There have been things I have been avoiding thinking about for some time because the need isn’t immediate, the world has been pretty unpredictable, and there doesn’t seem to be a great place to be anywhere on the planet.
If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
This past week I withdrew and thought about the things I had been avoiding. I had hoped some years ago that if I pushed that last bit I pushed, I could stop pushing. I could be static instead of dynamic. In that time, I focused on myself. I focused on some health issues, which are in check.
My sanity has been established, and as a psychologist put it, ‘despite the things I have been through’. So there’s that.
The world, though, has been disturbing my revery. I needed to think about the future. I needed to think about where I should be and what I should be doing.
I needed to wake up.
It seems to me that the world has become less and less certain. We have artificial intelligence, we have some pretty weird stuff with economies, maybe even because of algorithmic trading, and we have people all scraping by and trying to find a future out of the past of others.
I don’t know what exactly is coming next, but it’s time to make sure all the tools at my disposal are at the ready for whatever comes next.
Writing is something I enjoy, so I will keep doing that. Technology is something I have a stronger familiarity with than most. These past years, though, have had me also growing well beyond those things, and it’s time to see where that means my future is.
Honestly, it’s a little fun waking up. I didn’t even realize I was asleep until the nightmare became unrelenting.
My mind is a bit cluttered. Sometimes I simply vegetate somewhere and blank it off, and sometimes I go through my mind, taking things out and examining them one by one. Sundays are good days for that.
It’s also sort of like a roundup. I have a thunderstorm playing on Youtube for ambience and the sun has crept up.
It really got me thinking about the different varieties of mango that I grew up with but don’t see much of anymore, even in the more rural areas. In the US, where I also understand the perspective at the market, a mango is just a mango. Growing up, though, this was not so.
I grew up with Greyham mangoes, large grafted mangoes that could count as an entire meal – even in the U.S. ‘Judy’ mangoes were about half the size. ‘Doo Doos’ mangoes were popular but I always found them annoyingly small – too much work for too little meat.
The Hog/Rose mangoes were for making mango chow – a recipe which is fairly basic that always varies a bit from person to person. Any recipe calling for chillis with the mango chow is not a mango chow recipe, I’m sorry. It could be a Thai dish, which is different, but growing up we had the scotch bonnets, the bird peppers (whose proper name I do not know) whose trees magically sprung where the birds dropped the post-digested seeds.
Anecdotally, the birds suffered a long time in Trinidad and Tobago when the government routinely sprayed malathion all over the place for mosquitoes. They have made a resurgence, all the different tanagers and thrushes and grieves, but the bird peppers never really seemed to come back. You can get them here and there, and I’m on the lookout.
‘Long’ mangoes were for cooking, for making mango talkari, as well as mango kuchela. In the ingredients for the video below, you’ll see the author specified ‘long’ mangoes, and verily, those are indeed long mangoes!
There were all these different types of mangoes, and when I listened to my elders when I was younger, they too would talk about mangoes that they could no longer get.
There are reasons some of these species don’t make it, but the main reason is because of humans. There was a time when everyone seemed to have access to a mango tree in Trinidad and Tobago, but because of people not cleaning under their trees or keeping them properly trimmed, the answer people came up with was to cut them down. Those were generally the generic rose/hog mangoes.
Then there’s the marketplace, where long mangoes and a few other species are bought en masse for foreign markets and for local companies to produce products. If you wanted to make money, having a rose/hog mango tree wasn’t of interest.
The mangoes that do make it to the American markets – not from Trinidad and Tobago, I think mainly from Mexico – have to travel well.
That lead me to a conversation I had with a Minister of Technology of St. Lucia over a Piton, circa 2005, as he explained the banana market issues that St. Lucia was having. I don’t know how it is now, but I’m fairly certain that St. Lucia’s exports are seeing severe competition from the larger land massed nations for the European markets. At the time it seemed they were being edged out, and I don’t know if they have been (yet?), but an island simply can’t compete with a nation that has much more land mass.
We like to throw around, ‘banana republic‘ a lot when we speak of some developing nations without understanding the history related to mainly Guatemala and Honduras. Even so, the banana is an interesting fruit because it needs us to propagate it, and what people see in the developing world as bananas are actually only one type of Musa. There are a thousand types of banana, but only a few are the ones that the developing nations are interested in.
I grew up knowing at least 10 types of banana in Trinidad and Tobago, now I only see maybe 2 varieties regularly. If one of you finds some ‘man-killer’ fig, I’m looking.
The then Minister told me about the color charts, the size charts, and that bananas that didn’t meet very specific criteria were thrown away, which by itself as a travesty. I remember noting the neatly kept graveyard across the road while we were drinking our Pitons and thinking what an odd coincidence that was.
What’s worse, if a supplier, like St. Lucia, didn’t meet it’s annual quota, the balance was carried over to the next year which meant that the supplier would have to produce even more bananas. Banana republic indeed. One bad year and it could mean a severe loss of income for many years as the Banana Republic plays ‘catch up’ to a quota they can’t make. Over one type of Musa.
That means more and more of the precious land on an island would be devoted to the monoculture of Musa. Why precious? Populations rarely stay the same, they have a tendency to grow because one of humanities recreational activities – indeed, the one that motivates so many things – is making more humans.
Thus, the biodiversity of an island can be wrecked even as the economy destabilizes. That’s why when people in Trinidad and Tobago say we should be growing more of our own food, even as the government takes arable land and builds houses on it, I wonder where they intend to find the land to do so. Yet the government in Trinidad and Tobago, about as archaic as the year the present Prime Minister was born (1949), doesn’t change much regardless of political party is in charge.
Jamaica had a similar incident related to coffee, where only the Constitution of Jamaica saved the land of Jamaica’s coffee farmers from being seized. I can’t find a link for it, but it was something discussed at the very table with the Minister for St. Lucia.
Growing monocultures of vegetables or fruits, a way to feed massive cities, wrecks rural areas, not unlike what coal did to the poorest regions of America.
I don’t expect you to watch the entire video here on the site, but it’s worth watching on YouTube and quite revealing.
We have a tendency to forget – and I include myself – where power comes from, where produce comes from, and how much it costs beyond economics. This is not to say that it can be done otherwise. ‘Organic farming’, as an example, requires a lot more land to produce the same amount of produce, and drug cartels are finding their own opportunities with avocados and limes.
What a strange world, where the paths to our continued stability could be the seeds of our own destruction. The bananas and mangoes must flow!
Is there anyone to blame? I don’t know that there is. We’re all born into a system, to press forward we have to work within the system, and then eventually we find faults with the systems.
Maybe we need new systems. I’m sure very smart people have had very smart meetings with lots of big words, but in the end… we want things from all over the world now. How many bananas can St. Lucia sell to balance it’s imports? How much coffee for Jamaica? Did we forget Haiti? France didn’t, that’s for sure.
I’m sure I’m not the first to wonder about this. I’m sure I won’t be the last.
There’s no call to action here, and I’m not saying anything is right or wrong. I’m just wondering what the future holds for people on both sides. Will there be banana riots in stores in the U.S. and Europe if not enough bananas are to be had? Will there be a Black Friday for avocados when the cartels withhold avocados? We see what’s happened with coal, with oil, and so on.
It’s almost too ridiculous to consider, but then I’ve been on the planet for more than 50 years and seen plenty of ridiculous. We are not that far removed from our cousins fighting over the best trees in the jungle.
It’s worth taking a few moments to think about over a cup of coffee. I have no answers, but I have a lot of questions and I think we all should.
An inordinate amount of my life has been spent staring into the abyss of the future, trying to peer around it’s fluid corners so I can be prepared for whatever comes next.
Something always comes next.
For the most part, I’ve been pretty good at it. I’ve hedged bets and maybe at times been too conservative, choosing less risk as the present cut to the bone.
Lately, on a global level, we have some blanks that are difficult to fill in. Ken’s post, “A Future That Worries Me“, covers quite a bit of these things and is worth the read. In some ways I have written about some of the things, in others not as much (which is one reason why you should read other people).
In a way, it centers around a distrust in who we are as a species, I think, always playing it fast and loose. Sure, it got us here, but what if here is a dead end? Do we have a plan? Even a thought?
Here’s a twist. Here’s where I think we may, as a species, may be getting things wrong.
Silos. Not just specialized knowledge in this regard, but also different siloed perspectives of the same knowledge.
The “Be Inspired” blog’s post, What Are You Reading, makes the point about balanced reading – something, too, I haven’t always been good at because I have a tendency to stick with a lot of the latest non-fiction. What she doesn’t get at is to read broadly, to take on new perspectives on the same things. Many people will read a book and only have the perspective of that book, which isn’t always a good thing. Being able to appreciate different perspectives is an important thing and it helps break down the other silos of perspective.
We don’t do that enough. Educational institutions are about specialization. Where there were once books, there are specialized YouTube channels and TikToks. How mundane.
On that note I’ll end with my favorite Heinlein quote.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
It’s not often I switch my focus to Trinidad and Tobago, though I live here. In the minutiae, it’s always very busy with cars going to and fro in a rush to go stand in some form of line somewhere, or to drop children off to a school, or to go to the nearest KFC so they can get to the front of the line and then decide what they want to get.
There is a charm to it, the lilting accent Trinis are famous for a form of spoken poetry, an evolving pidgin that has all but lost some of it’s French Creole roots. When I grew up here, ‘oui!‘ was still but rarely used to end sentences, now replaced with the English, ‘yes!’. Language changes. The lilt does not.
This was a lyrical land, though it’s hard to see it now. Waves of subversive lyrics would cast spells over the populace, not direct enough to be offensive to those in authority, but understood well enough that they became popular, were sung, and parts of the lyrics often injected in conversation as a subversive poke at whatever needed to be poked at. There was always plenty.
Nowadays, it’s difficult to find that in lyrics. I won’t say it’s impossible, I simply haven’t heard much of it other than David Rudder, perhaps the last popular spokesperson of that world. Now it’s clamoring bass with witty lyrics like, “Wave your hand in the air!”. Such originality lost in paradise.
As a teenager, I saw promise in the magazines I impatiently waited for. I would wait for my Uncle’s subscriptions to Time Magazine and National Geographic to go visit him, as I could, and I would read hungrily these missives from the rest of the world about the dawn of an Information Age. There was promise, there was a future. Oddly, at the dawn of the Information Age, in a tropical nation, those who were in authority were afraid of sunlight. They still are. Transparency, making decisions based on data, seems like a version of magic considered evil by some.
On returning to Trinidad and Tobago again and again over the decades, I saw what could only be described as arrested development. I saw it as a tidal pool, something I wrote about. I still do. And looking at Trinidad and Tobago through the lens of the future of artificial intelligence, I see a self-inflicted artificial extinction as more people from Trinidad and Tobago will go abroad to join the global economy.
The wheels of government, when they move in the right direction, move too slow and for political reasons. The impatient world will not stop or turn around for Trinidad and Tobago, it will press forward even as I imagine political parties will try to leverage ChatGPT to stay in power – because that seems all they wish to do. Education isn’t what it used to be while crime has people huddled on WhatsApp chats sharing video of shootings, attempted home invasions and standard political nonsense.
All this nation knows is self-congratulating bureaucracy in most regards. Perhaps the red on the flag has come to symbolize the red tape.
Yet there is hope. I’m not sure where it comes from, but that’s the spirit of hope. It’s peculiar to see a nation I grew up in so hopeless, but when I grew up was imperfect too – and maybe because dinosaurs will not die the future will not come. Generations of promises broken have taught the younger generations distrust, generations of not opening the economy beyond distinct special interests has left an economy closed to all but those who pay the tolls through political donation.
But it is not that different from the rest of the world. Not the world piped into flat screens by Hollywood, or the BBC, which even ring hollow in parts of their nations.
What is different is the capacity to change things.
Let’s time travel back to 2017 and read something.
Most jobs that exist today might disappear within decades. As artificial intelligence outperforms humans in more and more tasks, it will replace humans in more and more jobs. Many new professions are likely to appear: virtual-world designers, for example. But such professions will probably require more creativity and flexibility, and it is unclear whether 40-year-old unemployed taxi drivers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers (try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!). And even if the ex-insurance agent somehow makes the transition into a virtual-world designer, the pace of progress is such that within another decade he might have to reinvent himself yet again…
We’re on the brink, and while Sundar Pichai may be using lawyers as examples, it stands to reason that there will be a shift in jobs of people who aren’t reading stuff like this to jobs where people… aren’t reading stuff like this.
It’s a really good article and worth exploring, since he condenses some ideas from his books nicely within it. Written 6 years ago, you’ll likely see that the future hasn’t changed that much in 6 years. It’s just gotten closer.
This is an existential thing for many jobs, but everyone is so busy working those jobs that they seem to have no time to notice. What are you doing to pay the bills, and how safe is it from the future?
Well, nothing’s safe from the future, but there are many jobs that will be safe. But there are many that won’t be. Worth considering before you turn on the television and plop on the couch.
What if we’re all parts of one organism we call humanity? Like cells, but not. We’ve even managed to grow a nervous system which you’re using to read this now. Everyone wants to be the brain, and we like to speculate about things like collective intelligence when more often than not we see collective stupidity. There’s a reason that the intestines weigh more than the brain.
So, what’s the plan? As an organism, what are we doing? Aside form warring with other parts of ourselves and evolving structures, what, exactly, are we up to? At this point we just erode a planet, but to what end? We don’t have a plan.
As individuals we’re very busy, racing to and fro, but the almost all of what we produce is not what other species are too interested in. This is why the dolphins have not evolved feet; they do not want to see our great cities. Some primates stay in the trees and fling poo at us as we pass by. Some species just say, “screw it!” and go extinct, even as elephants wander around trying to reclaim territory from invaders who are just trying to sustain themselves.
Self-interest. We’re all pretty busy with self-interest, like all the other creatures on the planet. It’s a survival trait, it’s nothing to be ashamed of – we’ve come from a long line of self-interested people who somehow managed to procreate. Certainly, we help each other, but do we really? Does that farmer in India in that village really need to be having it out for some subsistence farming while facing our elephants?
Don’t get me wrong. It’s good to be productive members of society, but it also seems like we are just racing against each other all the time and as a species we don’t really have a direction. We have the people who have the most of what we’re told we should produce doing some pretty odd things that don’t really benefit us, like a car as space junk in the solar system. What other species does that?
“We’re going to expend all this energy to fling a car into space!” doesn’t seem like something myself or anyone else agreed to. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have approved had I been asked, but it’s not likely.
Allegedly the intent is to get people interested in space travel, though I’m not sure what the selling point of space travel to the old lady who just got home from Walmart with sore feet, which she has basic health insurance to help her with as long as she makes her co-pay. It’s a reality. Does that car, that costs more than she may make in 3 years, inspire her in Space travel, or does she wish she could live freely without her feet being sore all the damned time? Her grandson might be inspired, but he’s busy dodging gluten while stationary and staring at a flat screen.
“Grandma, they sent an electric car into space!”
“That’s nice dear.”
Grandpa, who died of a heart attack on the way to the ground as he fell off that roofing project, would have been more practical had he been paying attention, “Well, that electric car spinning it’s wheels in space has no purpose!”, and promptly got back to making those, “Get off my lawn!” signs. He sold those as a side project so he could afford the co-pays on health insurance. Sadly, he could not invest in the future NFT disaster before he died otherwise he would have been noteworthy to his grandson for 15 seconds, between swipes.
Personally, I like the space exploration thing, but I’m writing here that it’s not the top priority for everyone. It’s not even my top priority, honestly. Hear me out.
Genetics has proven we’ve got loads of ancestors who loved two main things: Sex and Travel. Someone way back when whispered, “Go forth and prosper!”, and let me tell you we took that very seriously – so seriously that we’ve pretty much run out of spots on the planet. In fact, some people might even consider that this happened a while ago. There’s a clip of Sam Kinison cracking a joke about people who need food are living in a desert, which, on it’s face, is funny and should have people asking why people are living in those areas. Maybe they could move somewhere else, but now we have lines on the planet that restrict travel.
So what we have is a survival trait of being nomadic becoming a liability. The “stay put” gene, if there is one, is becoming dominant. As a society, we’re becoming conditioned to stay in certain places rather than wander – and that makes the idea that by the time those people in the desert can wander space they just might want to stay put since the idea of nomadism was finally extinct. After all, they’re in a desert without Netflix. You know there will be kids born.
What we’re deciding, really, is who gets to go exploring. The grandchildren of that farmer in India isn’t going to get a Willy Wonka ticket to get on that spaceship.
I don’t know where we’re going as a species, but I’m pretty sure where we’re not going.
I’ll now return you to your regularly scheduled life of productivity to whatever end.
If I had been born a few hundred years ago, I would likely have been on a ship staring out into the horizon, my body rolling to the waves, heading to places not on known maps if only to get away from all that traps us.
Some people are comfortable in what society dictated before we were born, where it is all well defined by those who came before, a world which worked for those that defined it and their descendants. So much of our world works that way, and as humanity grows older the clay of systems becomes brick, hardened, inflexible, immobile.
A child born today will find in adulthood that they pay taxes that were agreed upon by others long ago, that they may worship in a religion that while they may be faithful is an accident of geography, that they have more or less opportunity due to a socioeconomic status that they had nothing to do with. Even our bodies conspire against us in this way, subject to genetics that some deny even as they breed animals. Few, if any, break out of these shells, and as time goes by it becomes harder and harder to break out of them.
In fact, simply traveling without permission from authorities we didn’t create across borders we didn’t draw to see things in other places is illegal, something I myself was born into, but which I have watched become more and more harsh. The nomadic roots of our human past find themselves in shrinking containers and, when the container cracks under the pressure, someone dutifully comes along and mends the cracks with gold to make the container that much more attractive to those outside, but less bearable for those within.
We live lives where we dig coal, and for those few of us fortunate, we dig coal in ways that we enjoy, and at points when we look up from our task and dare to look to the horizon, someone or something cracks the whip to keep our noses down. And so we go, nose to the coal grindstone of ‘life’, in the hope that the light at the end of the tunnel will draw nearer as someone long ago promised.
A lifetime of slaving at something or the other, or many things, to be rewarded later when we are old. The 50 year old in the convertible corvette, what’s left of his hair blowing in the wind, the tired and empty joke of decades ago.
I’ve been left in this life rediscovering elder things, repurposing that which came before, exploring the abandoned as if it were new only because it was new to me, sharing it with others who found it new for themselves. Photographing things, writing about things, and watching parts of a past we romanticize only because it is abandoned, maybe because inside we feel abandoned by the gilded cages we live in – some more gilded than others.
I do not know. I do feel.
There is little rationality we find in such feelings in systems that tell us even how to feel – if we’re a bit too different, if you rebel just a bit too much against the system, we are either criminal or someone with some form of mental or emotional disorder, rarely both, and based on… things we find we are unable to control a few steps beyond the facade.
With all of this mind, I close my eyes at time and escape into the view of a bay with my gear packed, thinking of a world where I can sail away from what is established and able to push into the unknown, where the laws of nature outweigh the rules of the land, where it is unsafe and where one’s worth is gauged not by artificial structures but instead whether or not you are a good person in a storm.
And I open my eyes and find myself sailing through the artificial structures of society, dancing on the waves of what people have been taught to think and believe and how to think and believe, and realize I am sailing across the most dangerous waters we could create on maps that shift even as we cross latitudes and longitudes, having lost members of the steadfast crew as we moved to the horizon of humanity, and I find some comfort in that.
I don’t really like mirrors – I never have for whatever reason – yet now and then I use them to make sure I don’t look like someone who hates mirrors. Those people are relatively easy to spot, and they stand out a bit too much to be able to disappear into the background and observe effectively.
And every now and then I stare into the mirror and look at myself. I look at what is there. I think about what used to be there. As we grow older, we start with grey hair, we start with wrinkles – lines that tell us what facial expressions we wear the most. We see the scars and remember their stories.
We remember what used to be there, the younger versions of us that would become what is there now. We become the maps of our lives, a physical story of the changes made by ourselves.
And then I pull away and move on – not because I don’t like what I see, liking it or disliking it is of no value. It’s the same reason I’ve always hated mirrors.
They can only tell you what is there and you can only see what has happened between stops at the mirror.
The salt breeze beckons. Standing on the edge, water Laps at the feet, licks the legs The toes sink with each wave, Rooting, poised, still, ready Anchored in the present, Eyes to the future The tide dragging it closer, The past washes away.
Once again, I drove out to the beach this morning expecting the chill start of the day would create great isotherms with the sub-Saharan dust, making for wonderful colors. The chill would assure less people were there running through my frames.
And like most quiet mornings there, I had time to consider. There are a lot of things on my mind right now – be it finding the next job, to issues with land, to family, to friends, to all those details that compose our lives – and we tend to judge them in black and white. We tend to think in what’s good for us and what’s not. If you think long enough about them, they become noise and you can get underneath.
This morning, underneath, I thought about how some live lives that they regret while others regret lives that they don’t have – and how wasteful regret is when you are staring at a horizon.A colorful horizon.
Where we stand gives us the view, how we got to that point is history – a series of steps or missteps, a product of planning with a co-efficient of the randomness of life. There is no sense in worrying about how we got there. the only thing that really matters is where we want to be – where we think we’re supposed to be…
What if we’re all parts of one organism we call humanity? Like cells, but not. We’ve even managed to grow a nervous system which you’re using to read this now. Everyone wants to be the brain, and we like to speculate about things like collective intelligence when more often than not we see collective stupidity. There’s a reason that 
I don’t really like mirrors – I never have for whatever reason – yet now and then I use them to make sure I don’t look like someone who hates mirrors. Those people are relatively easy to spot, and they stand out a bit too much to be able to disappear into the background and observe effectively.
