This writer’s adult life has spanned the birth of the personal computer, invention of internet, and the spread of social media, so the concept of a society drowning in an ocean of detail stands out in near perfect relief.  From the time of the first floppy disc, the public sector has been been drawn down into a quicksand of useless, unprioritized, detail posing in its lumbering bulk as majestic proposal and law.  We now have a Congress that has access to enough data memory to turn out bills of so many pages no healthy human wants to read them, including the law makers themselves.  They vote on assumptions built out of their private piles of detail that machines collect for them like loyal concierges, assign bias, and remember.  AI is the next thing and I won’t be here to see the peak of its development, but the upshot is we now have an external brain that claims to process the piles of detail our relentless computers have stacked up.  If we endow AI the authority of legitimate conclusions drawn from humanly incomprehensible detail, we have finally created a separate universe to “run us”.  How did that happen?  

The only thing it seems not to be in this mega-cache of memory called AI is the experience of being a human being.  To avoid the death sentence of being buried alive in detail we need to preserve and elevate the human experience. This writer writes to warn, and not so much to blame.  People are desperately using  memes, PowerPoints, and stereotype as floatation devices in this new age of overwhelming information, but floatation devices are not navigators so we are lost in an ocean of detail of our own making threatened by spiritual dehydration. 

A Modest Proposal for Good

In case you hadn’t noticed the current national government governs by distraction which is the swirling of disconnected detail into a hypnotic whirlpool and intentionally obfuscating critical facts such as north, south, east and west.  Up and down are also up for grabs. Good in this dizzying situation is bonding and grounding in the truth of the human experience. As humans, in order to trust life enough to love, build, create and commit we need to bond at the beginning of life and stay bonded to a minimal number of trusted friends for the duration. Our minds also demand a grounded orientation, and souls require a focused vocation anchored in truth. The initial writers of the Declaration of Independence as well as the US Constitution understood the power of grounding, bonding and ‘self evident truths’.  To return to our democracy we must once again bond and ground in the faith and tradition that launched this imperfect experiment in governance.  That would be good.  Expect more on grounding from this Project in the next posts.