Summer is nearly over and talk about the coming Fall…“Over two thousand years ago, Plato described an illusion that shaped perception so completely that those trapped inside it mistook it for reality,” wrote The Art of Slow Down.

“He imagined a group of prisoners who had been confined in a cave since birth, chained in place, able to see only the wall in front of them. Behind them, a fire burned, and in front of the fire, unseen figures moved objects – casting shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. These flickering shapes became the prisoners’ entire world. They gave names to the shadows. They built meaning around them. The idea that something more existed beyond the cave was unthinkable.

Then, one day, a prisoner was set free. At first,… the light was overwhelming, his eyes unaccustomed to anything beyond the dim glow of the cave…But as his vision adjusted, he began to see clearly. He soon realised that what he had once believed to be reality was nothing more than distorted reflections, a shadow play designed to keep him in place.

In that moment, everything changed.”

With the mass adoption of the internet, social media and now AI, some two thousand plus years later, we find ourselves spending much of our waking hours in a digital cave, or to be more au courant, cave/matrix, tomato/tomahto. “We see glimpses of the world – fragments, filtered through algorithms designed not to enlighten but to captivate, capture and monetise our attention. We believe we are connected, yet modern connection feels thinner than it should. We believe we are informed, yet the information comes so fast, and from so many directions, that it becomes difficult to make sense of any of it. Atomisation has become the default.”

What might generally be called the Age of Technology, might more accurately be referred to as the Age of Hyper-Novelty. The endless streams of so-called innovations “has not just changed the pace of life; it has transformed the very fabric of existence. Every day, new technologies, ideas, and cultural phenomena burst into the collective consciousness, making yesterday’s novelties seem almost ancient,” noted Human-Level AI.

The real concern is, where has all of this brought us, and where will it lead?

History is always something  of a guide.

In the Age of Social, the world was suddenly ‘connected.’ People suddenly had ‘friends’ all over the world, never mind that they were virtual friends with whom they’d most likely would never be in the same physical room. Were they real friends, or were people interacting with people who had created online personalities that didn’t really match who they were in real life? The lockdowns normalized, if not amplified this.

Now, here we are in the Age of AI where conversing with an algorithm is becoming totally normalized. AI “Romantic and Sexual Partners — More Common Than You Think,” said Psychology Today. What to speak of the fact that AI chatbots can “sustain delusions in a way we have not seen before, Futurism reported. “One man was hospitalized on multiple occasions after ChatGPT convinced him he could bend time. Another man was encouraged by the chatbot to assassinate OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, before he was himself killed in a confrontation with police. Chatbots have persistently broken their own guardrails, giving dangerous advice on how to build bombs or on how to self-harm, even to users who identified as minors. Leading chatbots have even encouraged suicide to users who expressed a desire to take their own life.”

Now we have Deep Fakes and digital twins on the rise (Top 5 Cases of AI Deepfake Fraud From 2024 Exposed; Deepfake Evidence in Criminal Trials: The Emerging Dangers of Believing What You See and Hear), sometimes indistinguishable from carbon-based beings, and further down the slippery slope we go.

All in the name of progress, of course. Progress? This Company Turns Dashcams into ‘Virtual CCTV Cameras,’ 404 Media reported. “A hacker has compromised Nexar, which turns peoples’ cars into “virtual CCTV cameras” that organizations can then buy images from. The images include sensitive U.S. military and intelligence facilities.” Now consider neural implants, which are very much next on the horizon and already being implemented in the name of aiding the disabled. But it’s only the beginning of what Harold Fensky calls Nano-mind: The Dawn of Remote Thought Control. “The ability to control human thought and behavior remotely presents a range of potential abuses. In the wrong hands, this technology could be used for coercion, manipulation, or even warfare. The prospect of mind control, once relegated to the realm of conspiracy theories, now demands serious consideration.

“There are also questions about the long-term effects of such interventions. The human brain is an incredibly complex organ, and our understanding of its functions is still far from complete. Introducing a device that can alter brain activity could have unforeseen consequences, potentially leading to new forms of mental health disorders or other neurological issues.”

Which we’re already witnessing in the case of AIs.

It’s difficult to put the brakes on hyper-novelty when so many people have their fingers on the fast-forward button, barreling headlong and without thought to the negative aspects of the next shiny new thing. It’s bad enough when technology starts taking over jobs and professions, but what happens when it starts controlling our thoughts? Unless we do consider applying the brakes, or to at least seriously consider the ethics of what tech hath wrought, two thousand plus years of progress may well lead us right smack into Plato’s hypothetical cave. And we’re not convinced that that’s going onward and forward.