As Technology Lifts the Burden of Logic

Few people alive today realize just how different our experience of life is from what we once knew. Today’s objectivity and reason were modes of being only a sliver of us knew in ancient times. As the rays of the Enlightenment spread across the globe, this slowly changed.

Today, logic is so embedded in our lives that we no longer see it. We swim in a primordial sea of virtual intelligence, our material world bending as light refracting in water, to a rising tide of human instruction.

To say we understand our technology investments is true in the short-term, but not in the long-term. Today, we push our ego-driven engines of development faster and faster — primarily in search of economic gains. Over the long-term, we have little understanding of how these investments will stack up. We have no idea what they will become.

What strikes me most about humanity is the ominous uncertainty of our future. Never has Dickens been more right: these are the best and worst of times; we straddle oblivion on one side and Heaven on Earth on the other.

The human psyche is ill-prepared for the changes to come. We aren’t just flat-footed in our economic race with intelligent machinery; we are unaware of how this new intelligence will shift our experience of life. We are about to see fundamental changes in what is expected of our minds. The rapidly rising sea of code will lift the burdens of our logic and objectivity. In that wake, our brains will be left wondering what it means to be Human.

Thankfully, the more things change, the more they remain the same. With our layers of logic moved beyond our organic brains, we are freed to rejoin a Golden Era, a time when our insides led in ways we do not understand today.

Unexpectedly, the gift of machinery, which we give to ourselves, can leave us with a more meaningful mode of Human Being. But only if we make it so.