Alpha Bewilderment
How will future generations view us?
At brunch today we briefly discussed why people over the age of 55 are the new problem generation.
Summary (gpt-4o-mini):
The Economist discusses the changing behaviours of older adults, particularly baby-boomers, who are increasingly engaging in risky behaviours typically associated with youth.
Older adults are participating in drug and alcohol use at rising rates.
Sexually transmitted diseases among those over 55 have surged significantly.
Divorce rates are rising among pensioners, indicating changing social dynamics.
Many older individuals are experiencing loneliness and its negative health effects.
This aligns with my own observations. In my case, though, being a late gen-x-er and relatively open to adaptation, I even got to live life in both modes - boomer sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll in my 20s, followed by millennial earnestness and sobriety in my 30s and 40s.
It’s easy for me, as a pretend zillennial, to look back at my younger self and my parents’ cohort and laugh them off as a bunch of nihilistic idiots. But one clever question humbled me and got me thinking:
What will the next generation (gen-alpha) think of us? In what ways will they find us ridiculous?
I’d like to offer some guesses:
Alphas will view our generation’s obsession with “politics” and ideology distasteful and destructive. By the time they’re old enough to go on social media and voice their opinions, the kind of outrage-inducing political discourse prevalent today will be considered very “not cool”. Alphas will be much more rational and scientifically minded. They will trust evidence over opinion.
Alphas will see our generation and earlier ones as suffering from severe “reality” superstition. They’ll have AI friends, spend much of their time in virtual worlds, connect to computers with every sense available (and perhaps directly to their brains) and they will view our insistence on limiting “screen time”, explicitly identifying every bit of AI-generated content, and prioritising “authentic” experiences in much the same way we view the pagan rites of pre-modern tribes in Papua New Guinea. Fascinating, sometimes endearing, mostly just ridiculous.
Alphas will view human biology as transitional technology. Imperfect, difficult to maintain, but necessary as a vessel for carrying us into the singularity. They’ll bio-hack with the same nonchalance we change our wardrobe and many of them will be modified in some significant ways by the time they reach middle age. Some alphas may be the first people to transition to living completely in silica.
Any other ideas? I’d like to do what I can to learn from our much smarter and more modern successors and change my ways before it’s too late.