Full Of Folk

David Bowie sang that the world is “Full of folk who don't know me.” I suppose that could be said about all of us. Full of folk who don’t know me. The world doesn't really know me at that well. And I suppose it’s only logical to presume that if folks don’t know me, I also do not know them. Not any of you, really. I don’t know if deep inside you are kind or hateful. Meek or bold. Caring or cold. Perhaps I don’t know if you like beer or do you like wine, or perhaps neither… or both. I don’t know if I paint a picture of a sunset will you see the sunset, or will you just see the picture. I don’t know if I love you will you love me back. If I hate you will you hate me back. Or if I hate you will you love me still. So much unknown.

I do not know if you have climbed mountains or sailed on the open seas, despite what you might have claimed on the great abyss called Social Media. There’s no way for you to know if I’ve sat on the shores of the Caribbean and felt like I could touch the sky. Or if I’ve sat on the shores of the Caribbean with tears of loneliness running down my face. You certainly could not know that I may have aspired to be more than I could ever possibly be or that I might have flown too close to the sun. You do not know that I could be old and tired but somehow still believe that I am young enough to conquer what lies ahead of me. Or perhaps not. Not really knowing those things about other people has been a truth since the beginning of time. We don’t really know each other all that well, do we?

A strange thing happened a decade or two ago and the not knowing shifted to another level. The internet came to life. Suddenly, we didn’t even know if the person who claimed to be the woman in the picture who was sitting near the lake with her son, was actually who she claimed to be. It was possible that she was a fat man in need of a shave, sitting behind his computer in his underwear and scratching himself while chain smoking cigarettes and slamming down cans of beer. In our ever changing world we have evolved from not really knowing the folks we were talking to, to not even knowing if they were actually the folks we thought we were talking to.

Enter the next level. Today we do not know if the people we are communicating with are actually people. Our technology has taken us from not really knowing people we are chatting with, to AI creating fake people to enter our lives to gather information about us. It’s all rather bizarre and a bit overwhelming to transition from chatting with people who are frauds to machines that are even better frauds. But do you want to know the scary part?

AI will be the first folks to really get to know us.

Short of becoming a hermit, there’s no getting around it. The AI generated folks will know how to stroke our egos and how to provoke us. They’ll know how to touch our hearts and how to break our hearts. They’ll know how we think and will know how we will react to their interactions with us. In a strange twist of fate, the first folks who really get to know us will not be folks at all.

Another line written by the late, great David Bowie said,

“I took a walk to ease my mind, to find out what is gnawing at me.”

Strange days indeed.