Leaving Anhedonia

7 Takeaways About My College Students:

 

1. Most of my students are decent people trying to play by society’s rules so they can climb the economic ladder.
2. Most of my students show up to class with a chronic sleep deficit.
3. Most of my students don’t have big chunks of time to flourish in college so much as grit their teeth and squeeze in college with the rest of their frantic schedule.
4. Most of my students live in a state of constant financial insecurity.
5. Most of my students are playing academic catch-up to make up for wasted time in high school.
6. The cumulative effect of the above pressure points makes most of my students feel constantly stressed and exhausted, a condition they face with a mix of stoicism and depression. 
7. The state of affairs described above has gotten progressively worse since I started teaching college in the 1980s.

Is the Future a Doomsday Scenario, Or Am I Being Chicken Little?

Chicken Little said, "The Sky Is Falling" and became a symbol of the pessimist who creates self-fulfilling prophecies. On one hand, I don't want to be Chicken Little; on the other hand, I should unleash my angst and not pent it up, right?

Let us proceed then. Here are my concerns about the future, especially as the future pertains to technology:

Loss Free Will: When AI does the job better than we do in terms of making decisions for career, entertainment, going to college, dating, romance, marriage, health, diet, etc. We will lose our free will.

 

Loss of Individual Relevance: When AI creates cognitive machines that can replace highly trained people resulting in mass unemployment, will we lose our relevance as individuals?

 

Loss of Truth and Shared Reality: When trolls who have learned to weaponize misinformation can create false realities that get more traction than the truth so that when we try to counter lies with the truth we feel like we’re shouting in a hurricane.

 

Loss of Civil Discourse and Critical Thinking: When weaponized misinformation takes over as in the case of Anti-Vaxxers, will we just join our political tribes and war against each other with no critical thinking skills or civic discourse?