power finally achieved real grip. Recall that important distinction between “Predictive Learning” and “Representational Learning” - and how machines with a deep representation outperformed the ones merely predicting, the difference between recognizing a Mozart symphony and writing one? We ourselves need to move now from predictive to representational views of our world. We need an historical sense, of course. But something else too, that Seventh Sense I’ve been writing about. So much of what lies ahead can’t, of course, be predicted by looking at what has come before. And we won't make this leap to a new representation of the world around us with mere technology. That passage to a new, and subtle insight, to a new instinct, demands wisdom.
There will be a point, several hundred years from now, when the answers to the fundamental questions we now face will be decided. A new political order, tuned to the power laws now visible with the Seventh Sense will emerge. Our question we will often ask on that long passage is this: Can more and more technology bridge the gap between the ideal society we might aim for and the troubled one we have? Or might it crank that gap wider still? My sense is that the antidote to the machines and their new logic is not, in the end to make ourselves more like the machines. Encryption alone won't protect our privacy. Mobility won’t assure our liberty. We can’t keep up with the innovations, to be honest. So we have to go deeper. Our protection will come from making ourselves more human, not just more technical. We should consider the path Su Dongpo’s life suggest, the cultivation of an inner instinct, and that this should touch on the very things that make us most human. This means to make ourselves more political, more cultured, more aware of history and ideas. Which problems do we solve with technology? Which ones with our own hearts and minds? This choice, at least, is still before us.
Take a moment. Look at yourself. Feel yourself with the Seventh Sense. Through each of us now will flow all the power of this new age. Yes, it can jack apart all our old habits and fill the passage of our time with all the dangers of evil as we silently watch terrible and fearful things appear from nowhere. But we can also wake up, see the world accurately and then act with the confidence of knowing that we are, each of us, the passage through with which the future will emerge. At the very moment we might feel so many of our burdens lifted by technology, an old and heavy one crashes down upon us. It is the burden of maintaining our liberty. Now, you and me are, like it or not, what we are connected to.
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