Sometimes I honestly think we are living in a massive life simulation. That our ancestors actually managed to upload humanity into a computer and we are all figments of this experiment. Humanity’s evolution is playing out in a box somewhere — the culmination of all our technical achievements. The great humanity video game.
When the world gets into a rhythm, when we all get too comfortable with our plans and our processes our dungeon master injects a little virus to keep us all grounded. This virus could come as a drought, a dictator, discovering oil, aging, the Kardashians or COVID-19. Just small experiments to see how accurate the simulated humans are represented inside the sim. How do we react? How does the system bend.
When we are stuck on a problem or aren’t evolving our thinking fast enough, our impatient AI overlord invents a mind like no other to move us forward. Think of world outliers like Genghis Khan, Leonardo DaVinci, Elvis Presley, Rosa Parks and Elon Musk. These humans aren’t like the others. They don’t think like us, they don’t act like us, they were added to our timeline just to simply move us forward.
Then there are the future Darwin Award winners. They are injected into the system to warn us of our human limits. They’ll argue that the world in lockdown is a conspiracy and then drink lysol. How dumb does this AI think we are? Those people can’t exist in real life. We MUST be in a sim.
The experiments that are happening today are testing us in ways that we’ve only theorized.
Our environment has been weeping for two generations with the earth asking us to slow down, to consider our impact on the only inhabitable planet many generations will know. Now we get a chance to see what happens when we take most cars and planes out of circulation.
The evolution of business means we’ve been stuck inside of offices with more and more people jammed in next to us. Then, one day, all of our offices were closed. We’ve been talking about paperless and office-less work for years and here we are. No more talking about it, we have to adjust.
The family unit has taken a beating over the last 100 years. The way we are living in a COVID-19 world is how families lived before offices were invented. The family unit has broken down because of the way we operate our daily routine. How many of us are deeply appreciative that we get to spend this time reacquainting ourselves with our partners and kids?
The age of being a celebrity as a career is over. No longer can we accept that people famous for being famous is a thing. Our eyes have been opened to the fact that actors are not great at real life — nor does their life resemble any of ours.
Perhaps the greatest experiment is how humanity’s resilience has been tested by this sim over the last 100 days. It is in the way we show compassion to our neighbours and essential workers that makes me realize that we can’t blame a computer for where we are as a race. The human spirit is a connection among us all, not a trait that can be programmed and we’ve seen it shine in the most unlikely time.
We are one people on one planet that had better get better at being human.