Choice – we can’t handle the choice

Today is the 21,162nd day I have been alive, but I still haven’t worked out how to be a human. Last day of a fascinating 2 week business trip to China, I chose to wear last night’s now stinky, crinkly shirt to breakfast in Singapore, because I only had one more shirt left for the flight. My fellow diners at the buffet breakfast, all sporting posh clothes, already aghast at what I was bringing to the party visually and olfactorily, stared at my frankenbreakfast of nasi lemak, smoked salmon bagel and pain au chocolat. To escape their stares, I turned on youtube on my ipad. The algorithm knows I like animal rescues, and showed me a video of a man taking a 16 year old dog home from the shelter, so it could live out its last days at home. As I started blubbing, my neighbours turned their children’s heads away from the weirdo’s table. To try to stop crying, I rubbed my eyes with fingers covered in sambal. And so ensued 15 minutes of trying to stop my eyes burning with tissues dipped in my water jug. In short, I made lots of terrible choices. As ‘sambalgate’ died down, I began thinking that choice is the next thing we have to worry about. If global conflict and geopolitics, pandemics, global warming and deep fakes weren’t enough. Choice used to be seen be economists as an unadulterated good thing, a sign of development. Now we realize that too much choice in many circumstances is a bad thing. The burden of freedom of choice. I am reminded of this every time I am baffled by details trying to buy a laptop. Think about the choices that are coming. We will be able to design every detail of our baby’s DNA with AI and CRISPR. Decide how many and which types of our unarticulated thoughts we are prepared to share with governments and advertisers with brainwave-reading AI. How we want our personal virtual agents to negotiate on our behalf. To paraphrase Colonel Nathan R. Jessup (Jack Nicholson) in “A Few Good Men”: “Choice: We can’t handle the choice”. #unthink #unask #progress #innovation #AI #genAI