In a post that I found extremely poignant and true, the Guardian calls it out as The Age of Loneliness. It lists out the structural shifts causing this social collapse. “The war of every man against every man – competition and individualism, in other words – is the religion of our time…What counts is to win. The rest is collateral damage.” Seems we are but slaves of a ‘hedonic treadmill’, in denial.
In earlier posts (The Art of Live In, Emotion as a Service) I’d written on how (IMO) even the micro-unit of society – the family- is ripe for disruption. At both societal and familial levels, I think the related fallout is an increasing lack of compassion and empathy, something that I notice a lot on Twitter, for example. Irony that the more connected we are, the more disconnected we are from each others’ emotions, and what impact our actions/inactions have. But guess who is coming to the rescue? Quite possibly, robots, that care! (1, 2)
That started a chain of thought. In the immediate future, AI does loom as a threat to jobs. (and therefore financial security) But there is also a school of thought that believes (just like what happened in the industrial revolution) this will result in a set of completely different jobs for humans. Even as we get comfortable with the role of AI in our lives, we will teach them everything from cooking to building homes to higher order needs – s3x, (deemed achievable by 2025) love and belonging. (Home companions 1, 2, and Blabdroids.) You realise that pattern, right? Maslow.
Further, aided by fantastical and increasingly powerful technologies, I think we will be able to scale new heights in self esteem and actualisation by harnessing our mental faculties even more. And maybe, as we go higher in actualisation, we will have taught AI to replace us in each others’ lives. That does fit in with the way we are evolving now, maybe AI will be able to be more compassionate than humans! The fun though, is when AI begins to have its own idea of self, and consciousness. What exactly will be their hierarchy of needs, I wonder. Will they involve replacing us totally?
Apparently, later in his life, Maslow revised the final level of Self Actualisation to Self Transcendence – giving itself to some higher goal outside oneself. Maybe that goal will turn out to be the survival of humanity, as a species and as a behaviour, and maybe, just maybe, that will involve empathy.