A Future on Cloud Nine

How will we remember these days of the Pandemic in years to come? Will we talk about it nostalgically as a time when the whole world decided to take a break from their usual routine to rethink their lives?

Or will be soon forgotten when the world goes back to normal where everyone is preoccupied with their cellphones and their social media feuds? Our world has become so noisy: information are bombarding our minds at an unprecendented rate. Just notice how many notifications that you receive on your smartphone every minute. They come in rapid succession: Whatsapp messages from your chat groups, emails from your work and personal accounts, news alerts from the sites that you subscribe to, Facebook and Tweeter notifications from the people you follow and the ever-present SMS spams advertising the latest illegal online gambling sites. 

We are swarmed with unnecessary information. How do we make sense of the world? How are our worldviews shaped by this deluge of mostly unsolicited information? I suspect we react to it simply by filtering out things that we dislike and only admitting those that conform to our chosen beliefs.

In this era of so-called 'fake news', we no longer know what is the truth, nor do we care. We simply choose to believe what we believe. And what we believe is what we are comfortable with. If you are left-leaning, then you will only admit liberal and progressive views into your bubble. And quite naturally your circle of friends would be people of the political beliefs, which again determines what kind of messages and alerts you'll be receiving throughout your day.

We are not comfortable standing in the middle, undecided. We need certainty to make sense of the world. Only then do we know how to act or the world would be too confusing for us. The world has no time for nuances; everything is polarized, pixelized and pigeonholed into neat little boxes. Every politician is either idolized as a hero or vilified as a villain. This makes life manageable and entertaining--like a good popcorn movie. 

We want the world to be easy to understand because it's too much hassle to treat everything as nuanced and measured. So we dumb down everything. And in the near future, I suspect we'll outsource all our decision-making to AI because they will do a better job. We'll all carry a better brain in the cloud. What kind of life will that be? Will we all be on cloud nine?  As always, the future is full of surprises. And I look forward to that movie.