{"id":34637,"date":"2024-01-15T11:00:29","date_gmt":"2024-01-15T19:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=34637"},"modified":"2023-12-23T05:58:42","modified_gmt":"2023-12-23T13:58:42","slug":"its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-i-feel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-i-feel\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s the End of the World As We Know It, And I Feel."},"content":{"rendered":"

Spoiler Alert:<\/strong> \u00a0The following post contains spoilers for Eve Poole’s 2024 book entitled Robot Souls: Programming in Humanity,<\/em> as well as for the 2024 Netflix movie Leave the World Behind<\/em> starring America’s Sweetheart Julia Roberts. I consumed both at approximately the same period of time (the week after our final Spring semester class), and the connections and overlaps are stunning.<\/p>\n

Poole’s book was consumed in paperback form, although the back cover denotes that it is also available as an “eBook edition in a range of digital formats.” Leave the World Behind, <\/em>a thriller based on a book of the same name by Rumaan Alam, was consumed twice (once is simply not enough) in digital form, via the Netflix app on our 65-inch Vizio 4K HDR Smart TV.<\/p>\n

A bowl of popcorn and copious amounts of La Croix were also consumed.<\/p>\n

Leave the World Behind<\/em> tells the story of a family whose vacation (at a beach-town short-term rental) is interrupted when strangers (who actually OWN said short-term rental) arrive to tell them of a worldwide blackout. Both groups must band together as the world seemingly experiences global, doomsday cyberattacks. Since watching the movie I have been talking with handfuls of people about its larger themes, warnings, and implications. In many cases, my bantering has been met with “Hmm, I thought it was good movie,” or “Gosh, I remember watching Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman<\/em> or\u00a0Mystic<\/em> Pizza.”\u00a0That’s it. Fodder. Silly talk. Not much in the way of substance or deep reflection.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I am gripped by the subtle and not-so-subtle deeper questions, subject matter, and cautionary warnings, such as:<\/p>\n

\u2022 Digital screens can serve as both an escape and a reflection of reality. In the movie, each member is deeply engrossed in their personal devices, at the expense of one another, only to have those personal escapes rendered dead and useless.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Humanity has a glaring over-reliance upon online digital content. When the world started to fall apart all digital content was seemingly gone, leaving only analog options (vinyl, CD’s, DVD’s, etc), and, God-forbid, human connection, as evidenced in the movies consistent usage of the 90’s show Friends. <\/em>The episode mentioned throughout is called “The Last One” and it’s a movie trope that harkens us back to six lonely young people in New York, expressing “I’ll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour….” And, boy, when it rains it sure does pour.<\/p>\n

\u2022 American society has historical fissures, such as racism, class inequality and intolerance, that threaten to implode us as a nation. One of the opening, ominous scenes was that of a massive oil tanker named White Lion<\/em> running aground on a heavily populated Long Island beach. Per History.com<\/a>, the White Lion<\/em> was the English ship that was first responsible for bringing enslaved Africans to the Virginia Colony in 1619. That ship’s journey is widely credited as the start of slavery in America, which is perhaps the greatest crime that America has ever committed.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Automated, AI-controlled technologies, if left unchecked could be agents of destruction. This is seen so clearly as tens of thousands of self-driving Telsa vehicles crash together in a massive high-speed pileup. Thanks Elon.<\/p>\n

I could go on and on. This stuff gets me amped. And I’m not alone, Eve Poole says “If we do not strive to equip our robots [AI, technology, etc] with this programming [soul, moral agency, etc], we may have spawned a race of psychopaths from who we will need protection” (Poole, 131). Poole asks an important question: “Do we embrace AI, or do we panic and lock it down?” She goes on to maintain, “we will only have ourselves to blame if we do not act now to try to rectify our programming mistakes” (Poole, 124). In an effort to create machines that are, by design, smarter than us, we have to reconcile the reality that they can (and most likely will) overrun us. In a recent New York Times<\/a> article about OpenAI it states, “From\u00a0the moment it was created in 2015, OpenAI was primed to combust.”<\/p>\n

So, how do we program our robots and AI with free will, uncertainty, emotions, mistake-making and matters of the soul, before it destroys us?<\/p>\n

Now, I’m not like “Danny” the conspiracy theorist of the film, played by Kevin Bacon, although I might be six-degrees separated from it. I’m not advocating stocking up on can foods, hiding in a bunker and cutting off all digital connection, but I am calling for, well, connection. Actual. Human. Connection.<\/p>\n

We all need Friends<\/em> (RIP Matthew Perry) – not just the 90’s sitcom, although that wouldn’t hurt, but actual friends.<\/em><\/p>\n

Not just the ones that we scroll through, heart, or thumbs up. Analog friends. IRL.<\/p>\n

If the Covid-19 pandemic taught us anything, it’s that we need fellow humans, community, and connection. And, as Poole notes, “humans still turn to religion when their world has turned upside down” (Poole, 93). This invites another deep question, one I have been wrestling with for a number of years: Can we actually find deep community in an online church service?<\/p>\n

How ironic was it that as our world was falling apart during the pandemic we collectively moved more and more into virtual spaces? The irony is about as thick as Julia Roberts staring in Leave the World Behind<\/em>\u00a0as Amanda Sandford, that highlights Friends, <\/em>a TV show from 30 years ago, in which she had a cameo as Susie Moss. All of this would bring attention to the fact that Leave the World Behind <\/em>and Friends <\/em>cannot really exist in the same time and space. Therefore, Julia Roberts is a paradox.<\/p>\n

There, I said it.<\/p>\n

And while I’m being honest, I think America’s Sweetheart is overrated. She hasn’t had a good movie since Notting Hill<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Don’t judge me. That’s just how I FEEL.<\/p>\n

And, as the song says, “It’s the end of the world as we know it. It’s the end of the world as we know it. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel<\/em><\/p>\n

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fine.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spoiler Alert: \u00a0The following post contains spoilers for Eve Poole’s 2024 book entitled Robot Souls: Programming in Humanity, as well as for the 2024 Netflix movie Leave the World Behind starring America’s Sweetheart Julia Roberts. I consumed both at approximately the same period of time (the week after our final Spring semester class), and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2310],"tags":[2956,2954,2955,2090],"class_list":["post-34637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-doctor-of-leadership-3","tag-juliaroberts","tag-robot","tag-soul","tag-poole","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34637"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34655,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34637\/revisions\/34655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}