5 steps for a safer, more predictable world
Original Medium Post HERE
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And 5 steps to make our days less predictable and more fun
Making room for serendipity: visiting the world’s largest teapot on the way from Pittsburgh to Cleveland.
We know the 90 day outlook, but the ten year forecast has become way less reliable.
We know exactly where traffic is and which side roads to take, but we don’t know if humans will have jobs driving taxis, liveries or trucks in five years.
We can refresh an election prediction every minute on predictit or 538, but the prediction remains: the election will be a coin flip.
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Does a predictable world optimize our time?
Do we over-optimize our time, but really under-optimize, because of this?
I look up T (our public transit) or driving travel time and try (not always successfully) to leave with enough time to be on time. Because I look for the optimized route and then generally take it, exploration and serendipity are not as common in my travels as they once were.
At transit stops, I keep refreshing to see if the optimized route has changed. When on transit, I check email. When driving, I tell my bluetoothed phone to either play a podcast or make needed phone calls.
Could this be why we all are so busy: that with technology, we always can be busy?
By optimizing for these “productive” things, where are we underoptimizing?
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How do algorithms change us?
As each moment of our lives becomes more predictable, are we becoming more predictable? More boring?
Algorithms tell us what we want to type next in emails, what videos we want to watch, what content we want to read, and of course, what we want to buy. How are algorithms changing how we structure our sentences, what we experience, who we are?
It doesn’t just change us directly. Social media and content curation tap into our primitive need for validation: to increase likes, engagement, and shares. We change what we produce — consciously and unconsciously — to try to game algorithms and win validation and status.
Of course, we’ve always been shaped by our social context. Algorithms are just more omnipresent. Engagement with them is more constant.
Where the New York Times print edition would have been able to collect overall paper sales data, the electronic version lets them know exactly how many people click, and stay for how long, and engage, with each story. Their writers know it too. Where we used to show a few friends a few photos and they would politely smile, now we know exactly how many people engage in exactly which ways with Instagram posts.
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How is unpredictability changing us?
On the other hand, humans are creating more unknowns and change than we have seen for most of human history. We also know about more those unknowns.
We are speeding climate change and mass extinctions. Elements of new technologies, like AI, have been adopted at a much faster pace than in previous waves of technological adoption — as shown below.
And
Scientists are publishing a lot of science, including some unpredictable, existential stuff. We keep learning new ways homo sapiens could go extinct — like cosmic rays, supervolcano eruptions, or yet another new Marvel Superhero losing to yet another new archvillain.
How could this uncertainty not help the global spread of authoritarianism? People want someone to tell them everything will be OK.
But authoritarianism isn’t the answer. Telling people everything will be OK doesn’t make it so.
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What do we do?
Making daily life less predictable
We can bring some more fun and spontaneity back. We can strengthen relationships by welcoming serendipity and unpredictability into our lives. A few ideas (some of which, I confess, scare me a little):
· Taking a new route to school, work, or a meeting without using GPS
· Moving our kids away from screens toward a play-based childhood
· Rebelling against autofilled emails. Intentionally using different words
· Going to a local restaurant without checking any online reviews
· Going to a concert from a band we don’t know without researching any reviews or listening to any of their music beforehand
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Making the world more predictable
The change and uncertainty in the world might feel a little less scary when we take the actions we can to respond — and also when we manage the info we take in. There is increased unpredictability in some areas (like climate), but more predictability in others (crime has decreased a lot in much of the US over the past thirty years). A few ideas:
· Self-assessing: is our level of news checking helpful or scary? Consider uninstalling news apps and other steps to modulate news intake
· Exercising, meditating, praying to manage stress and increase joy
· Reducing our carbon footprints
· Building trust. Finding less pessimistic explanations for others’ actions. Trust in many institutions — like the press, many levels of government, and the nonprofit sector, has decreased. When we meet people from those sectors, we can learn these humans have good intentions. We can trust while recognizing people are imperfect.
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Stay joyful East Boston!
Please share, subscribe, and join our movement by emailing me or supporting East Boston Social Centers. Look out each week for our posts about boosting joy the only way we can: in community.
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