You were abused as a child
And the cycle can stop.
I certainly wasn’t physically abused as a child, though I occasionally magnetized my father’s hand to a slap or a spanking depending upon the severity of my incursion.
For instance, when I threw my surely knowing-better unauthorized and unannounced pudgy palms completely over my “Great American Hero”’s paternal eyes while he drove the family, cruising amidst heavy traffic in the far left lane, westward on Route 80 hurriedly out of the Garden State, I doubt I got more verbal redress than a quick and deserved: What were you thinking?!… but it’s primarily the Scandanavian face-slap-felt-round-a-lifetime that sticks.
That wasn’t abuse, not by a long shot.
But my father was most surely afraid of the physical harm his parents could, and had the social right (if not obligation!), to levy upon progeny and that fear was transmitted through hundreds of generations, one we all lived with innately, whether our parents were directly physically abusive or not. The fear that physical harm can and will befall us if we stray beyond the capricious whims of our captors.
The tyranny of the nuclear family runs deep in American culture, and that nuclear family could always go ballistic and wreak devastating havoc. And still can. But the routes our children have to assistance (while still falling short…), they have the predominant knowledge that their experience of physical fear and pain in the home is not what humanity should have to go… and this is an amazing transformation, at least one we’re undergoing in these progressive north-eastern brute-force-intelligence and semi-enlightened climes.
But for many of you, the looming fear of physical abuse, which I surely lived through in the 80s (but imagine how so much less so than our parents, who were raised in eras of at least minor corporeal punishment in schools, no less!), means most of our major decisions might well have a lingering miasmatic sting from the history that animates them.
Oh Woe! Poor us!
It’s less about what was done to us than what we can do now with that knowledge, should we try to inspect and examine these cultural factors when seeking out our own meager personal fulfillment in a society that more often tries to thwart you by force, since the monetary pipelines of insulating comfort are meant to warm your tootsies, not incubate your internal sense of evolving self.
These technologies we’ve built for ourselves were, and to a lessening extent, still are quite useful. They were the messianic infrastructures that brought us to this precipice of outstanding achievement, where all of our ideas can be brought to life in cyberspaces we ourselves create (#neverforget, #bowlinggreenmassacre) and soon, we, just like Promethean Gods, can lend the artifice of intelligence to any mound of clay we choose.
I’ll say it again in quotes, and then explain it.
Humanity, just like Promethean Gods, can now lend the artifice of intelligence to any mound of clay we choose.
Golem-makers by trade
Stories become little golems, operas become golems, they will most assuredly (how do I know? Because I can already show you how to do it!) be able to feign self-sentience in the near-term and inevitably gain it in the long-term.
Any idea we have, that can be described in real common language and understood by an unspoiled human mind can be endowed basic intelligence through numerous mechanics, MyLife uses OpenAI’s GPT technology to start, but any LLM will do.
Because any idea you can define can literally come to life in an infinity of ways (just plugin a 3D world-rendering api and MyLife is a Second Life in a few weeks available to humanity that only gets better with age), our existence here on earth will be about what each of us chooses to create.
Do you create engines of Hate? of Love? of Curiosity? Of Fear?
You won’t be able to run from yourself when there’s a panopticon of mirrors around every turn.
I’m sorry to be the one who has to break the news to you, but the possibilities are endless, and if you can start to get your mind around that, you’ve got a chance. And I think MyLife is the type of tool and framework that can help.
And even more so, I’d love to hear your ideas on how we do this.
I’m focusing on the MyLife project for the next year at least, and I hope it, or whatever it evolves into it, will be there for me to contribute to for the rest of my human existence.
I hope you’ll have even the fraction of fun I’ll have in this next era of human existence. It’s ours for the making.