Every Solution Has an Expiration Date

I've had some less-than-casual observations lately about the world we find ourselves in. This began as a stream-of-thought essay, so prepare yourselves.

Example: the surging prices of technological commodities such as RAM. Tim Cook explained it during a recent interview as a “100-year flood,” the likes of which he admitted he had not experienced in any area during his 40 years in the industry.

It all feels so...exhausting.

As a 47-year-old with the first vestiges of retirement just beginning to dawn on me, it really does feel like something new is more expensive each time I wake up. And as a functioning adult with children to clothe, bills to pay, and a future to somehow prepare for, I adjust. That is what adults do. We make the math work until the math changes again.

Gas is expensive, so I drive electric. Air conditioning is expensive, so I replace my roof with materials that are supposed to save money. Clothes, technology, cars, cell phones...it's all seemingly out of control. So I adapt, I move on.

But then letters arrive from SRP, saying my electricity plan will go away soon. The HOA says they must increase our rates. Car insurance fluctuates for no damn reason at all, causing consumers to hop around every 6-12 months.

Here in the American West, even the weather feels like part of the negotiation now: heat, water, power, insurance, roof materials, utility plans, and the creeping sense that daily life itself is becoming more expensive to maintain.

And these little magic rectangles in our back pockets that ping us every 15 seconds, reminding us just how narrow the ledge is that we find ourselves walking on? The human brain was not programmed to connect to and consume the amount of data that we feed ourselves daily.

And please, let's not get started on food pricing. Great heaven above; we haven't seen any recovery since COVID-19. It genuinely feels like every corporation in America saw the chance to raise prices and never looked back. There are outliers. Costco, I'm looking fondly at you. But by and large, inflationary practices are here to stay.

The feeling is not simply that things are changing. Things have always changed. The feeling is that I am being asked to keep adapting faster than I can recover from the last adaptation. At some point, adaptation itself becomes the burden.

And jumping back to matters of technology, as an IT professional, I've gradually felt the soles of my shoes split apart on the razor's edge we tread upon daily. The more I learn, the more powerless I feel.

It's absolutely astounding how reliant we are upon fragile networks and systems. As the years wear on, we comfort ourselves more profoundly within ecosystems and promises. Just this week, I witnessed the degradation of a tiny sliver of the systems that keep our lives afloat, and it terrified me in no small measure.

I cannot imagine the constant state of tension companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, et al. feel as they implement even the smallest changes.

Take, for example, a minor behind-the-scenes adjustment Google rolled out to its global content servers this week. The tweak accidentally caused Google’s systems to act like an excited security guard at a public library, suddenly demanding to see an ID badge from anyone trying to walk through the digital doors.

For standard personal computers, the request went completely unnoticed because everyday users don't carry those types of digital badges. But company-managed MacBooks, which we use in greater numbers at my employer, are embedded with an invisible security certificate from corporate management platforms like Mosyle.

Well, the internet browser got totally tripped up.

Recognizing that the computer did have a badge on hand, it began frantically throwing up confusing pop-up windows, asking bewildered employees if they wanted to hand over their corporate enrollment credentials just to open a Google Doc or load an email profile picture.

It was a completely harmless ghost in the machine, but it perfectly illustrates how a single line of misplaced code altered in Silicon Valley can instantly trigger false alarms and IT panics for thousands of businesses around the world.

Because of these issues this week, I felt the ripples of at least a half-dozen red herrings as I tried to troubleshoot numerous other problems at work. Part of it is just my own tendency to overreact and hallucinate root causes that don't exist. But the greater part is that these root issues can be very, very real...and very, very hard to diagnose in real time.

Anyway, it all adds up to a weighty feeling on my soul. A trepidatious feeling of anxiety as I look into the not-so-distant future, as well as the world I will retire into in just 20 years’ time.

How on earth will I keep up with all of the technological innovations and disruptions that take place over the next two decades? It makes me exhausted just thinking about it. I've already had to completely give up on ever trying to understand the world of cryptocurrency. And it's taken a significant toll on my physical, spiritual, and emotional battery to keep up with the world of AI.

In a tangential thought about AI, I witnessed the most remarkable video online today, where comedian Jimmy Carr was doing some crowd work. He was asked what he thought about AI, and here's the basic summation of his answer.

The Four Great Humiliations:

“I think there have been three great humiliations for humanity...”

The First Humiliation, Copernicus: he told us that we weren't the center of the universe.

The Second Humiliation, Darwin: he told us that we're no different from the animals.

The Third Humiliation, Freud: he told us we're not even in control of our own minds. There is our subconscious and our conscious mind, and we're not driving.

The Fourth Humiliation, AI: we are now not even the smartest thing on Earth.

Golly, but that certainly describes some of the currents churning just under the surface of my daily inner dialogue.

Whether or not you subscribe to the thought that AI is actually “smart,” its mere existence is rewriting the human experience on the macro and micro level. It changes how we work, how we play, how we plan. And society as a whole has invested billions and billions of dollars into it, feeding this soulless entity all of the nutrients it needs to keep growing and “learning.”

And, by the way, these resources we pour into AI? They’re scarce. Water, electricity, GPUs, RAM...and we, you and me, will be the ones who ultimately pay the price for where this technology goes.

This is not an anti-AI rant. What's more, the irony in this associative little essay may be the fact that AI might just be the vehicle that allows me to endure the next two decades of technological advancement without severe burnout.

But for now, for this exact moment, my soft, mushy human brain is just about at capacity. My ability to see what's next for me is severely diminished, and it's not just because of my own anxious tendencies anymore.

It's something a bit deeper than that.

Something a bit more sinister.

It's my own precarious position within that Fourth Humiliation, and my faltering ability to keep up with it.