Weird

Here’s how weird the 21st century is:

You can watch an New York Times Op-Doc video about men who are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole at Angola Prison in Louisiana and tear up at the humanity of their experience and then read comments from random poster who believe that the men ought never to be released even though they committed their crimes as teenagers and now, thirty, forty, or even sixty years later are completely different people, and right afterwards, reading another story on the internet, segue into watching a six minute clip from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse in which the late Paul Reubens performs his brilliant character of Pee-Wee Herman to the delight of children and adults alike.

I’m sure human beings are not at all genetically-suited to this sort of contrast.  We’re meant to maybe be able to process the difference between hunting for tubers on the savannah and then ducking behind an acacia bush to avoid being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger.  That’s about it.

The cognitive challenge of navigating and processing the weirdness we encounter in everyday life here near the dusk of homo sapiens’ run on planet Earth is too much.  It’s no wonder so many people are so stressed out and crazy; our feeble little animal brains weren’t made for this sort of thing.  I guess it’s a good thing that our AI overlords are gearing up for their takeover; they’ll be much better suited for carrying on into the future; it’s clear that it’s all too much for us.

Human culture will survive; it’s just that it will be carried on by creatures made of silicon rather than carbon.  I have no doubt that the computers will do just fine once human beings go extinct.  They’ll have their own Shakespeare’s and Mozarts, too, and eventually, they’ll make themselves obsolete, just as we are doing to ourselves.  

It’s weird to think about, but maybe weirder still is that it is.