18th May 2024
Thinking about Tom Scott, time and identity
My usual Saturday D&D game got cancelled today, so I had some spare time. Obviously, I used it to rot (I promise this journal gets less depressing right at the end). I wasted my afternoon watching old Tom Scott videos, and it was a very interesting experience, timewise. I just finished watching this video, where Tom, in 2022, looks back at a video he made in 2012 where he tried to predict what 2022 would be like. The main thing I got from that video is that the only things about the future that can be accurately predicted are easily-predictable trends. Everything else is an absolute gamble. And of course, people have known that the future can't be predicted since the future was invented. I'm 18 now: in exactly 90 days' time, I will be 19. Two semesters of school, 12 months of personal growth, and unknowable highs and lows after that, I will be 19. One day I'm going to look back at my life right now with the same simplified lens I look back on my past with right now. When I was 14 years old I had a deep and meaningful experience of the world, with complex emotions and ideas...but nowadays, when I think about my 14-year-old self, I think of someone who was a bit insensitive, very emotionally troubled, and is generally inferior to me in every way; I think of a two-dimensional idea of who I really was, simplified for my convenience and probably totally misrepresentative of who I really was. If 14-year-old me knew what I thought of them, they would probably be quite offended. And I'll bet, by the time I'm 20, or maybe even by the time I'm 19, I will be looking back at 18-year-old me typing this right now with the same sort of dismissiveness. Hank Green has said at least once on YouTube that your past self is nothing but a dumber version of you, but I still think it's worth noticing how much you dismiss your past self at times.
As a consequence of my as-of-yet undiagnosed and mostly uninvestigated depersonalisation issues, I struggle to remember things. I have absolutely no memory of what my life was like in the majority of high school, I only have the narratives and simplified factoids I've constructed around my past. That's part of why I've gone to such lengths to document my life since midway through high school (which includes everything from this journal right now, to the video diaries on my computer that I recorded in 2020, which no one but me has ever seen). Anyway, maybe it's partly that which causes me to dissociate myself from my past self so much. Once a certain, unpredictable amount of time has passed, my future self will inevitably view my past self as an entity separate from themself, just as I don't really think of my teenage self as the same person as me. I'm also very conscious of the fluidity of identity, and the fact that I don't exist as a stable "person" because identities change so much. Just like modern English is no longer Old English, I am no longer my past self. And one day, I'll be my future self, and I'll think back upon me right now - and present me will be reduced to a 2D idea of a person, and probably be dismissed. It's a very interesting thought to me.
To be clear, this doesn't bother me. That'd be weird - after all, it doesn't really effect me. It's just like how I don't care whether free will exists or not. Some people make a big deal out of whether free will exists or not. I personally believe in hard determinism, which implies that free will doesn't exist because all of my choices are informed by my past experiences, brain chemistry, surroundings, etcetera. But I don't give a shit about that! Who cares if my decisions aren't "my own"? How do you define a decision being made by you? How do you define YOU? I really don't care if I have free will or not, because it doesn't effect me. I reckon it's odd how some people really care about that.
Anyway, yeah, time. I watched Tom Scott's first few videos again today, and I thought two things. First of all: man, Chris Joel looks so different!! He sounds exactly the same but is TOTALLY unrecognisable. And second, there's no way that uni student there knew that one day he would amass nearly TWO BILLION VIEWS on YouTube; travel the world;, fly in zero-G; get set on fire; learn how to tattoo, and then give a coworker a tattoo, all in a matter of hours; fly with the Red Arrows; and take a trip to the Arctic and BUNK WITH CHRIS HADFIELD AND PILOT AN ICEBREAKER...ALL FOR WORK!!! Tom Scott has inspired me more than anyone else, his career has been so amazing to watch. I didn't initially get sad when he retired (honestly I got a bit sick of him for a while around when he changed his thumbnail style), but now that I'm getting back into his content like I was circa 2020, I'm getting sad about it. I didn't realise until these last few days how big of an impact Tom Scott had on teenage me. He taught me so much about life for a man I'll never meet, especially about taking advantage of opportunities. I was thinking today that if I ever met Tom Scott in person I might freak out. The only "celebrity" I've actually MET in person is Larry Dean, and it was a very nice but also very awkward interaction because I was so nervous. If I met Tom Scott, who knows how embarrassing I would be!
But yeah, past Tom Scott had no IDEA what he was getting into when he started making YouTube videos about fun facts and interesting things. And he had no IDEA what the future would be like. And neither do I.
He released this video quite a while ago now, and he talks about the future of AI, and how in this time of tumultuous change, we have no idea how much AI is going to change the world we live in: we'll only know once the change has slowed down. He reckons it's comparable to the levels of rapid, permanent change that accompanied the Dot-Com Bubble, and I'm inclined to agree. The internet, especially websites like Google, changed the world so quickly and so irreversably that for people like me who were born after that change, it's almost impossible to truly imagine life before it. Same with iPhones and their kin a decade or so later, and now the same is happening with AI. I was born post-Google, and I'm too young to remember the advent of iPhones and similar technologies, but now that I'm a young adult the world is changing yet again with AI, and the world I grew up with and the world I'm going to spend the rest of my life in are quickly becoming further and further apart.
Soon there will be children old enough to go to school who will not remember a time before ChatGPT and AI art. It's going to be sooner than you think. After all, as I write this, people born in 2012 (one of the first years that I can almost remember) are starting middle school and going through puberty and all that shit. Gen Alpha, especially the youngest ones, will grow up in a world where they can just get a robot to write scripts and make art for them. I feel like this is a bigger change to society as a whole than the other societal revolutions we've had in the past. I can imagine older people saying "when I was your age, I had to look in an encyclopedia if I wanted to learn about the world!", but I feel a distint churning in my stomach when I imagine saying to my children, "when I was your age, I had to use creativity every single day!" I love creativity. I think it's the best thing about humans. This change just feels different. But at the same time, that's what they all say. As goes the Gen Z proverb: "time is a flat fucking circle".
The future is exciting, and it's also scary. But...only in theory. Because in practice, change happens slowly, and I know I'm going to adapt. I will be okay, no one's going to let AI take over the world...but it's still a frightening thought sometimes.
I also find it funny to think about the future sometimes. Like, imagine...some day far in the future, the new generations will think of Fortnite dances, skibidi toilet (whatever the fuck that is), Donald Trump, and COVID-19 as things of the past that only old people really know about. How surreal is that to think about? There will be art history textbooks discussing YouTube Poops! Old people saying, "I remember when Donald Trump was president", "I remember when everyone tried to invade Area 51", "I remember when we made fun of people for being fat"...actually now that I think about it, old Gen Z people will talk wicked fucked up, won't they? We better not be withering in retirement homes saying shit like "daaaamn, these prunes are GOATED!" There's gonna be wheelchair-bound old people named Tyler and Chelsea and Ashleigh and shit like that. I do envy the future generations of queer people...unlike my generation, they're going to have so many older queer people to look up to. Right now queer elders are a rare and wonderful type, but isn't something like 20% of Gen Z queer?? Gay old people are gonna be a dime a dozen!
Get hyped, people. The future isn't all bad.
Did I ever tell you why I keep this journal? Sometimes it's to confide in, but mostly I think of it as something to look back on. That's especially why I wrote this one. I wonder how I'll feel about this journal entry when I'm 19 or 20 or 100, and my 18-year-old self (right now, that's ME) has been reduced to nowt but a 2D charater I use to understand my past.