Skip to main content

The Last Generation


If you are over 50, you are probably among the last people on earth where you will complete your life in a traditional way.  Namely,... You were born, grew up, matured, reproduced, grow old and then pass away, without the assistance or hinderance of massive data about you, nor excessive intrusion into your life. 
If you’re younger, you’ve been fully tracked.  By the time you retire, there will be so much information about you online and for sale, that just about anyone with a couple of bucks can purchase your life story in data.  AI (Artificial Intelligence) will project accurately your future medical problems as you age. Your financial condition will be known even sooner. Your credit history will cover decades. All your jobs and performance ratings will be available. Your complete family and their records will be correlated as well into the giant record, which will be you.  
In future, you may see the courts order an AI monitor to assist with your finances, diet, and exercise in retirement. Such monitors may insist on doctor visits, sleep regimes, or limit sedentary activity. 

On the other hand, AI may establish the retired are nothing more than an expensive luxury. This can be achieved only a matter of switching on the “optimization” option. The cost of medicare in FY 2018 was $582 billion, 14% of the national budget. In 2018, the cost of Social Security benefits to 42 million retirees was $988 billion*. Retirees cost the United States $1.52 trillion.  A lot of money the impersonal AI might tell us for unproductive, useless, citizens.
For good or bad, governments around the world are becoming more involved in their citizens’ lives. When it’s for your own good, as will be argued, there may be no stopping point to their help (i.e. intrusion). 

*https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/payment.cgi

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

UNCERTAINTY IS CERTAIN

  Uncertainty is Certain G. Donald Allen 12/12/2024 1.       Introduction . This short essay is about uncertainty in people from both secular and nonsecular viewpoints. One point that will emerge is that randomly based uncertainty can be a driver for religious structure. Many groups facing uncertainty about their future are deeply religious or rely on faith as a source of comfort, resilience, and guidance. The intersection of uncertainty and religiosity often stems from the human need to find meaning, hope, and stability in the face of unpredictable or challenging circumstances. We first take up the connections of uncertainty to religion for the first real profession, farming, noting that hunting has many similar uncertainties. Below are groups that commonly lean on religious beliefs amidst uncertainty.   This short essay is a follow-up to a previous piece on certainty (https://used-ideas.blogspot.com/2024/12/certainty-is-also-emotion.html). U...

Where is AI (Artificial Intelligence) Going?

  How to view Artificial Intelligence (AI).  Imagine you go to the store to buy a TV, but all they have are 1950s models, black and white, circular screens, picture rolls, and picture imperfect, no remote. You’d say no thanks. Back in the day, they sold wildly. The TV was a must-have for everyone with $250 to spend* (about $3000 today). Compared to where AI is today, this is more or less where TVs were 70 years ago. In only a few decades AI will be advanced beyond comprehension, just like TVs today are from the 50s viewpoint. Just like we could not imagine where the video concept was going back then, we cannot really imagine where AI is going. Buckle up. But it will be spectacular.    *Back then minimum wage was $0.75/hr. Thus, a TV cost more than eight weeks' wages. ------------------------- 

Human Simulation is Possible - by Humans

  Human Simulation: Agent-Based Modeling and the Computational Case for Our Reality   1.       Introduction In the essay, we introduce the notion that humanity could be a deliberate simulation based on an extremely simple single-celled organism, hardly anything more complex than that. This will allow an (apparently) new interpretation of the notion that humanity is simulated, but that there is no master engineer at a massive number of dials and switches, responsible for every twist and turn of our universe and lives. We begin with the notion that the universe exists and operates under its own laws. So, given the Earth [2] , when and where life first began, it was infused with a living agent, self-actualized, reproductive, and with other basic rules for its operations, interactions, and much of what single-celled organisms do today. The idea from this occurred some years back when writing code in ActionScript (formerly Flash), I was able to create...