By Morf Morford, Tacoma Daily Index

There are some among us who remember life in the analog era. There was time when “work”, for many of us, even most professionals, meant using our hands and our learned skills. From surgeons to auto mechanics, work was accomplished, objects were built, maintained and used by those with acquired skills.

Training was often specialized, and arduous, and took years to absorb. There were few, if any, screens, “platforms” or online services. Becoming “educated” took a massive investment of time and money. College, or something like it, took years and focus.

Life after high school, for almost all of us, was predicated on the idea that we would all acquire skills that would prepare us for a career. From universities to technical college to the military, training and acquired literacy, even mastery of a skill set was the intention – at least of our parents.

But, as in many other cases, that was then, and this is now.

Entire (lucrative) fields have emerged the past several years. From Tik Tok to cyber currencies and the rise of entrepreneurial “influencers”, we have seen a “gold rush” of fortunes made (and sometimes lost).

But way back then, as in about a year or two ago, those “influencers” were actual humans. Thanks to ever-emerging “smart” technology that learns (but somehow, at least for now, doesn’t know that it knows) we are seeing the influence, perhaps even eventual dominance, of AI generated influencers and even AI “celebrities”.

If you need a friend

If you need someone to talk to, you can find someone who will promise (or is at least programmed) to listen to you; you can find it here.

From sorcerers to psychologists to study partners to alternate time lines, you can find a listening presence – maybe listening a bit too closely.

This, and many other sites, offers something media empires could only fantasize about just a few years ago – custom content generated specifically for every user. Just don’t expect a real human being anywhere in the mix.

You might need to be a bit flexible on your definition of “friend”.

Humans (and perhaps humanity) is found IRL (In Real Life) only.

Did I ask for your advice?

Have you noticed that almost anything posted online can become a frenzy of feedback, responses and objections from thousands or sometimes millions of anonymous strangers – usually within minutes?

To put it mildly, human beings were not designed to face continuous onslaughts of rude, crude, hostile, sometimes menacing, and almost always anonymous comments.

Any statement of belief or allegiance seems to generate free-floating amorphous rage and a feverish case of “current thing-ism”.

And, unlike a productive human conversation, few, if any, minds are changed.

As the volume increases, so does the vociferousness of the positions held. Which, in most cases, leads to what we see in multiple media platforms – the loudest voices prevail and any dissenting voices are squelched or dismissed, and yet another echo chamber is born.

Have you noticed that, thanks to the internet, everyone is a writer, a photographer and an instant expert on everything from politics to global currencies?

In technology, as with everything else, you get what you pay for

A generation or so ago, I and several of my peers, friends and co-conspirators, were cheered by the thought that “Information wants to be free” and that finally, perhaps for the first time in human history, information (and access to it) would be free without the traditional “gatekeepers” of schools, universities, publishers and corporations that, until then, it seemed, controlled access to information that we all needed or wanted in our daily lives.

The internet made music “free”, but at the cost of music stores, royalties to the creatives, and of course, physical media we could own, share and treasure.

We have lost bookstores, print newspapers and much of what used to be called “leisure time” – and thanks to a near infinite level of distractions – we have lost the ability or capacity to be alone with our own thoughts.

The high cost of “free”

Information might be “free”, but it costs us in ways few of us anticipated – identity, privacy, security and susceptibility to hacking and cyber-attacks on everything from health and credit records to public utilities, are all burning issues that impact most of us directly, but would be near impossible to explain to previous generations.

And yes, the internet, thanks to streaming and online identities, stripped away the multiple constraints of physical media and distribution – if not physical existence.

Young people are inclined to ask questions only asked by extreme outliers and fugitives in previous ages; why should I bother to learn anything? Why should I “know” anything? Why should I care about anything?

And, thanks to YouTube, Tik Tok and a thousand others, in a sense they are right. Why study anything when you can just Google or YouTube it? Who needs an education or a social life when we can have algorithms and AI friends who tell us what we, based on our previous “clicks” should want next.

As with children, perhaps we should all ration our screen time and use it sparingly.

The internet is the ultimate “time-suck”; it is useful in ways few of us could have imagined. But, as history has shown us over and over, we, perhaps like every creator, make things in our own image, and sometimes those creations re-make us in their image.

Maybe it’s time to wean ourselves off the virtual and return to the real.