Chapter 7 – Fiction or Reality?

Where some movies may have been preparing us for our future

As my mum is going through this ordeal after her severe stroke, I have become her spokesperson. I am the one, family members, eager to inquire about my mum, call to get updates. I am the one the hospital, insurance and other authorities connect with since my father is feeling too overwhelmed to deal with them. I am the one my mum relies on for mental and moral support. It’s all good of course and I am glad to help. It just feels very unbalanced right now. You know when you feel that your cup was full and now it is getting drained…It’s not that I don’t have friends to talk to and I do share that it is hard for me to suddenly have all these extra responsibilities on top of sorting out my own life.

I wish I could afford a therapist right now, someone I don’t know at all that could just listen to me vent. But since I do not have this, I am so glad I created this safe space on the web. I feel it is the only place for now where I can express myself and let everything come out freely.

I do not have censorship. The only censorship I could possibly have is that of my own mind. I disabled the comments as this is a journal aimed at freeing myself, like an internal therapy. I also don’t have to strain my mind in thinking of what words to use and how to turn things around so that I won’t be spotted by an algorithm that will judge my post unfit and not following the agenda of the platform… I have become increasingly frustrated with Facebook and Youtube that have become dictatorships.

As I am living through these crazy times of transformation of our society through the virus and all that is been revealed in our world, I am taken back to movies I watched years ago.

Terminator and The Matrix in particular have come back in my mind. I am starting to think that we are slowly starting to mix reality with fiction. What was first a movie on a screen seems to represent bit by bit what we are experiencing. 

Artificial intelligence is like anything in this world of duality. Like the Yin and Yang symbol, it has its pros and cons. I know I am not the only one feeling the frustration and even the rage sometimes when confronted with sometimes struggling to fill in a form, sign in, or simply get a simple answer and the robots on the other end treat you like another robot. Because your input or question doesn’t match what they are programmed for, you get nothing. I have a love and hate relationship with the new technologies. I can see the potential but I can also see the danger.

Who has ever spent hours trying to sort out an issue with a company that is only fully represented online?

No phone number, no address… I wonder if there are already companies out there on the web that are not even run my humans… My poor wrist has been punched so many times on my table to extract the frustration I was feeling to try to communicate to a brick wall that I have to apologize to my poor hand for the damage I am causing it.

As there is talk of modifying our DNA to enhance our potential and to track us like robots with chips in, I want to throw up… Are we really going to let A.I. take over or are we going to wake up and come back to our true nature of humankind? After all it’s in the name “human”/”kind”. We are supposed to be kind to each other and not work against one another…

I am grateful for the web to allow us to connect with like-minded people all other the world. I am grateful that we can still choose the information we want to be exposed to, at least in the western world. As our freedoms are slowly being stripped away, I hope we will keep this kind of freedom online.