Let's combine two topics of the weekly WTF from yesterday, with self-driving cars and celebrity abusers taking the fore, as both are going to increase in frequency and they are perhaps surprisingly for some, in my opinion, linked.
What isn't surprising is that everything is linked in someway and nothing lives in a vacuum. The conditions required for one facet of life is dependent on a number of conditions throughout others, so it is like the formation of a weather pattern that creates rain, or clear skies. I believe that in the past the patterns of society were harder to predict because we were more decentralised in information and behaviour, but with the introduction of the internet, we are becoming far more homogenous in our source material, plus we are having particular stories pushed to us intentionally which create more predictable conditions. This is great for business, terrible for skill development, creativity and diversity of thought.
This is a far larger topic.
However, if we narrow it down to self-driving cars, we can see the competitive cognitive artefacts they develop that limit our skills. Even before self-driving, driver aids have been around for decades that have reduced our abilities. Even automatic transmissions meant that people who could previously drive manual lost some of their ability, and many never learned how to drive stick at all. The "never learned" is incredibly important for this discussion.
For example, a person I know who was young bought a new car some time ago and on the first day he had it, he reversed it into a pole and damaged the rear. He didn't understand why this happened, because the car didn't beep to warn him. However, he had bought a new car without the sensor options (which are standard now), which meant - it would never beep. But, he had never learned to reverse in a car that didn't have sensors, so he didn't even bother checking his mirrors, turning his head, ensuring that it was safe, because he had none of that experience. He failed to learn what was standard for a driver not too long prior. Now, most drivers have forgotten or never learned how to reverse their care without sensors.
Very soon, no matter the conditions, self-driving car technology will be better than average drivers and increasingly so. The technology will mean that most people will never learn how to drive a car at all and it will only be when the systems fail that the cars crash, because even if they put the control over to the driver, the driver will be worse than the failing systems, as they will either be so far out of practice they will be useless, or never learned how to drive in challenging conditions.
Competitive cognitive artefacts are tools that reduce our human abilities, like a calculator. There is nothing wrong with using them, but when they are used so we never even learn the foundational skills, we are unable to build the structures in our brain to understand and deal with the complex problems we will face. And this is where the celebrity abusers come into the picture of this discussion, and it won't only be celebrities.
Most of us live a lot of our experience through a screen these days and the information we get is a severely stunted version of reality, especially in some aspects like social interaction. This means that our real-world social skills degrade the more we use them, which affects our abilities to interact with others. We get worse at reading things like social cues, micro expressions, tones of voice and body language. And there are now almost two generations who have had their abilities influenced by screens so that many have relatively no experience with physical social interaction, learning their skills through a screen. A screen where faces are large, micro expressions and body language hidden, filters applied, sounds amplified or cleaned - and the list goes on.
This is not reality.
So, when I have talked about celebrity abuse it is often cited that the victims are young and inexperienced. The thing is, the age doesn't matter for experience. Experience is the thing that matters. Youth is connected to inexperience because of an assumption that as we get older we are exposed to more conditions and circumstances that we learn from. But, that is no longer the case when living the world digitally, which means that in some aspects we mature far more slowly, if at all.
This creates the conditions for naivety, which means lacking experience and wisdom.
Young people used to get themselves into trouble because of a lack of experience, but as people no longer develop real-world skills as they live through their phone screens, their experience and therefore wisdom is developing far slower, which means they are more open to scam and abuse later into life. And while it might be somewhat understandable that some people get "starstruck" by celebrity, the lack of social skill at all levels of society will mean the conditions are ripe for abusers and scammers to take advantage.
As our abilities reduce, we are less capable to solve the problems that we face, including reading the conditions of our environment, including the faces of the people we interact with. We can't tell if they are lying, we do not notice the curve of a lip, a cruelty in their eyes, or that tone in their voice. We become naïve through inexperience, and gullible, yet simultaneously feel and are confident that we are correct, that we know what we are doing, and we are good judges of character, even though our representative models are all fictional, all manipulated, all unreal. Combine this with a focus on the me which translates into entitlement to get what "I want" which means being selfish and greedy, and it is a recipe for social disaster.
And we are seeing this play out in multiple areas today, and it isn't only in celebrity abuse. Some talk of a "rape culture" at universities which I disagree with somewhat, but the conditions are there. Naïve, selfish, greedy people who are both on the side of abuser and victim, which leads to opportunity and performance. People confidently putting themselves in bad situations, believing that they are entitled to be looked after by people who are looking to take advantage of the same conditions to meet their own selfish, greedy and entitled beliefs.
Now, this is just a very narrow example of the implications of learning poorly through screens and not learning the skills necessary for life, but there are many others. As said, we will get less capable to solve the problems we face as a species. We will get less capable at building valuable relationships. We will become lonelier, more depressed, more isolated. We will build more difficult conditions, put ourselves into those situations, and be victimised. And then, we will believe that the problem isn't us, we are just victims of circumstance, when the circumstances are only possible because of us as individuals, and a collective.
When we lose our human abilities.
We lose our humanity.
Making what we do, inhumane.
Taraz
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