Side Effects: Unintended Consequences

While well be back soon with the big piece I wanted to get this brief aside down for y'all while AI and college examinations are hot on my mind. So welcome to “Side Effects” the series of my only partially related topics.

The danger of Traditionalism

If anything can be looked at for what is most difficult on this time, it may be the following. While refusing to concede their position, Boomers and a growing percentage of Generation X, refuse to allow for improvements to be made.

The effect of this comes in obvious places of course, but also in unexpected ones. This, “we've always done it this way” mentality creates artificial scarcity in goods. It creates artificial ceilings in innovations.

I went through school, college, and law school as technological advanced made the process of test taking and essay or paper submission more convenient. I won't go into the details but by the time I'm taking the bar exam in 2014, less than 10 people in my exam room for Missouri’s bar used a written blue examination book for their essay.

And that includes me, I was there with my laptop with examsoft typing away like crazy. So you can imagine my cynical incredulity when I saw a recent article about AI causing a rise of blue book examinations returning.

Reading that piece caused quite a chuckle for me. One of the big things as millennials we loathes was the way we had to take tests. Scantrons for multiple choice and those annoying blue books for essays. Even now as you read this, you had that flash of that one test you hated at some point. It's okay, we have a collective nightmare about it.

This is a small example of the larger issue, which I will save for a larger piece of course, but I want you to see it for what this piece is. Somewhere in heaven is my old boss, mentor, mock trial coach, and friend, Derek Moorhead. He's very likely laughing hysterically at what I'm about to say. Most of the luddites are right.

This isn't just me declaring technology needs to die. I'm very tech forward, but I see a need for control in a world that seems to have not learned the lesson of letting Mengele exist. Control on innovation isn't just needed in medicine, it is needed in everything.

But often that goes to far. Which is how we end up with Boomers and X’ers who both have no concept of what is possible and refuse to allow for change. And suddenly even parents can't get it while hearing from their own children.

As you can see in the video repaired by the Holler, there are two versions, people so disillusioned they think no change is possible, and people who don't care because they are fine.

What are they missing with this mentality? You've probably already guessed it. They are breeding the same contemptuous attitudes towards their own future suffering and downfalls. And isn't that common for us all? It takes a lot of internal reflection and introspection to think about more than your own situation and the future ahead of you based on collective choices.

In the end, these possible positions have all manner of unintended consequences. Some causing us to revert to earlier states of things we once saw as innovation. Others causing a massive disillusionment to take root. The question becomes, what is the result? And for that, well… we have to choose the fate we follow. I'll leave me thoughts on that for the bigger piece.

So bye for now. See you next time.