How will A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) affect our lives, and where is the changing culture of the United States heading?

As things seem to get worse around the globe and right here at home, our urgency to be better prepared escalates daily. With social, economic, and political divides, with world conflicts, and with our national debt, it seems that something is going to give.

Let’s imagine for a second that nothing major happens in the next 20 to 50 years. What does the future hold for the U.S. and the rest of the world? How will A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) affect our lives, and where is the changing culture of the United States heading?

The Face of Preparedness is Changing

As they say “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. When push comes to shove, the basics of preparedness and survival remain the same, how we get to that point could be different in the future. While technology is great, it also opens us up to new types of threats.

We are becoming more and more dependent on technology and automation as the days go by, and this is both a good and a bad thing. Life is much easier than it was 20 or 30 years ago, but at what cost?

SPP256 Artificial Intelligence, Family Values & Propaganda

This week Lisa and I talked about what the future might have in store for us as preppers. As quickly as people and technology is advancing and “evolving” these days, our culture is changing, and criminals are becoming more high tech.

Creature of Habit

In the show we talked about how easily we fall prey to propaganda, and how propaganda isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the days of political propaganda posters. These days it’s more subtle, and far more effective.

The majority of people are sheep, and will move along with the other sheep in order to not stand out. The media is the sheepdog that moves the herd where it wants it to go. Unfortunately all the sheep thrust this sheepdog, even if it is leading them to the slaughter.

We blame Facebook, YouTube and the MSM (Main Stream Media) for filtering out conservative voices, but the truth is, these are private companies, and have the right to do business as they choose. The issue that should concern us is when the alphabet agencies and government get involved.

Loss of Family Values

These days there is quite a bit of debate about why there is so much violence. Instead of looking for the root cause, people just want to ban this and ban that. These types of things didn’t happen as often 30 or 40 years ago, so what has changed?

In the show we discussed some of the reasons that could contribute to this, and where our culture could be headed in the future, here are a couple things we discussed.

Loss of God in the Family: At the very least, the bible is a great guide book on being a good person, unfortunately people are being told that if you believe in God, you might as well believe in magic. People have the “what’s in it for me” mentality these days, and God doesn’t fit into that equation.

No Parenting: There is a severe lack of good parents these days, and because of that children are learning from other children on social media. Children and teenagers make bad decisions all the time, that’s how they learn and grow, but It’s our job as parents to kick them in the butt when they do.

No Value for Human Life: At the risk of sounding like an old fogy, it seems that social media, Hollywood and video games have made murder seem acceptable. With good parenting, this may not be a huge issue, but when you add loss of God, loss of family and bad parenting, it can create the perfect storm.

Robots and A.I.

This may sound a little “Sci Fi” but it is possible that we have a future society completely dependent on artificial intelligence and automation. This will likely mean there will vastly more inequality in america as technology is going to automate a huge number of semi-skilled & skilled jobs.

In the documentary “Do You Trust Your Computer?” Elon Musk warns A.I. could create an ‘immortal dictator from which we can never escape’. Musk also warns that as we advance with A.I. we risk becoming irrelevant, and we could be creating another race.

Elon Musk warns A.I. could create an ‘immortal dictator from which we can never escape’ from CNBC.

Lisa and I went down a few rabbit holes with this one talking about SkyNet from the Terminator movies, but art does imitate life right? We don’t know exactly where this will go, but if you asked me about cell phones 30 years ago, I would have said “like the communicators on Star Trek? Right!”

Cyber Security

We didn’t talk much about cyber security in this episode because next week we are going to spend the whole show on it. Cyber security on a personal level is fairly simple, although most people fail to protect themselves.

On a national or global scale, who knows what tools different countries have, that can be used in cyber warfare. WW3 could look totally different from the other world wars because cutting off supply lines can be done with EMP weapons and hacking.

Global Warming

Global warming is one of those subjects that everyone has an opinion on, and their opinion is absolute fact. If you say one thing against it you are a “climate denier”. If you say something supporting it, people assume you are a “Prius driving hippy”.

To me, it isn’t that cut and dry, regardless whether you believe it’s real or not, it should be on your radar, because the consequences are so severe. Weather patterns (Natural disasters) food production, and sustainability could all be affected, so we should all be watching where this leads.

This is easier said than done when you have guys like Bill Nye (who isn’t a science guy), Al Gore, and other companies making money hand over fist preaching about global warming.  My thought is wait and see. We’ll know more in the next 10 years or so, and according to some predictions, we should all be dead by then anyway.