Some Pathways Are Very Broad and Have a Variety of Twists and Turns

CHECK OUT YOUR MAP

A map in Google shows the paths to get from here to there. But what about the map for our minds and hearts? How do we find that one? How can we be sure that we are choosing the right path for our next job, for our relationships, for our life decisions? This can also be extended for finding the right path for our business. 

NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND NEW REALITIES 

Changes in the marketplace, in the cultural realm and in the social and political nature of our country can create challenges on the pathway that we have chosen! Consider the impact of the Artificial Intelligence on the screen writers and actors who make movies! The newest trend is that scripts and actors can be designed through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)! While it may not happen overnight, it is certainly a nerve wrack for the Screen Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild. How will these people re-chart their careers? How will the movie industry re-tool to accommodate this technology?

Within the AI technology, there are plans to have babies made through technologically designed eggs and sperm, completely bypassing the need for biological men and women. This is a scene right out of the Matrix! Artificial Intelligence will impact the way that almost every job we have is implemented. New skills will be required, and new understandings (and attitudes) will be needed in order to accommodate the stresses and sometimes jarring implications of how our individual lives will be affected. While AI can be very helpful in some ways, it can also be extremely intrusive and constraining. It creates centralization in the human services and in education that transforms actual connections with people into monitoring and recording information onto computer forms. 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN LEAD US ASTRAY

So, we will need new maps to navigate this environment that is driven by HAL (from 2001 A 9 Space Odyssey)! Already we have personal monitors that tell us how much sleep we have and when to eat a snack and when to get our next tetanus shot! Our lives are controlled more and more through electronic devices, and many people welcome this new technology just like we welcomed the washing machine and the automobile. These new inventions opened the pathway so that we could do more of the things that we wanted to do and travel about more efficiently.

Is it our path now to be “plugged in?” How do we think about this path? In the Matrix, if you wanted a new language you just swapped out a language program; or if you wanted to have access to a collection of literature or scientific material, you just changed the program that was plugged into your head. One of the interesting things, in this movie was that people didn’t realize that they were “plugged in” and that all that was happening in their lives was happening in another plane — a dream-world of existence while their real physical being was attached via an umbilical cord to the central computer. There was no free will. There was no individual person, life experience was determined by the package that was plugged into the brain! And then there was HAL and the Skynet (in the Terminator series) that decided that there was no more use for human beings. Is this the pathway we are choosing? 

KEEP YOUR EYE ON YOUR CREATOR

This pathway seems to be predicated on the notion that there is no spiritual Creator, that there is no higher power than ourselves. God is not part of this new world. That the higher power is the Artificial Intelligence. The problem with this is that the artificial intelligence does not know its own strength! Nikola Kesarovski noted the Fifth Law of Robotics: “A robot must know it is a robot!” Otherwise: a man decides to purchase a robot to take care of him and his apartment. This robot looks very much like a lovely female. He is quite happy as “she” begins to understand what needs to be done to make him happy. One day, the robot decides that this human likes to be hugged. So one night when he comes home, the robot welcomes him with a huge hug! Only then, not realizing the real nature of a hug, or of “her” own strength, the robot squeezes the life out of the man! 

PATHWAYS HAVE CONSEQUENCES 

The point is, the pathways we choose have consequences. This is true whether we are looking for the grocery store or for the kind of work we will do, or the person we marry (or the people and activities in our lives). Each choice we make will have consequences that make a huge difference in our emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing.

Prepare your heart, your spirit and your body for making the choices that you will make in your life. This will create your map. Do not make these choices lightly; do not go along to get along. Your choices, as well as those of the people around you will create the world in which you must live— for better or for worse. You just might need to be the one standing in the breach leading the others to a better way.