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If You’re Going to San Francisco
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Living in the Information Age comes with a few modern day hazards.
With such an endless plethora of information available, it is easy to assume the easiest answers, within arms reach are the right ones. We want the first result of a single Google search to be the definitive answer on whatever has piqued our curiosity.
The limits of human curiosity, and thereby, creativity, are infinite, which is why AI, however advanced- even self-aware- will never be able to predict and therefore reproduce.
One moment, it’s the poetry of Peter Blue Cloud and Gregory Corso; the next, it’s how the yen is currently holding up against the dollar (not well) and the plight of women in post-Taliban Afghanistan (worse still).
The Information Age, in addition to creating a great many instant “experts” on any number of intensely complicated topics from virology to Middle Eastern geo-politics of the late 19th and 20th century, has other shortcomings.
Namely, media bombardment isn’t doing much for out attention spans, which were admittedly never that great to begin with. A mountain of information crashes down on us each day in the form of headlines, news reports, status updates, trends, pings, dings, tags and notifications from every app imaginable.