SAHF Files #2: Mid-life Cry...sis

3 days ago

5 min read

Recently, I have been watching old Black TV shows and movies, almost rendering myself to tears of nostalgia. Scenes from Family Matters and School Daze play daily in the background as I watch Ivy-Raine stand, step, stumble, and situate herself. Something about seeing these actors in their youth makes me think about my own youth and my own middle age. The face-to-face confrontation between Julian (Giancarlo Esposito) and Dap (Laurence Fishburne) about Blackness made me reflect on my ethnic (mis)education, academic and experiential. In other words, am I just a Black American from Temple, Texas? Or am I an African-American whose spirit hails from the Motherland? This ethnic delineation sparks a bit of discomfort from the cognitive dissonance and my own ignorance.

Sidenote: Ever since I visited Morehouse a few years ago, I have wanted my little nephew to attend this historically Black college. Can one have nostalgia or anachronistic memories that are beyond one’s own current existence? I sometimes have dreams of a past I never lived in but the familiarity of the imagined experience makes me more curious and critical. I guess I am the one learning how to walk in this new head space.

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Some of these thoughts are spurred and spurned by the fact of having a Bay Area biracial child but also my cross-cultural experiences navigating predominantly white spaces, double-consciousness, and the respectability politics via the amorphous, anonymous IRL and terminally-online commentators, critics, and carpers.

To ground myself and get offline, I have conversations. I miss the full classroom interactions with all of the people, the personalities and the perspectives. Now, I am doing one-on-one online conferences (ironically) during which I hear amazing origin stories of real people. I get it: artificial intelligence can do a lot of stuff; however, I do not think it can replace the live interactions, the follow-up questions, the comfort given and allowed for people to open up and share passionately and vulnerably. There's nothing like the laughter and the embarrassment of having a playful, giggly child interrupting your business Zoom calls. Nevertheless, why show your heart, your mind, your hand to a flawed, judgmental, contradictory human like myself when there’s software that admires you, listens to you, and soaks up your good data energy? As software replicates our human hardwiring, imitation is the sincerest form of obsoletion, some cynics would argue.

The Bay Area’s immiscibility of deep-rooted activism and weedy tech-wealth also makes me rethink my current and future plans in a world where human employment is being repressed and or repurposed around ever-expanding amounts of AI agents and currency debasement. How will artificial intelligence change or affect my parenting and my pockets? With AI, what insurance and assurance will I have, especially if companies are not hiring or onboarding new employees? Not to mention, hackers are using AI to damn near hack the internet, bank accounts, and critical infrastructure. I stupidly say this as if these tech companies haven’t been monitoring and mining our data for decades. Hey, have you opted out of or turned off the “passive listening” functions on your devices? Aww, quiet luxury.

All I want to do is find well-resourced and safe schools and extracurricular programs for my daughter. Wait, what does “well-resourced” and “extracurricular” mean nowadays with artificial intelligence? Since I have been home, I have been doing some extra-curricular research on the economy and education. I wonder, what is the price and the cost of an agentic AI-ran economy and education system? We worry about the generation of “iPad kids” but what about the generation of AI agents micromanaging our schedules, our bank accounts, our algorithms, our children, and our lives? We, humans, are supposed to be the masters of the agents but what happens when they have mastered us, weaponizing our behaviors, our fears, our dreams, and our penchant for convenience?

Currently, I am enjoying watching Ivy’s little hands turn pages of Pete the Cat or her little index finger pointing at Eric Carle’s Brown Bear as I make the corresponding animal sounds. Oink! Oink! Will my desire to have “enough” money put me in the dirt alongside the corporate pigs? Is there such a thing as a conscious capitalist? Based on history, I would rather not say. I mean, is there such a thing as a punctilious pimp? A discerning drug dealer? Hell naw. So what is my point?

On a personal note, I can’t tell if I am struggling with aging or growing up. Or, if it’s watching the world change around me. I mean I was just on my grandmother’s couch, excited for the TGIF Friday Night TV line-up. Now, as I write this late at night, I am crazy-eyed, crazy-haired, and crazy grateful for my village. My friend Aukeem reminds me that lifelong friendships and connections are the real healthcare. Young people, continue to pour into your relationships. Artificial intelligence can’t replace that homie showing up at your door to hug you, knowing you left them on read or those college friends who took you out of town for a quick retreat. Or, those high school classmates and their families who still send you Christmas cards every year even though you graduated 20 years ago. As far as aging goes, I am excited to see my relationships deepen and mature as we all evolve. Again, why listen to a contradictory, flawed human like me? Nowadays, how many of us have connections that span decades? And memories that play vividly in our minds like primetime television? Maybe there is something consequential and consoling about never getting the chance to see those old sitcom characters grow old in their respective universes. Well, Black boy meets world, step by step.

For my teachers out there, continue to explore the large language models to better understand the future. I do not want to fearmonger or overstate the power of tech because I, myself, have done some thought-provoking thought-partnering with the different LLMs. Sure, some will say that quantum computing is one of the looming final bosses over the coming years. Not to mention, some corporate suits would love for the online teacher to become the fully digital teacher, just pixels with programmable personalities. Continue to have honest real-life conversations with students about responsible tech use and integrity as well as the joys of analog teaching and learning. Online, they say "touch grass." I will add, hug a friend! Touch a book!

And let me say this, to my homies in tech, I know you’re just trying to make a living in a system that only wants your continuous production, productivity, and now your performance for imitation learning. Just be leery of staying on code and potentially jeopardizing your peace for a piece of failing fiat. Current-day economics will have us looking for negligible pay increases while the almighty dollar decreases in purchasing power. For capitalism, where there's a hamster wheel, there's a way...

Considering our lives are just a scattergram of dates and data points to the machines, I still believe our greatest tech is our connections, no DSL. Shout-outs to the original data centers aka granny's house and the local library!