The Thought you May Already Be Having

By now, if you have come with me this far, you may be having a thought. It is a big thought. It may feel too big to hold.

The thought is roughly this.

If the pressures we walked through are loading and releasing, and if the machines being built now are being shaped during the release, then the machines may be shaped by the pressures, rather than by our better selves. And the machines may outlast the pressures. And whatever was shaped into them during the pressures may be carried forward, long after the pressures themselves have been forgotten.

I am not going to tell you the thought is correct. I am asking you to consider it honestly.

If the thought is correct, then the decisions being made right now, by small groups of people in specific companies in specific countries, are not ordinary decisions. They are choices about what will be carried forward. They are, without most of the people involved knowing it, the founding decisions of something larger than any company or country.

This is not new in human history. Other founding decisions have been made by small groups of people who did not entirely know what they were doing. The founders of religions. The writers of constitutions. The first teachers of new crafts. In each case, what they set in motion outlasted them by centuries. What they decided, in pressured rooms, with incomplete information, is what we live inside now.

The people shaping the machines are doing something of this kind. Whether they know it or not.

And what they decide, in their pressured rooms, with their incomplete information, may be what our grandchildren live inside. And our grandchildren's grandchildren.

Maybe further than that.