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https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/11/the-magical-thinking-thats-killing-our-humanity/>
"There is an epidemic of magical thinking. An unwillingness to confront
reality. Because reality is scary.
This affliction cuts across all ideological lines, manifesting in different
forms but serving the same function: allowing us to avoid the difficult truths
about what it will actually take to preserve human dignity, meaning, and
freedom in the face of forces designed to eliminate all three.
We live in the most dangerous moment in human history—not because of nuclear
weapons or climate change, though both threaten our survival, but because we
are creating systems that threaten something deeper: our capacity to remain
human. To make meaning. To experience genuine choice. To live lives worth
living rather than optimized lives managed by algorithms and administered by
bureaucrats.
And our response to this existential crisis? Magical thinking. The comfortable
delusion that simple solutions exist for complex problems, that we can have
technological progress without existential consequences, that we can avoid
difficult choices by pretending they don’t exist.
This is not just political failure—it’s the systematic abandonment of what
makes us human in the first place.
Human beings are meaning-making creatures. This isn’t a nice feature of
consciousness—it’s what consciousness is for. We don’t just process information
like biological computers; we create significance, purpose, and value through
the active engagement of our minds with reality. We transform raw experience
into narrative, chaos into order, suffering into wisdom.
But meaning doesn’t emerge from comfort or certainty. It emerges from
tension—from the creative friction between what is and what might be, between
constraint and possibility, between self and world. Meaning is born in the
space where we must choose, where we must struggle, where we must actively
participate in creating our own understanding rather than passively receiving
it.
This is precisely what many of our technological systems are designed to
eliminate. Social media algorithms don’t enhance human connection—they replace
it with engineered engagement designed to maximize screen time rather than
genuine relationship. They don’t help us make better choices—they manipulate
our choices through carefully calibrated dopamine hits that bypass conscious
decision-making entirely.
Artificial intelligence has the potential to augment human creativity in
remarkable ways—providing new tools, expanding possibilities, enabling forms of
expression previously impossible. But it also threatens to replace human
creativity entirely when we mistake sophisticated pattern recognition for
genuine innovation. When machines can generate art, music, and writing that
satisfies human aesthetic preferences while eliminating the human struggle that
makes creativity meaningful, we face a crucial choice: do we use AI as a tool
that enhances human capacity, or do we allow it to substitute for human agency
altogether?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
