I am retired now, and the world I grew up in no longer exists.

I find it amusing that gaming consoles built only 20 years ago are now considered coveted nostalgia pieces and cars once had nothing whatsoever to say about the way they were driven. With artificial intelligence and its offshoots now beginning to roil every aspect of our entertainment, education, careers, and daily interactions, I suppose 20 years from today people will look back with helpless yearning at the supposedly simple lives we lead today.

Our technological innovations running back to the dawn of civilization have, of course, inevitably revolved around the two imperatives that have defined our species: improving our ways of killing one another and gaining more material comforts for those days we were not occupied with the grim business of exterminating our neighbors. Unsurprisingly, much of the wondrous technology of the past could be handily repurposed for either slaughter or our own ease. For example, early internal combustion engines could power both mechanized killing machines on our battlefields or those balky and rattly automobiles we took on Sunday drives in the country, and this perverse duality has been true for improvements in technology throughout our human history, which probably is but a mirror of the sometimes thin barrier between the murderer and the healer in each of our own souls.

However, changes that at one time took centuries are today outrunning our ability to absorb them. The inflection point was perhaps around 1945, when atomic weaponry and quantum physics began to push our ever-accelerating arc of development from vacuum tubes and wires to transistors on circuit boards to integrated circuits and, finally, to the ubiquitous silicon chips that are today embedded into every aspect of our daily existences and provide a Harry Potteresque level of magic that we both love for its conveniences and fear for its consequences.

Modern medicine, to look at just one area where technology has changed our world, has spawned, much to our dismay, vast and incomprehensible profit-driven systems that are incentivized to turn every normal variation in human physiognomy and behavior into problems that must be solved with surgery and drugs. 

Today’s medical technology both saves and prolongs lives. However, it also creates unintended physical and psychological side effects that cause untold misery, extends lives with no concern for the patients’ quality of life, and shows a astonishing lack of concern with the problems that might arise from pumping everyone—from the very youngest to the oldest—full of drugs that are that are mind-bogglingly expensive, more and more powerful, and turn our brains and bodies into guinea pigs for the medical-industrial complex. Healthcare spending now consumes over 18% of or annual Gross Domestic Product, a trend that is both financially unsustainable and disconnected from our national health outcomes, which lag behind the rest of the developed world despite the fact that we spend much, much more than other countries on our wellness.

Technological innovations have also greatly improved our ability to communicate with one another. We can now instantaneously reach out to practically every point on our planet. The early Telstar satellites in the early 1960’s brought us the first transatlantic telephone calls and the then-astonishing ability to allow a worldwide audience to watch the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, and this was in itself truly a magical moment.

However, instantaneous mass communications have enabled a terrifyingly powerful mass manipulation that is more sophisticated than the crude, but still frighteningly effective, methods of propaganda seen in the past. 

We today fully understand that the battle for public opinion has become its own disturbing form of warfare—one that is increasingly targeted at civilians—and we can know without a doubt that the kind of mass hysteria generated at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, which turned America and the world into one gigantic prison camp, would have been impossible only a century ago. Think of our comparatively mild responses to the 1917 and 1957 flu epidemics that killed a far higher percentage of the U.S. population before pondering the worldwide panic and insanity engendered by the 24/7 fear mongering beamed to us through our personal devices and televisions, which convinced billions of us across the planet to cower in our homes with two cloth masks glued to our faces and a bottle of hand sanitizer gripped in each of our quivering hands. Mass manipulation and mass hysteria are the evils we must live with today, and those who are determined to control us are pleased with the power granted to them.

We must also recognize that the dark side of our miraculous communication technology is that it is routinely used by governmental and business entities to engage in the surveillance and censorship that are the defining characteristics of our brave new world. Our handy cell phones now track our every movement, contact, and thought while allowing both state and non-state actors to easily erase opinions and ideas they deem dangerous or unacceptable. This surveillance and censorship combines well with the active manipulation of our minds to allow those seeking profit and power to create a new reality divorced from actual facts—and crush those who dare to contradict it.

The amazing new technologies of communications and (let us be honest) individual surveillance have also dramatically changed how we work while fundamentally erasing the boundary between our homes and our workplaces. In a peculiar way, tens of millions of Americans have returned to a form of medieval cottage industry, but instead of weaving or making pottery in our homes, we now clack away at our keyboards and wear our headsets during Zoom meetings, our homes now our places of business as well. This has been a boon to many, but it has also vastly increased our already devastating societal isolation while hollowing out our major cities. It should perhaps not surprise anyone that a record number of Americans committed suicide in 2022, which is certainly related to the extraordinary loneliness so many experienced due to the Covid-19 lockdowns and the work-from-home trend that was entrenched in our lives.

What will our futures bring as new technological miracles continue to transform our lives at an astonishing—and worrying—pace? Will those gleefully predicting the mating of man and machine be proven correct, and our children and grandchildren end up as cyborgs? Will we be microchipped at birth and tracked throughout our lifetimes in much the same manner that pallets of dry goods are tracked through a warehouse today? At what point will our increasing reliance on technology rob us of some essential part of both our autonomy and humanity—or have we already unknowingly crossed this threshold?

The difficult national questions and choices that are surely ahead of us will require a wisdom we must hope we can still muster because, if we choose badly, we could lock ourselves into a future that is more grim than we can possibly imagine.