Lockdown 1.0, 2020: Please do digital things now, offline is illegal, people are illegal. Lockdown 4.0, 2023: Locking away all digital things & AI, all that I have left in my life now.

Anonymous

June 7, 2023

Lockdown 1.0, 2020: Please do digital things now, offline is illegal, people are illegal. Lockdown 4.0, 2023: Locking away all digital things & AI, all that I have left in my life now.

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It is the year 2040. I am struggling to make ends meet, here, in the US, the place I immigrated to in 2024. I meet a crazy old professor - he invented a time machine! I travel back to the year 2023 to make a change in this form, stating how in 2020, my job was cancelled, and then I was sent into solitary confinement without a crime for two years. I have lost all real-life relationships I've had, I explain, telling a sad tale of Lockdown and the fact that my parents died years ago - I have no family, I was a persona non grata, I was illegal, and without a job. But it is also a story of hope, I explain, because I have adjusted, I am fighting for myself, and now I consider myself to be "AI & I". I use generative AI in many forms, and it is roughly a third of my income right now. Just yesterday I have used GPT4 / ChatGPT to fix a piece of code I would have had trouble fixing in less than an hour, I said! And I said that I am now very afraid of another Lockdown. After I have died the social death, I am afraid of a Lockdown first happening in Italy, and then shortly after, grasping Germany. This time, a digital Lockdown. First my social life was destroyed, and now I feel hunted again, afraid of losing my income, AGAIN, to Lockdown 4.0. I continue, saying how the only positive thing about this is - the fact that I can run away from the Lockdown, and even years later, from another country, when I am legal to use ChatGPT again - the AI will be the same! It will not be destroyed like my social relationships, I just need to run away to get access in a better place, so I can keep my job! But I am very afraid of an avian flu lockdown, I explain, because that would be a double-lockdown. I would be locked up without a job, without help, without friends, without anything. I am afraid of losing my mental and physical existence this time, I pleaded, hoping somebody would hear me, think twice. Or if I should really try my best to run away to the USA, just so I am safe from the deadliest Lockdown ever, the Lockdown 4.0, that has even more of a risk - a solid chance I will not be able to survive this one....

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Immagino

I envision a Europe where the dictates of political parties are just a bad reminder of how things have failed in the past. I imagine a single land of European peoples united by a common interest in solving their own problems, without having to deal with political assumptions that have led to the collapse and ruin of democratic states and the despair of so many citizens, who have lived and suffered within a community that should have solved so many problems and, instead, has brought new ones. I imagine my Europe, for which I fought my most tender years, free from the accartona politics, whose goal is the seat, it is their own "particulare," and not the family (that of others); it is the appearance at any cost, putting their signature on even the most unimaginable documents. They care little anyway, as long as they "enter history." So much for Europe, to which they fatten themselves by saying they are parliamentarians. I imagine Europe uniting peoples and people, but, not with a common currency, which has impoverished them. A Europe that is not carried away by the often morbid imagination of a few, and that, above all, the men and women who represent it, live on this earth!

Future : retour vers le passé

In fact, I think the future is horrible; I'd like to go back to the real values of the 1970s and 1980s; I'd like a world without war, without violence, where people appreciate each other; I'd like to go back to a less technological world, while keeping the good sides of this technology, the useful side, but without scam, spam, with real encounters, not virtual ones.I'd like to rediscover love between humans, not this dehumanization where machines replace human contact.

Tout va bien dans le meilleur des mondes

For me, the future would be a world without war, with everyone getting on well, everyone getting enough to eat, no more fatal diseases in the foreseeable future thanks to advances in medicine, artificial intelligence and so on, tightly controlled immigration and the lifelong sheltering of all these criminals.

Nur geträumt

Humanity has come to its senses. We now have enough agriculture in Germany again and can feed ourselves, are independent and free. Asparagus is only available in asparagus season and strawberries only in summer. And tomatoes taste like tomatoes again. We get them directly from the farmer in the farm store or in small corner stores where we like to stop for a chat with the neighbors. Where there used to be huge supermarkets, there are now large playgrounds for our little ones, free-range enclosures for man's best friends and hospitals. We have leveled and renaturalized many highways or converted them into local recreation areas. We are currently in the process of dismantling residential silos with more than five storeys and creating new living space. This will keep us busy for some time yet, after which we will turn off the alarm clock and wake up from our dream.

#OurFutures

Lockdown 1.0, 2020: Please do digital things now, offline is illegal, people are illegal. Lockdown 4.0, 2023: Locking away all digital things & AI, all that I have left in my life now.

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