What is notable now is that apocalyptic angst has become a constant: all flow and no ebb. One might have assumed from the millions of words devoted to the end of the world during the 1990s that the noise about it would reach a millennial crescendo, but instead it has grown and grown. In 1989, Susan Sontag suggested the title of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now was wishful thinking and what we are living with instead is “Apocalypse from Now On”. This must come to some degree from the fact that we absorb more news, which is to say bad news, than at any time in history. Speaking during the second world war, long before 24-hour news or the internet, the poet Wallace Stevens argued that the “pressure of reality” overwhelms our sense of perspective: “It is not possible to look backward and to see that the same thing was true in the past. It is a question of pressure, and pressure is incalculable and eludes the historian.”
What can’t be contained? Not much. We are given the resources, mental or physical, to contain our emotions and our belongings. Failing to do so often registers as weakness.
Some stories give you the unvarnished truth, some the varnished one. “Worry” is generous and wise enough to give both.
This isn’t a story about ChatGPT and the other large language models and their looming impact on everything from Hollywood to homework, though there is a bit of that. Instead, it’s an account of how the everyday algorithms we have already learned to live beside are changing us: from the people paid (not much) to make sense of vast datasets, to the unintended consequences of the biases they contain. It’s also the story of how the AI systems built using that data benefit many of us (you, ordering McDonald’s on UberEats) at the expense of some – usually individuals and communities that are already marginalised (the young immigrant worker picking up your Big Mac for a small fee).