Algos

Concept

It sounds like a cliché to speak of the importance (and difficulty) of truly getting to know ourselves. But both are true. Getting to know yourself requires sustained work but, I believe, it is crucial to a sense of fulfillment. The closer you are to your deep rooted truisms, the more aligned your life and actions will be with a life that truly matches you. While, on the contrary, if you are unfamiliar with your own idiosyncrasies, you can’t be truly authentic. Even when you think you are being yourself, it may just be a construction based on outside influences. Living a life without self knowledge leads to confusion and misery.  Truly knowing yourself is the essence of it all: the essence of finding love, the essence of your career, the essence of your purpose, the essence of all your relationships, the essence of your emotions, the essence of your life and, it is about to become even more indispensable. 

Algorithms, as they exist now, are here to get to know us. They want to customize our virtual interactions, serve us with corresponding interests, address us with suitable ads, show us the right content, manipulate us to the best of their ability into consumption, etc. They already have a big say in the influences we are exposed to daily, the brands that represent our personas, the people we date or get to know, the books we choose, the videos we watch, the people whose lives we are exposed to (and thus compare ours to) or whose opinions we absorb, to name just a few. These algorithms are already molding us beyond what we can perceive.

There’s a morbid irony to this, the less self-aware you are, the more you allow the algorithms to define you without your realization. Most of the world’s population fits this category. The question then becomes to what extent is the creation of culture truly up to us? To what extent is a democracy truly a democracy?

These algorithms get under our skin and into our subconscious by processing various inputs such as our geolocation at all times, our past purchases, our zip codes, our preferences, the apps we engage with, our social media behavior, the movies we watch and don’t watch, etc. And, soon enough more data is going to be accessed. Algorithms will be able to track the direction of your eyes, what you look at, what engages you, your attention span, maybe they’ll have access to biometrical data too—your health condition. Perhaps algorithms will soon be able to read our facial expressions and emotional reactions in ways more precise than what we are able to detect in ourselves. With a cross over analysis of your reactions and your biometrical information (like dopamine release or cortisol levels) new data would be created, like your emotions towards certain things, information you might not be conscious of.

In other words, if you don’t have a tight relationship with yourself, you risk losing your genuine identity. Algorithms will know you better than you know yourself and you will therefore become perfectly moldable human clay.

So, the importance of our future doesn’t depend on the technical skills of future generations. Most academic fields will be pointless in the future as human skills will be easily replaced by robotics. The skills we should be cultivating are philosophy, psychology, art appreciation, consciousness, emotional intelligence, etc. The approach we each take might also be different. Some might arrive by reading, others by writing or journaling, others by using creative outlets, others through conversation and active listening, others by pursuing the practice of meditation. But, most, I suspect, will heighten self-awareness through a combination of these.

It is not a gloomy future that I’m presenting to you. It is, though, an uncertain one. In my opinion, it has the potential to be magnificent. Imagine having equal access to great health care, isn’t that the underlying needed potential to achieving anything? Health? I think we will not be needed for mechanical work, and in consequence, humans will be able to re-focus on the deepest meanings of life. Sounds glittering to me. It might sound dreadful to the ones lost in shallowness, and that’s why the paradigm has to change in advance. The focus within has to be sown. We don’t make a better world by huge actions, we make a better world by being the best version of ourselves we can, and sharing it.