking about how people will live if one third of them work, or if everyone works fifteen hours a week. What about security?  What about privacy? What about generating enough power for all of these machines without ruining the planet?  

These are just the most obvious of the questions that need to be confronted starting now.  I haven’t heard a word about any of them.

My Mission:

During the last few months I have been reading many of the posts one The Mission.  I read how people are trying to help others find pathways improve their careers, their finances, their relationships, and where they fit into the world.  Most are focusing on short and intermediate time frames.  I am older than most of your readers, almost as old as Bernie, and I am interested in the longer term. I wonder about the lives of my children and grandchildren. 

I read how many of your readers are working hard to create a future that will be different in many ways from how we live now, and hopefully, it will be better. 

My Mission, is to start a discussion about that: where are we going?  What are we creating?  Why? What do we want?  What may be the unintended consequences?

I want help people think with a wider perspective.  What will happen to their lives, to their families, to communities, to the world as a result of all of these changes?

I am proposing to write a series of essays, each 1000 to 2000 words, which highlight the many significant changes that are affecting all of us.  These essays will describe changes in areas such as technology, genetics, families, population demographics, the earth’s environment, sources of energy, and medicine.  Most importantly, I will focus on how all of these areas interact with each other to increase the impact on our lives.

At the end of each essay there will be a few questions for people to consider.  These questions are designed to help people clarify how they want to participate and benefit from the opportunities that are being created.  I hope to be able to stimulate a discussion about how each of us can influences the direction and consequences of all of this change.  The flux will always be with us. We can either be swept up and dragged along by the swift current, or we can take some actions now to control the direction of the river, while we each choose the best ways to steer our own kayaks.

Ch-ch-ch Changes

Things are changing. Many things already have.  The world is being disrupted.  More change is coming, and coming faster. Constant change is now the norm.

As we change the world, the world is changing us, as a species.  The type of tasks we need to survive and prosper are different than they were fifty years ago when I was just facing the world as a young adult.  Everything in the world moved much slower.I had to search for information in places well beyond the palm of my hand. The information I could find then, especially in sciences, was probably less than a third of what there is now.  What I was learning in graduate school about Psychology at that time has mostly been disproven or relegated to the archives of “long ago.”

All of the sciences are completely different than fifty years ago.  So are almost all of what happens during the daily lives of everyone in the developed world: how we communicate, how we work, where we work, how we get food, what we eat, how we spend our leisure time, how find mates, how we create our families, what constitutes a family……. Almost every aspect of our lives has been affected by changes in technology, medicine, and the changes in our biological environment and our social environment.

The result of all of these changes is that the people who do well in the future will require different skills than the ones who are doing well now.  In many ways, they will be different kinds of people.

What will you be doing in ten, twenty or thirty years? What about your children or grandchildren?  Do you know how all of these changes will affect you, and them?  Do you think you will be able to choose the benefits these changes offer while avoiding the dangers?  Do you think you know what is coming or will it all just happen to you, and you will have to struggle to cope?

We are living in an fascinating time, a chaotic time.  Many of these new developments are marvelous and fascinating, but so much is happening so quickly that many people are feeling very insecure. I have been a psychotherapist for over forty years and I have witnessed how, even though in many ways our lives are much easier, there still has been a widespread rise in the amount of stress, anxiety and depression in people all over the world. 

On the positive side, it is clear that more than any other time in history, many people are very aware that there is a lot going on. This is good, but we have to take advantage of this realization. We have to ask ourselves many difficult questions, and they are questions that we will each have to answer for ourselves.  There really is no one best way forward. But if you don’t consider many of these questions, you could be swept away and who knows if you will like where you end up.

That is my Mission: to highlight the impact of some of the many changes in our lives, to make the issues clear, and to ask some questions.  My purpose is to start a discussion so that we can all share ideas and perspectives.  We all hope to build a better future. Let’s create the future we want instead of letting it shape who we become.

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1. Hey Gottlieb!

Let me begin with a hypothetical:

It’s sometime around 1885.   You are about to attend a meeting with Gottlieb Daimler and a few of his buddies. He is the guy who constructed what is generally recognized as the prototype of the modern, gas-powered, internal combustion engine.

Let’s get all of those innovators together and brainstorm about the long-term consequences of their new product.  Do they have any idea of the effect it could have?  Is there anything they might do differently if they could see how the world looks today?

The invention of the internal combustion engine was the beginning of one of the great technological transformations of the world. That technology changed the world dramatically in ways that we take for granted today.  Almost all of the those changes are seen as “progress,” but many of the secondary consequences are a bit troubling. 

Here are a few of the obvious changes: 

— There has been a great reduction in the need for backbreaking human and animal labor.  

— The improvement in the transportation of people and goods has totally transformed how people live, work, and relate.  

— People are now spread across the world and still get to wherever they need to go, rapidly and easily.  We have cars, trains, planes, buses, trucks, and boats. 

— We have billions of miles of paved roads to help us get places.  We can live in suburbs or exurbs and still work in cities.

— Internal combustion engines now do our farming, build our buildings, pave our roads, fight our wars and blow our leaves away. 

— There is no part of our lives that has not not been affected, and in may ways made much easier.

Of course, there have been some unintended consequences:

— The burning of fossil fuel has been a major contributor to changing the atmosphere and heating our planet. There is now the possibility that it will cause great harm to many people.

— Easy, rapid travel and big machines have allowed people to live in climates and environments such as deserts, jungles  and mountain tops in a way that has destroyed a great deal of the natural balance between the flora and fauna of our planet,  

— There has been an unmeasurable amount of corruption and a great many wars fought to insure access to the gas and oil needed to run these internal combustion engines.  Many of the poorest and most oppressive countries in the world have become unbelievably rich due to having vast deposits of oil and gas.

— Wars have been fought involving the entire planet, resulting in the deaths of millions of people, mostly due to the more destructive power of the planes, battleships and tanks that have been powered by internal combustion engines.  

No one would think to place the blame for the destruction, corruption and pollution on  the people who designed and built those early engines. They had no way of even imagining what was gong to transpire in fifty, or a hundred years after their spark-plugs began to ignite the fuel in those cylinders.  They were really just trying to find something that was stronger, easier to care for, and more dependable than a horse or an ox. 

But perhaps, if there was a way of trying to consider the long-term possibilities, some small revision may have been made the could have kept many of the strengths while avoiding many of the difficulties.  A man named J. J. Étienne Lenoir tried, in 1858  to make an engine using hydrogen as fuel.  Perhaps we should have stuck with that.

Today, we are in the early stages of many such transformational technological creations. Due to the interactions of science, technology, entrepreneurship, and rapid communications, many of these new creations are appearing at once.   We are developing digital technology, nano-technology, and quantum technology.  We are making amazing advances in genetics, engineering, medicine , brain science, robotics, virtual reality, and human/machine combinations. We are working on new, clean sources of energy that will be necessary to keep all these things operating   We are also seeing huge migrations of people who are blending together to create new communities. This is leading to large shifts in the values, expectations and behaviors of everyone, all over the world.

We have the opportunity to use many of these advances in communications and technology to anticipate, in ways that no one possibly could have back in 1885, what the consequences of all of these changes could possibly be. Since we are at such an early stage in so many of these advances we should try to use our new powers of analysis and prediction to help us make choices of what we want to achieve and how we want to use it?  

How can each of us determine which parts of this new world we want in our lives?  We have learned that we cannot depend on governments or corporations or any institutions to be watching out for our best interests. We have to be able to watch over them. 

There will be scientific studies, algorithms and protocols to direct us, but we need to be sophisticated enough to understand them and know what they are designed to do. The hope for the future is that we will gain more freedom and prosperity.  These changes will affect our lives and the lives of future generations, Now is the time to choose, and we need to choose as wisely as possible.

That is why I am writing this series of essays.  They will contain descriptions of many of aspects of our lives which are rapidly changing.  At the end of each section will be questions 

i hope you ask yourself, and discuss with your family and friends. I hope you will add your comments here.  It should help you decide, as much as possible, which of all of the new possibilities you want in your life, and which ones would lead you away from the kind of life you hope for. I hope you will pose your own questions.  The more people who are involved, the more successful we will be. We should all be part of the process of making the new world a better place to live in, and one in which we can all live there together, in peace, with freedom, prosperity, health and happiness.

Questions:

1.   How much time do you spend on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Linked-In, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube,Tumblr, Instagram, etc)?

Do you control it, or does it control you?

Are you getting what you want more than you are bothered?

How many apps do you have to help manage your other apps?

Can you stay away?  FOMO?

2.   If you are experiencing some strange physical symptoms, would you rather have your diagnosis be determined by a your personal doctor? a Watson computer? or a combination of the two?

Which would your doctor prefer?

How old is your doctor?

3.  How much different will our lives be in 2045, the year I turn 100? There are many predictions you can look at: Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, Michael Bess, Steven Kotler, many VC people, as well as Mad Max. Many others such as sci-fi writers or corporate think tanks.

What are some of the things we do now that will amaze people in 2045?

That we:

— Let humans drive cars and fly planes?

— Eat food that comes directly out of the ground or the ocean?

— Work more than fifteen hours a week?

All of these questions, and many more will be discussed in the weeks ahead.

Please join me by pushing the green heart and adding a comment in the discussion.