The weight of the moment cannot be stronger than I am. And yet, though I am accustomed to facing change, I belong to a generation that has witnessed the greatest technological expansion in human history — television, telephony, fax, personal computers, then the internet, and now artificial intelligence.
During my three-mile walk, I try to make sense of how discordant it has been to witness so many leaps within a single lifetime. I remember when the first personal computers arrived. Many workers refused to use them and preferred to keep encoding data manually on long stacks of paper that would later be tabulated. Few truly understood how those numbers were processed inside enormous machines — several meters tall and wide — machines that looked closer to factory equipment than to office tools.
Thinking about this, I walk and reflect. Back then, resistance to change existed. Today, it seems it no longer does. Change now moves at such speed that resisting it has become nearly impossible. It simply happens.
Death becomes a punishment for the body when it can no longer perform the miracle of existing. For that reason, as our most extreme fear, we resist exchanging life for death. Fear, according to Socrates, is the anticipation of an evident evil. Philosophers and thinkers have long agreed on this.
The symbiosis between resistance to change and fear, acting as its accelerator, is generated in our brains not as an act of thought but as an instinct of preservation. Yet today death seems less associated with the fear of extreme change. In the collective consciousness of humanity, death no longer inspires dread and is increasingly treated as one more element of circumstance. The value of life now appears to draw more from the display of achievement and pride than from the dignity of existence itself.
Before the arrival of the internet and the excesses of technological expansion, change did not confront human beings with such force, and the instinct of preservation was rarely called upon to prove its courage. Today, however, change appears at such accelerated speed that our intuitive resistance has been displaced and transformed into circumstantial acceptance. We often cannot determine whether a change that overwhelms us — one that has never been examined by our own conscience — is good or bad.
The tendency now is for humanity to assume a priori that whatever becomes more sophisticated must therefore be progress. Changes arrive unannounced and paradoxically accepted. Toxic mutations pass before us without ever being subjected to the act of resistance that once defined our caution.
It is deeply troubling, for example, that a nuclear weapon can be refined to achieve even greater lethal reach in the name of evolution. The destruction of humanity should not be placed in human hands, for no one possesses the right to generate transformations that could lead to collective annihilation.
Through this evolution — which, far from filling us with pride, should perhaps terrify us — humanity now seeks to control itself in ways that border on the supernatural. The natural world changes differently. The earth produces its own transformations through earthquakes, atmospheric corrections of hurricanes, typhoons and tornadoes, and the delicate balance of melting ice and rising floods. The changes carried out by human beings, by contrast, should exist to protect life from the power of nature’s transformations.
What is certain is that these transformations now present themselves when resistance is no longer possible; we adopt them according to their nature. The sensation we experience today is no longer defined by the instinct of preservation, but by our capacity for astonishment in the face of the velocity of events we call change.
We now find ourselves gravitating within realities that arrive unexpectedly and shift even as we begin to understand them. Contemporary transformations are profoundly mutable. We almost have to chase them in order to comprehend them, yet they move faster than our own imagination.
Human beings are demonstrating that self-satisfaction and the cult of achievement have alienated us, separating us from the respect and caution that fear of change once inspired. Our lives are increasingly placed in the hands of algorithms that predict nearly everything we might do, corralling human consciousness into green pastures that contain no nourishment.
Artificial intelligence arrived without consultation and installed itself as entertainment before it became anything else. Resistance to change had no role in its development, and for that reason it emerges as if from nowhere, moving through our lives like a new era of colonialism that constructs ghettos of will beneath the arrogant logic of “take it or leave it.”
Today change carries meanings far removed from our instincts of preservation and from our ancient understanding of the fear of death. The speed with which it arrives leaves us without the time required to resist it, examine it, or even understand it.
Perhaps for that reason humanity has begun to accept transformations it has never truly had the opportunity to think about.
And so, almost without noticing it, resistance to change no longer holds.