Day 366: Where Do We Go from Here?
Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash
Technically, 366 days. They have definitely brought disruption.
Small ones, like law students innovating using the entrepreneurship mindset and method.
Bigger ones, like the disintegration of communities at WVU and the accelerating erosion of the administrative state.
Quantum Leap
But the biggest one — the one bigger than all disruptions in human history combined — lies just ahead of us.
In his brand new book, The Singularity Is Nearer, AI technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil promises that, if you’re under about 80 and in reasonably good health, this will happen to you.
And there’s reason to believe this is gonna be phenomenal.
Kurzweil writes,
Remember what happened two million years ago, the last time we gained more neocortex? We became humans. When we can access additional neocortex in the cloud, the leap in cognitive abstraction will likely be similar. The result will be the invention of means of expression vastly richer than the art and technology that’s possible today — more profound than we can currently imagine.
Other prognosticators tend to portray AI in man-versus-machine terms. While not denying the profound challenges AI will pose for humanity, Kurzweil offers a different, and profoundly optimistic, vision: AI as the quantum leap from humanity to higher consciousness.
Disruption, Day Zero
Today ends my daily blogging project. In addition to cataloguing in real time the changes I’ve seen around me, I’ve tried to share the techniques — most of them substantiated in the positive psychology literature — that help me keep my head on level with all this change swirling around. Hopefully some of those tips work for you too.
I won’t blog daily after today, because I want to turn my creative energy toward channeling these observations into academic articles about the coming tsunami of transformation for the legal system.
But I’ll still share updates and insights as I think things through, either here or on my Substack publication, How We Got Here. You can sign up to receive those updates by email at this link or in the footer at the bottom of this page.
Stay disruptive, my friend.
Alison