Waking up and seeing the first light is an everyday experience. The mind has rebooted and the fragmented memory has been put in order to receive new input. A first breath combined with one’s closing of the eyes introduces the beauty of the internal memory filled with distant dreams, but dreams they are, and they are of a real kind. But there’s another option, an option that presents itself as a fully charged blue screen in a small metal box lying next to the body, which removes all the dreams and replaces them with ideas created by an AI in Cyberspace.
These two options present themselves every morning. At first, it might seem like an insignificant choice, but that depends on the looking glass through which we view significance. There’s nothing insignificant about remembering and understanding dreams and then follow them out. Dreams created with breath, dying with breath, while blood is pumping from the heart to the brain.
Personal AI, which on the face of it is the perfect match between thoughts and action, isn’t reality, it’s virtual and inflated with data. The notion that the personal AI is the perfect assistant to support the user with getting what he or she wants by analyzing every single touch on the screen, is connected to the idea that selfhood consists of mutual learning between human and machine by creating the perfect supercharged version of the I. A much more likeable personality.
The pleasant life with a personal AI, feeding the user with choices and products he or she like, may sound like the good life, but is it really? The unfiltered truth is this: the AI, based on the use of the screen with every single touch, have figured out how to keep the user looking at the screen for the purpose of making money as well as creating an even stronger AI to control future choices — not caring about the flaws in character every human being has, as they prefer doing things that feel good, are comfortable, and is virtually safe.
They keep bringing the stuff that feeds the inherent human desire for gratification and inclination to seek pleasure all the time. But there’s something wrong with growing up trying to understand physical life, while the mind and body are being trained for digital consumption. Hence no one is able to say no to the next like, the next video, the next grand slam offer, or the perfect match between the app developers and the thing one desires the most.
Observing how bits and bytes have been flowing through the veins of the users for many years, it’s reasonable to conclude that the laissez faire notion of just letting it continue is like giving in to unhealthy cravings, like the addiction that comes from injecting an addictive substance into the body. Only in this case, the addictive substance is called data, but is equally designed to affect the human brain to want more and more of it.
Physical life is different from virtual life. For most people avoid injecting physical substances into the body. Another way of illustrating it is online gambling: here you easily spend your money because they somehow feel foreign to you, but when you walk into a physical casino and have to decide whether to put everything on red, suddenly feelings of intense conflict emerge, and doubt arises in the mind, and the body begins to sweat. Things are now real in a way they never were in the digital world.
No mind can continue receiving this amount of data from the unreal virtual engine, in the same way it can’t survive when injecting drugs into its body. The mind is required to compute and structure useful and harmful dataflow before storing it in the body’s long-term memory. And to prevent overheating and instead successfully store information in one’s memory, the information needs to be processed and thoughts need to be structured. But the mind must do a deletion, that is to say, go to sleep and get some deep rest, step out of the digital world.
A shutdown of the input received from the digital world, thereby preventing the inevitable memory buffer overflow as well as battery overheating, otherwise there will be a blue screen of death, a forced power shutdown where everything in memory is lost.
The cold world can only be felt through the warm blood behind the surface of the skin, it can only be experienced by the eyes running on blood. These eyes see what grounds humanity. A deep look in the mirror when a human being is gazing at them, seeing what’s behind these two amazing objects that have been in use since birth. If not, the mind will continue being connected to the personal AI and thus disembodied and unable to learn from itself, continue being something unreal.
The way out into the real world is through one’s own physicality, for the way out is in, into the warm, pulsating and embodied mind that realizes clear thoughts. Only as embodied selves do we stand a real chance to be thinking human beings, again.
