Can You Be Too Smart For Your Own Britches?

LinkedIn is a business networking platform. So, maybe you are reading this at work or you are at least thinking about work. Here is a friendly alert for you today. Everything isn't as it appears.

If life continues as it has for thousands of years (not a guarantee), I believe people might look back at this time as the beginning of the true confusion.?

Photos of people that don’t exist (like the photo included with this article - it's made up using Elon Musks' Grok app.

Video of people who are not real people.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence. What is the value of something if the result is confusing?

A number of years ago, I read an article about people in the Middle East and how they see the United States as the place that can create these fake images, like movies and TV. They literally see us as fake and dangerous. At no point in these articles did they talk about us as a people. For them, we are people who make up lies.?

Hollywood is what they thought of us. And, let’s be honest, Hollywood can produce some doozies.

But let’s get back to being too smart for your britches.

Consider that recent articles have included a theme called “Man Will Be Able To Live Forever Soon.” By the way, these articles all state that living forever is a kind of immortality.

But what are they actually talking about?

According to the all-knowing (wink) Wikipedia, “Immortality is the concept of eternal life.”

There it is. Man is back in the Garden Of Eden looking at the forbidden fruit. However, just like man, our concept of being able to become immortal through our own powers looks like this: To become immortal according to these recent articles, we will replicate someone who used to be alive through the use of their social media and real life entrail. Uh. That isn’t immortality.

That’s a copy of something. It's like a complex digital photo really.

That's not life.

If immortality starts with your death and you stay dead, that isn’t immortality, is it? That’s a museum piece or a carnival trick. “Here is Uncle Ted.” No, “Here is a visit with a virtual version of Uncle Ted, who is dead.”

We might would be better off sticking to what we know. Humans are frail herds of people who are easily swayed by noise and who gossip and fall prey to their own weakness. We may want to extend lives forever, but we are not God.

Human nature remains the same: Imperfect, flawed, selfish with a high potential for grabbing a headline and having the attention span of a goldfish. And now we are back to the current ongoing challenges around social media and the massive variety of opinion “out there.”

You enter the world alone and naked and that is how we leave. Been that way almost forever (for humans). We don’t know the future, we can’t predict things well and we are subject to greed, fear and folly.

Your life is your turn. Be careful with it.

No matter what you do for work or what your domestic situation, you and I are both wise when we consider what we don't know and we spend more time thinking before acting. And - yes - that includes what you see in social media.

When you are young, you think you know a lot. As you age, if you are truly smart, you realize you know less than you thought. That's wisdom.

So what is the bottom-line? Be careful out there, my friend. The world is complex and we are not God. We never will be.

-- Loyd Ford