Imagining the Future With Hope
By Kyle David Reavis
Perhaps it's my own defense from fully taking in the bleakness of our current situation, but I find myself often thinking towards the future at this time. I wonder what our society will look like when all is said and done. I imagine remote work will be normalized going forward, which is a silver lining for those facing accessibility issues. I also can imagine two very different scenarios unfolding when the order to shelter in place is lifted: the camp that will want to go out every night and socialize their newly-freed hearts out vs. the camp that will refuse to do so until the proverbial canaries in the coal mines live to tell the tale. There's also the lingering question of when this would be, and the ethical implications of this decision. This is again a divisive topic that can often result in two schools of thought. It seems like the well-being of the economy must be weighed against public safety in a macabre balancing act. Keep in mind that the economy is more than just a theoretical concept and rising unemployment comes with a human toll as well.
As many have stated before, it really is a lose-lose situation no matter how one looks at it. It really does seem like something straight out of a movie, as many have observed before me. If my experience reading science fiction somehow unlocks the secrets of time travel for me, I'm sure if I went back in time to inform my past self of the current situation, he'd have a hard time believing that society could take an unprecedented pause almost overnight (he'd also probably be confused with the time-traveling and paradoxes that ensue from such a development, but that's beside the point here). Still, unlike good fiction, reality has no internal logic to follow. Perhaps this is why it's easy to use fiction as something of a lens to contextualize and understand the world we live in. With fiction, it's typically easy to recognize when an action is portrayed in a positive or negative light. Morality, as the author perceives it, can be intrinsic to the fictional universe. I don't need to tell you that reality does not come with such a luxury and that the human experience cannot be as tightly crafted as that of the reader's.
Technology only adds to the long-standing questions of where the boundary between right and wrong lies, subjective call that begs the question of who decides the "objective" answer to provide artificial intelligence. We talked a bit today about investigating how it's collectively decided what "normal" is, and by extension what deviance would be, and I'm really looking forward to exploring that in more detail in the following ten weeks!