Should We Be Dragons?
I don't know where writing comes from. It seems like magic to me. Sometimes it flows, and sometimes it takes great effort. Like a good conversation. Like chemistry between two people. Like that presentation you gave that was so good it made you uppercut the air (and you didn't know you had it in you to uppercut the air). So I don't know where this question or this article is coming from. I'm just writing.
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When I was a boy, I used to look up at the stars in the sky and look down at the stars in my astronomy books and wonder. I would wonder what might be beyond in the great "out there". I would wonder how we knew enough about the universe to write books about it. I was learning about inclined planes and struggling to memorize the insides of a mitochondrion, but somehow we were sure there were nine planets (later, eight) in our solar system and we knew how far away Betelgeuse was. Bill Clinton was president. iPhones didn't exist. "You've got mail" was rare and exciting to hear. I called my best friend every day from a phone on the wall.
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Some time ago, if you wanted a map of the world, you had three options: consult a globe, visit a library to see a giant laminated cartograph, or open a geography textbook to the inside of the back cover. To zoom, you would bring your nose closer to the globe or page, and to pinch you would simply move your head away from it. Now we carry the world in our pockets. The world can be found in an app. And because of that, we've stopped talking to each other. Not always, you see, so it's hard to notice. It's hard to notice because it has crept in as newly normal. People bump into each other on sidewalks because their heads are buried in their phones, uttering abridged sorries without looking up long enough to share at least a glance. There is no embarrassment. Families of four sit in the beautiful brightness of day outside shopping centers, silently sifting through their virtual lives. Couples well into their sixties who might offer us hope crush it by checking Facebook as they eat their lunch together, and apart. None of us is immune. I imagine this is true almost anywhere on a map. The world is changing. The world is changing fast.
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I remember in the summer of twenty years ago running after an actual ice cream truck and hyperventilating in excitement at the impending rush of joy and sprinkles and soft-serve that would soon be dripping down my arm. To this day, when I'm lucky enough to hear or see a Mister Softee ice cream truck, an overwhelming Pavlovian happiness descends upon me like the dopamine of a thousand Likes hitting me all at once. Last weekend, I saw three girls and their mom out for ice cream. The four sat in silence, with no delight on their faces, taking pictures of their double scoop waffle cones, the mercilessness of their digital obligations taking over the moment, and it felt to me that their iPhones had trivialized and stolen a precious memory from them. But twenty years ago I could not imagine taking a photo of my summer from a phone. Maybe twenty years from now that family will be able to reconstruct that moment in virtual reality from the collection of pictures they took last weekend. Twenty summers from now, the sprinkles and ice cream will be printed. Mister Softee will be a robot. The ice cream trucks will drive themselves. I'll still line up for some, but my memory will still be better.
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Recently, a colleague hit her knee on a conference room table and responded with a few choice words for it, in Italian. I'd spent the previous week on the language apps Memrise and Rosetta Stone and instinctively uttered, "Mi dispiace!". In that instance, I felt triumphant, like the character Dev in the second season of Master of None, happy to have used my learnings to say, "I'm sorry" in real life. My colleague, now rubbing her knee ferociously, replied, "Yea, me too, mi dispiace!!" How marvelous that I live in a time when I can learn enough Italian in one week to use with a coworker. But we didn't even talk about it. It wasn't amazing. The world is changing so rapidly that we barely notice all the new stuff we can do in it. You can hit a button on your phone right now and something will happen miles away in the real world, and five minutes later you'll have a ride waiting downstairs, or five hours later you'll have a book delivered to your door by the same company whose owner is making rocketships to turn us into a space-faring civilization. Which I actually think is cool. I think it's cool that we carry in our pockets more power than was in the first computer that took us to the moon. I think it's cool that someone you've never met from Seattle can write this article on LinkedIn at noon and you can comment on it in India (where it's midnight) and his phone alerts him less than one second later on his screen. That's incredible. But it's not amazing.
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Somewhere in the world, a kid who loves Shakespeare and computers is figuring out a way to analyze every one of his plays and sonnets, and she'll create a Shakespeare AI that will write his 38th play. I don't know that this is happening. I just know that this is going to happen because it has to happen because humanity's curiosity cannot be quenched and everything that can possibly be imagined probably will. And when I or you or your kids or their kids see the smash hit that will be this young girl's Shakespeare's 38th play and she wins the Nobel Prize for Automated Literature, I won't be surprised or even wowed. Because when was the last time you were absolutely wowed by an app or a machine or something digital? In an age of reusable, self-landing rockets and totally-plausible talk of 29-minute trips from DC to New York, are you wowed by technology anymore? On the other hand, when was the last time you were absolutely wowed by a person, or by some tiny, seemingly trivial, analog thing, like a letter from an old friend, or a surprise package from a new mentor sending you a book, a t-shirt, a bunch of stickers for his company SomethingNew, and a handwritten note wishing you continued success? The most amazing thing we have is not our inventions or our technologies, not our tools or devices or our buttons or applications or even the things we can make or do. The most amazing thing we have is our humanity.
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Should we be dragons?
Some of you know I have a niece. She's the younger of two. The world that niece has been born into is one in which we can fly and rain fire from the skies. We can fly and rain fire from the skies. We have become dragons. But should we be? Dragons used to be feared. "There be dragons" used to be scribbled on maps, or globes, as a warning. Perhaps the warnings were misguided, because we never did find beasts, but remember that people in boats, as captains and as captives, did perish as humanity sailed on in unchecked exploration. The dragons were us. So as we march forward into our digital future, we should remember that the same power that allows us to explore our limits can and has been used for terrible means and terrible ends. But we get to choose. It's why conversation and connection and inspiration are important as counters to isolation and cynicism. We get to choose how we use our power. Even in the little things, the daily things, the ways we work and interact with one another at our jobs and in our lives. How we go about doing so defines what it means to be a human being. So just because we can code something, or sell something, or create something, doesn't mean we have to - not if what we've coded or sold or created trades away or diminishes our humanity. Not if it turns us into dragons.
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When, billions of years from now, the very last star grows cold, and the very last mitochondrion stops producing energy, and everything ceases to be, I hope we go out eating ice cream. So I hope Jeff Bezos gets his wish, and I hope I get mine too.