Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I often wonder if mankind is ready for what we have created… the dissemination of information that is currently accessible with the click of a mouse or the swipe of your finger is staggering, but are we evolved enough to handle it?

As evolved as we have become, we are still in a relative sense a very juvenile species. In reference to the time that we first walked upright and discovered fire, discovered is a very loose term because we didn’t discover anything just learn how to use it, to the computer AI we are currently living comically is a blip. Seriously the age of giant dinosaurs was millions of years and we have been around for even a tenth of that. With our big brains we have pulled ourselves from hunter gatherers to huge metropolitan cities and no longer revere the land but exploit it.

We are still superstitious with a majority of the world’s population believing in an all-powerful, omnipresent, omnipotent being that created and controls everything. It’s that magical thinking that has got us where we are, but it is also the same deep-rooted interpretation of those shared beliefs that continue to hold us back.

Millions believe that the Bible, Coran, The Tora were written by God, not by man. Those same text have been translated numerous times, and anyone that speaks more than one language know sometimes the is no direct translation. That is especially true when translated from a dead language like Aramaic. Not only is there the translation but many of the tales are written as parables and riddles to be interpreted and we all know how the human mind love to twist a riddle to fit what they want it to mean. So we a have ancient text written by men thousand of years ago that could have never imaged the world we are living in today and on top of that millions of people picking and choosing passages that fit their personal narrative while ignoring the rest.

This is just one example of information overload with a religious message now add in the billions of bits a data we are bombarded with every day. It is no longer Joe Friday, “Just the facts mam…” Facts have become something that is up for debate, a group of people can witness the same event or read the same article but not agree what happened or what the article said, it all up to the witness’s internal bias to interpret the events.

I am not saying that we should have hive mind and be part of the collective like the Borg but when there are such things as alternative facts, I thinks it time to step back and reevaluate. I don’t know that we are ready for the information overload.

I hope that this wasn’t too depressing, thanks for putting up with my mental vomit.