Back in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, I was a poor working stiff. But I could go out and find places to spend money, when I had it. Bank branches were all over the place, gas stations on almost every corner. Lots of shops, small and large, dotted city streets. The shopping malls were full of stores, and people too, on the weekends. Even on slow days, our shopping economy seemed to be thriving.
Now, older and retired, I have a little extra money, and a lot of extra time these days. But as I go out and about in town, there are not many places around any more. Once thriving restaurants are closed up. Storefronts are turned into something else. Downtown offices are being converted to housing units. Shopping malls are empty, and being re-purposed. The visual perception I’m getting is that our economy, and in some ways our society, is moribund, stalled out, withering away. It is a frightening and depressing perception.
Sure, we have a whole other economy running hot – the Internet/online/shipping economy. Storefronts are virtual-visual. Goods are loaded from warehouses to trucks, to end up at our doorstep. We can buy more things than ever – but just not “outdoors” or in our town. We walk around a local town and our five senses tell us it is dying or dead. We know better – our homes are full of stuff, and we put more stuff into storage units when we run out of room.
It seems strange, but we live in two worlds in a shopping sense. Granted, there are still places we can shop in person, but they are insignificant compared to what was around in, say, 1978. It is as though most of us are walking around with their awareness in two worlds at once. The virtual cloud-world on their phones and computers, and the real, physical world. Trouble can arise when we don’t make a clean shift from one to the other worlds.
Sometimes, I think that drivers rushing around, cutting in front of people, hurrying up to red lights, etc, are still living in the Internet world, where everything one desires is a mouse-click away. But when you are driving a vehicle, things take time – you have to wait for all the other people out there in the physical world to make their decisions and operate their vehicles. Things on the highway are not a mouse click away, but must be dealt with in a real, physical sense. We have created a virtual way of existing and are now victims of convenience, in a sense.
If these AI programs begin to take over the running of physical systems, like traffic lights, utility delivering and so forth, we could be further victimized by our own clever contrivances, who will have taken on a life of their own. May our new overlords have mercy on us and our slow, fleshy ways. Maybe they will even leave us a small store to shop at in the next century, when we can unplug from the giant matrix of world machinery. Our offspring will get to see if that ever comes about. Good luck out there.
