OPINION | Life for yesterday

I belong to the generation that had to learn how to use the internet, that had to attend college in person, but then had to adapt to distance education to complete postgraduate studies. After me came the generation that was born into a world with internet access, one that never knew what it was like to live without it. And more recently, “beings” have begun to be born into a world already shaped by artificial intelligence, where everything is relatively easy, where knowledge no longer needs to be stored because one can simply ask AI how to do something, where everything is needed for yesterday.

When I think about this evolution of generations, I sometimes feel uneasy. What will the job market look like? Will there be retirement? Will universities still have students? Will anxiety crises happen three times a day? Has everything become ephemeral?

And in the midst of these questions, I remember when waiting was part of life: waiting for the dial-up connection to complete that almost musical screech; waiting for the reply to a letter that took days; waiting for the teacher to arrive in the classroom, open the book, and calmly build a line of reasoning; waiting for a movie or a video game cartridge to return to the rental store, and so on. There was a time between wanting and having, and it was in that interval that we learned more than we realized.

Today, that interval has disappeared. The answer comes before the question has even had time to mature. And this, which seems so efficient, sometimes sounds like a strange silence, not the silence of absence, but of a lack of depth. Because knowing how to do something is not the same as understanding why it is done. Many people today do not even read the full text provided by AI; they simply do not have the patience.

It is a critique made with affection. After all, each generation carries its own conveniences and burdens. If before we struggled with lack of access, now we struggle with its excess. If before the problem was finding information, today it is trusting it. The obstacles change, but the journey continues.

Perhaps, the job market will change so much that we will no longer recognize its contours. Perhaps, universities will reinvent themselves or disappear as we know them. Perhaps, anxiety, this old acquaintance in new clothes, will simply change its name and intensity. Or perhaps, the human essence will find a way to adapt, as it always has.

In the end, no technology has yet managed to replace something very simple: the discomfort of not knowing. It is precisely from this discomfort that the questions that truly matter are born. It may be that the problem is not ease itself, but what we are doing with it.

P.S.: I will keep hoping that Skynet never comes into existence… Those who know know.