Robots

Many fear robots because they threaten to replace us. And they can if humans were only meant to do repeatable tasks without the need for judgement or imagination. To make sense of the myriad of personalities and faces that make up humanity, which seem impossible to organize, we have developed social models that (perhaps overly) regulate our lives. Many feel such limits are needed because free expression is chaotic and dangerous as the outcome is unpredictable.

So humans are trained and encouraged to be the same even though variation in personality is common even within a family, let alone the whole world. To maintain a semblance of "civilization", this moving target seems to demand that we give up our personality to preserve societal order.

I do not know how to organize the Billions of beautiful variation of people that live on this amazing balance of natural forces that make up our Earth. But I do know that our differences are what make us human.

So we do have a choice: either imagine a vain world of robots or let humanity show it's true colors. But do we really have to choose. Why not build automated machines to do the menial work while nurturing our children to be free to show their true colors. It all boils down to how much faith you have in humanity. Some say we are fallen, unworthy and unable to do good. Others are optimistic and think we can fly to new galaxies. Most actually live in between the 2 extremes not sure which is true of themselves. Look at history. we see truth in both and can learn from the past.

I dream of a world where humans create things that do not take over our lives but frees us to dream and inspire one another. Humans can graduate from useful to inspiring and make good use of machines. But first we have to stop believing we are mere robots ourselves.

David singing Cyndi Lauper's classic: True Colors

Al Jarreau jazzing up Handel's "Why do the Nations"

Night

"Making it through the night for joy comes in the morning." is a popular theme and may be overused. But this does not make the image of feeling so bad that hope seems to have disappeared as we wait for the dawn when sunlight seems to breakthrough the darkness in gushing streams of color and suddenly turns the sky from pitch black to light, any less impressive.

I never felt this so deeply until I went through years of disappointments and shock. Waking in the middle of the night to wait for the dawn became like a daunting experience because even the day seemed dark to me. I got up early again and heard the birds begin to sing just before the dawn in the trees behind my building.

Besides the troubles I went through, I now see that my struggle was with the common obsession to make lots of money, be really famous and retire at a young age (a boat I missed but do not regret). Most people I knew seemed to be chasing the elusive goal of making impressive massive success. But I wonder what they will do with the giant creature that will take over their private lives once the fame and fortune are in hand. They will have to deal with a dinosaur.

Like the bird that sings reminding me the dawn is near and can fly away at anytime, I want to wait for the joy of dawn by building a brighter more meaningful future with those who prefer flight over massive creations. For me the absurdity is to dream delusions of grandeur as if they will fulfill us. Money is only useful if used to invest in people who are not naturally to be controlled like cogs in machine. If given the choice, most (if the brain washing that mechanistic order is the only way is removed) will want to fly, sing and be free like a bird.

For to hold on to freedom and hope is to wait through the hardship of discovering who we are with our friends and family. To love and be loved as we live work and relax. It is a journey worth making instead of settling into the false comfort of machines (which is the way even information technology is being developed). 

I want to go down an untried path of close working relationships, apprentice like training, chase quality and real value for humanity beyond annual profits. Personally, I want to enjoy the company of those who pursue flight, song, freedom, new vision, new discoveries and just gliding in the wind of change.

I will get there. Just like the song by Boys II Men.

Flight

This symphony haunted me from the first time I heard it at a small concert in Germany many many years ago. I feel like it is about flying over uncharted territory. Scary, daunting but cool! Like this symphony written during World War 2. No smooth melodies or gliding as if a bird had to fly through enemy lines and recorded the feelings.

In my previous blogs, I recounted what I saw and felt as I went through a turning point in my life. Some would write if off as mid-life crisis (although this assumes I'll live to be 100). No matter what you call it, I feel, see and even look different. It's as if the self-imposed jail door has been opened and I finally dared to venture into what is ultimately who I am. And I'm not great. Not handsome. Not popular. Not even very intelligent. Yet I know my importance and that the life I've been given is ever so rich in what truly matters.

Another analogy is that I was struggling with the wind by flapping newly discovered wings. They may have been there all along but I never noticed or used them until now. I was afraid to because no one else was doing it. It took a change in how I lived, loved and hoped. The struggle was like a young bird flapping its wings to take off.

Once wings latch on to the wind, flying is actually gliding. It's effortless and requires little energy. It takes faith to negotiate unpredictable and invisible wind. But you get to see everything from new angles.

The change is not any miracle but merely unfolding of a future that uses all available resources. Many think success is to grow really big. Perhaps I was persuaded too by this common purpose.

Yet I always hated the crowds of common-denominators. I preferred to know someone well including myself. After being rejected a lot, I see the way forward. I yearn for those who see that flying is possible and want to see life from many angles. Discovering these people would be inspiring.

Grounded

Being "grounded" might make a good husband, leader or best friend but a grounded bird is devastating unless you're an ostrich or domesticated. Even humans can fly a plane or glider or balloon or other new flying machine coming up. But grounded dinosaurs would be too big and too unintelligent to use any flying machine.

Every movement for something big needs to be deliberate. To be big is a goal of many countries, companies and people in general. We like to make dinosaurs. The bigger the better because they are impressive and easy to sell to investors or fans. Celebrities aim to big by popularity but have to put up with unwanted attention of crowds. 

Like anything with small control center, size is as big a burden as it is magnificent. If what we create is unwieldy to control, like the story of Frankenstein, the well meaning experiment risks taking on a life of its own without humanity. Yet it is important to be grounded and avoid flighty impractical daydreams right?

We are living at the cross roads where the industrial model of nations, companies, productivity, education is inadequate to create enough meaningful jobs for the educated masses. With learning approaching free and always accessible, over time this problem will become worse. Arming the masses with information and purpose is the fear for many leaders who forget that they once supported the education, enterprise, freedom and finance that created the world as we know it. It's too late to go back to illiteracy and masses of robotic workers.

For human curiosity, the resulting knowledge, social systems and technology are what made civilization. Some want to re-brand civility with quiet submission with allegiance to something big like war, a set of beliefs, a team, nation, religion in order to manipulate the masses to blindly follow. 

The paradox is that we need to be grounded. The first time I experienced a 7 Richter scale earthquake was in Tokyo, it was disconcerting as if the world was crumbling. So when the once dependable and wealth producing institutions begin to wind down, many are afraid and wish things would stay still.

We face a choice: be big and grounded or small and develop flight. 

There is also a negative meaning to the word grounded: to be punished by removing the right to go outside. The truth is: many ground themselves.

Tomorrow, my analogy of flying in nature.

Sparrows

My first real emotional encounter with death was a sparrow. It flew into our home probably because it was sick and could not fly away. The 10 year old me put it in a box, fed it, gave it water and put a light under it to keep it warm. After one night, I saw it breath it's last breath, helpless to rescue it. I cried so much that my normally unemotional dad actually asked me if I wanted to buy a bird.

It was the first time that I felt how death comes and we cannot change it. I felt sad for the life that ended. Yet this helpless bird is what I want to be. Free to see, fly and enjoy their short life. The sparrow has to eat and drink constantly. It has no savings and often goes unnoticed. Yet it's very important. That's me.

The inconvenience of flight

There was an old book called "Small is beautiful". It was about living "as if people mattered" and using "appropriate technologies". To over simplify, it wanted real quality over greed. At the time (1973), computers and networks and social media was only available in primitive form to a very few, most people dialed their analogue phones and a color TV was still expensive.

Skip to now, big is still a big deal and small is seen as almost peasantry. Yet the most brilliant people are still small and dream big. While the promise of information leading to knowledge creation on ever present media, is still obstructed by laziness, easy answers, half truths, big money... somehow greed is much easier to finance to make big things rather than seek truth.

I have been using networked communications for nearly 30 years and computer programs for longer than that. What I was waiting for was some way to collaborate, enjoy, converse with those who want more than just scheduled predictability so we have time and energy to dream. You know, the things you so freely wanted to pursue as a kid but needed to wait until you had the resources of adults.

Yet when you finally got older, the world seems to tell us those childhood dreams won't work because the wisdom of yesterday, tried and tested methods were always better. This is true if the goal of each moment of our lives never changed. But as the Seasons change, the weather surprises us and we feel differently throughout our lives, instead of embracing the beauty of each precious moment of our short existence here, we want to suppress it and live safely, orderly and to be average. Even the rich want to be average, to fit in, to belong by being the same.

So when the most incredible growth seems to be in billions using the Internet, so much focus is on the crowd usage for the average on the Bell curve. Using the Internet on devices has allowed some small companies to become a giant (dinosaurs) in a few years among the littered corpses of millions of failed attempts and disappointed people (birds). It is a fact of life that most fail and only a few can get the gold medal, if that were the only definition of success.

This blog is about how small birds (the descendants of giants called dinosaurs) can survive and thrive among the land of giants that will be around for a while but are finding it harder and harder to survive among limited resources. While size (big or small) is neither good nor bad, ugly nor beautiful, my view is that the age of mass production for growth is over. We still need things that have to be made in the billions but they provide less and less margin to satisfy the lives of those who work in the assembly lines that produce them. 

Out of habit, education or worship of past success, most of society is still structured like an assembly line where the decision of a few affects multiples or exponents of thousands. So a tiny "brain" of a few needs to control a massive "body" of people who follow, therefore most organisations are or strive to be giants like dinosaurs.

I want to be a bird. If our efforts grow, I want to be a flock of birds flying in V formation. It's an ingenious trick on aerodynamics that even fighter jets mimic to reduce drag and increase efficiency. I don't like to be obvious or conveniently large. Instead the agility, freedom, speed and vision of birds flying in formation will become the new normal for growth in people and finance. More important, big inefficient things survive much worse in hard times which have always been a constant in our beautiful planet.

What I've written seems serious and complicated but what can be more simple than the story of dinosaurs that only exist as fossils, FX films and our speculation. The giant forms of the species all died off during a time of darkness and low food production on earth. Yet the small flying feathered animals we call birds is most probably their descendants.

So why not imitate nature and strive for the fittest form of the longest surviving species on earth: a formation of birds rather than the massive beasts of thousands. Big is much more convenient because size always appears impressive and therefore convenient to display success. Money, fame and status seems to follow the big things and popular people. The inconvenience of flight is much more enjoyable and can finally make a living for all who venture to change from the common wisdom of "big is better" to "small is fitter".