Worth Reading – Advancing Technology Is the New Existential Anxiety
I get it. Every day, there’s someone in Big AI telling us that AI is going to either replace you or kill you. Every other day, the tool you use to do your job changes. On the off days, announcements about new products that will revolutionize everything and make employers need fewer employees mix with stories about mass layoffs.
If you’re not anxious, you’re not paying attention:
In my private practice, I currently work with multiple clients in the tech industry who feel concerned that AI will eliminate their jobs and that there is not much they can do to prevent it. This is not necessarily an irrational fear that has no basis, much as fears of nuclear war in the 1950s were not necessarily irrational either. When existential worry becomes rampant, feelings of hopelessness and helplessness can result, yet another blow to our sense of personal autonomy.
I think this quote is the final word I want to say on the subject, though: that new technology can be an existential threat and also be something amazingly helpful at the same time:
Midcentury psychologist and author Rollo May wrote of the strange duality of a sky that at once could be expansive and beautiful but was also the place from which an atomic bomb could fall. In a sense, we are living in a similar reality: the advancement of technology has produced countless benefits, yet it comes with great risk at the same time. May’s point was that it was worth seeing the sky as beautiful every now and then rather than as a constant, impending threat.
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