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The 'disconnected youth' movement is growing as more Gen Zers struggle to find purpose at school and work
https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-d ... &r=US&IR=T

A horrific situation for children and youth might be playing out, a situation that could grow in severity exponentially in a very short time frame.

Can philosophy make a real difference, I wonder? Might philosophy have a responsibility for those people?

Many people have had grave difficulty to find meaning in life even in the industrial era where skilled labor was the cradle of society and industry with a corresponding strong pull and demand for human development and prosperity.

As in the saying, it all starts with an idea. My own vision is that an idea might be even faster than time, since it precedes time.

An outlook for the future. An outlook on prosperity. An outlook on meaning and purpose.

The potential of the idea is what would matter, and that aspect isn't bound by actual developments such as the actual availability of jobs today. It transcends the factual situation, as in the Dutch saying "children are the future", which is commonly said to demand respect for children beyond the situation of the day.

Children and youth growing up today would need to envision a future for themselves, and as a philosopher one is already able to examine the potential of the ideas that fundamentally underlay such visions.

Why school? Why work?

The old society has provided for a certain humanity and morality that people can depend on, but it was also based on a situation of demand for human prosperity.

In my investigation of how things developed, summarized in the article The Prospect of Teleonomic AI, I discovered that what once started with René Descartes his claim that animals are automata that do not feel pain, while humans are special due to their intelligence, might result in a severe problematic situation with regard the intellectual foundation of humanity.

Descartes is seen as 'the father of Western philosophy'. He used to dissect animals alive to prove that animals are mere machines. At one time, he even took his wife's dog and nailed it to a table to dissect him alive, to prove his point about animal consciousness.

Descartes Dissected His Wife’s Dog To Prove A Point

French philosopher Rene Descartes didn’t believe animals had souls. To test his theory, he nailed his wife’s dog to a board and chopped it open while the poor thing was still alive.

By his own account, Descartes happily sliced open dogs and stuck his finger into their still-beating hearts, marveling at how the valves opened and closed around his knuckle. But the madness doesn’t stop there. According to some biographers, his first vivisection was an attempt to discover once and for all if animals had souls. And the animal he chose to practice on was his wife’s dog.

Taking a hammer, Descartes nailed the creature’s paws spread-eagled to a board and proceeded to chop it to pieces, utterly unfazed by the “appearance” of pain. Whether he really was looking for the soul or not is a fact that’s been lost to history. All we know is that the dog died shortly afterward in unimaginable agony. How Descartes’ wife reacted to finding out her husband mutilated and murdered her pet to prove an obscure point has sadly not been recorded.

Voltaire responded with the following:

Hold then the same view of the dog which has lost his master (René Descartes), which has sought him in all the thoroughfares with cries of sorrow, which comes into the house troubled and restless, goes downstairs, goes upstairs; goes from room to room, finds at last in his study the master he loves, and betokens his gladness by soft whimpers, frisks, and caresses.

There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so greatly surpasses man in fidelity and friendship, and nail him down to a table and dissect him alive, to show you the mesaraic veins! You discover in him all the same organs of feeling as in yourself. Answer me, mechanist, has Nature arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel?

When human intelligence is no longer special, what will determine the value of humanity?

The intellectual path chosen by Western philosophy, as initiated by 'the father of Western philosophy', offers a prospect of "meaningless 'automatons' that feel no pain".

Questions:

1) what is your perspective with regard the situation of AI and 'the prospects for the future' for youth?
2) what solutions do you envision?
3) what are the implications of the disconnected youth movement for the moral culture of the future?

[Lagayascienza]

I would advise them to have fun with AI. And I would counsel them to avoid people like Descartes. And I might even suggest to them that, if they are delicate types, they avoid taking up philosophy which can lead one down all sorts of tortured paths.

[LuckyR]

Stand anywhere people congragate (outside of work or an organized event) and just observe the percentage of (mostly young) people who are staring downward at their phones. There's no way this seachange in human behavior can not have serious implications, likely towards the negative.

[Sy Borg]

"Disconnect" is the word.

It's common today for claims to be made about how people are becoming dumber, more unfit, let motivated and so on. This is caused by negativity bias.

An example to describe the growing divide is top level sport. Increasingly strong, fit, fast, athletic and skilled sportspeople perform ever greater feats for ever fatter and unfit crowds. Top scientists "stand on the shoulders of giants" as they probe areas that scientists of the past can only dream about, while many people don't even know the difference between a country and a continent, cannot construct a coherent sentence, or basic mental arithmetic.

AI will no doubt bridge the gap between society's needs and human degradation. It feels to me that humans are becoming more like cells of an organism than bacteria in a colony, no longer individuals in a group but components of a larger, controlling body. Cells are both much more complex than free-swimming bacteria but also less free, more controlled and regulated by other cells.

So, as people increasingly hide from the elements outside - pollution, congestion, crime, etc - they will hide with with "cells" like the bacteria, Iodidimonas, found itself safely inside an archaea millions of years ago and became the mitochondria of the first eukaryotic cells.

The elite youths will be fine. The others? Probably destined to be sitting at home online, being monitored in every possible way by advertisers and governments, their lifestyle supported by UBI.

We are creatures of our time. We have been conditioned to a way of life that is disappearing in this rapidly-changing world. The future is always awful, nearly as awful as the past. We are not conditioned for those times, only ours. Imagine what Homo habilis would think of modern life with its rules, complexities and sterility. It would disgust them, just as the future would disgust us. However, young people who know nothing else will feel differently towards their situations.

[LuckyR]

"Disconnect" is the word.

It's common today for claims to be made about how people are becoming dumber, more unfit, let motivated and so on. This is caused by negativity bias.

An example to describe the growing divide is top level sport. Increasingly strong, fit, fast, athletic and skilled sportspeople perform ever greater feats for ever fatter and unfit crowds. Top scientists "stand on the shoulders of giants" as they probe areas that scientists of the past can only dream about, while many people don't even know the difference between a country and a continent, cannot construct a coherent sentence, or basic mental arithmetic.

AI will no doubt bridge the gap between society's needs and human degradation. It feels to me that humans are becoming more like cells of an organism than bacteria in a colony, no longer individuals in a group but components of a larger, controlling body. Cells are both much more complex than free-swimming bacteria but also less free, more controlled and regulated by other cells.

So, as people increasingly hide from the elements outside - pollution, congestion, crime, etc - they will hide with with "cells" like the bacteria, Iodidimonas, found itself safely inside an archaea millions of years ago and became the mitochondria of the first eukaryotic cells.

The elite youths will be fine. The others? Probably destined to be sitting at home online, being monitored in every possible way by advertisers and governments, their lifestyle supported by UBI.

We are creatures of our time. We have been conditioned to a way of life that is disappearing in this rapidly-changing world. The future is always awful, nearly as awful as the past. We are not conditioned for those times, only ours. Imagine what Homo habilis would think of modern life with its rules, complexities and sterility. It would disgust them, just as the future would disgust us. However, young people who know nothing else will feel differently towards their situations.

Exactly. We've been here before. There was once a time when the majority of people knew how to live off the land. After urbanization and agriculture only a small minority know how to create foodstuffs anymore and the majority developed other, new skillsets. It's kind of like older farmers lamenting that "kids these days" don't know how to hunt or gather anymore. The difference this time is that before, the advent of urbanization increased the opportunities of (F2F) social interaction as a byproduct. Now, young folk in large urban areas are increasingly isolated within an ocean of other isolated individuals.

[Lagayascienza]

I think the danger is that the young will weaken, that they will disconnect. I worry that, for many of them, it will all become too hard. That's why I tell them to play with AI. It's here already. They need to learn how to deal with it or it will deal with them. They need to get with the program. A strange new world is upon us. But a strange new world has always been upon us. The universe, doesn't give a sh+t about how hard or strange we find it. Survivors are those who figure out how to get with the strangeness and to leverage it to their own purposes. Nietzsche was right. Even if it kills you, live life to the full so that if ever you were asked, would you live it again, you would say Yes! to life:

"Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things; and if our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence—and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed."

Nietzsche - The Will to Power

[Sy Borg]

I think the danger is that the young will weaken, that they will disconnect. I worry that, for many of them, it will all become too hard.

Is that like a tactful version of how our generation were thought to be to be lily-livered wastrels by those born not so long after the turn of the century?

A strange new world is upon us. But a strange new world has always been upon us. The universe, doesn't give a sh+t about how hard or strange we find it. Survivors are those who figure out how to get with the strangeness and to leverage it to their own purposes.

To be fair, strange new world arrived rather more slowly in the past. It's rate of change that's exceptional. Once there was a generation gap, how there's multiple gaps - twenty-five year-olds today can easily find themselves outdated and superseded, especially if they are white males, which is today about as well-regarded as being a black woman in the 1950s. One hopes the pendulum keeps swinging until a balance is achieved.

[Lagayascienza]

Yes, I was going to talk about the present rate of change compared to the more stately pace of change experienced by previous generations. The pace of change is why I worry that it will be harder for the young of today than it was for us oldies. I know that the world of the first 35 years of my life seemed calmer and more certain than the world of the second 35 years. But that may be just how it seems looking back - nostalgia, rose-colored glasses, and all that. It's unlikely that the pendulum will ever stop swinging as it gets constantly nudged by changing social circumstances and forces and as people jostle for position and status.

[Sy Borg]

Yes, I was going to talk about the present rate of change compared to the more stately pace of change experienced by previous generations. The pace of change is why I worry that it will be harder for the young of today than it was for us oldies. I know that the world of the first 35 years of my life seemed calmer and more certain than the world of the second 35 years. But that may be just how it seems looking back - nostalgia, rose-colored glasses, and all that. It's unlikely that the pendulum will ever stop swinging as it gets constantly nudged by changing social circumstances and forces and as people jostle for position and status.

Hopefully, each swing of the pendulum will reduce until the tropes lose their potency. Then, I guess, new issues will emerge.