Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Is it possible to be a historian of your own life? To see yourself as a figure in the crowd, as a member of a generation who shared the same slice of time? We cannot help thinking of our own lives as uniquely our own, but if we look more closely, we begin to see how much we shared with strangers of our own age and situation. If we could forget for a moment what was singular about our lives and concentrate instead on what we experienced with everyone else, would it be possible to see ourselves in a new light, less self-dramatizing but possibly more truthful? What happens when I stop using “I” and start using “we’?     What “we” are we talking about here? Which “we” is my “we”? An old joke comes to mind. The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by Indian warriors. The situation looks bad. The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto. “What do we do now?” Tonto replies, “What do you mean ‘we’, white man?” The “we” to which I refer and belong were the white middle-class of my generation, born between 1945 and 1960, and my theme is what we made of our privileges, and once we understand them as such, what we did to defend them.   We were, for a time, really something. We were the biggest birth cohort in history. We made up more than half the population and we held all the power, grabbed as much of the wealth as we could, wrote the novels that people read, made the movies that people talked about, decided the political fate of peoples. Now it’s all nearly over. Every year more of us vanish. We have shrunk down to a quarter of the total population, and power is slipping from our hands, though two of us, both presidents, are squaring up for a final battle. It will be a last hurrah for them, but for us as well, a symbol of how ruthlessly we clung on, even when our time was up.   The oldest among us were born when Harry Truman was in the White House, Charles de Gaulle in the Elysee Palace, Konrad Adenauer in the Chancery in Bonn, George VI on the throne at Buckingham Palace, and Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin. We were the happy issue of a tidal wave of love and lust, hopes and dreams that swept over a ruined world after a decade of depression and war. My parents, both born during the First World War, met in London during the Second, two Canadians who had war work there, my father at the Canadian High Commission, my mother in British military intelligence. They had gone through the Blitz and the V-2’s, fallen for other people, and at war’s end decided to return to Canada and get married.   I once made the mistake of saying to my mother that I envied their wartime experience. It had tragedy in it, and tragedy, to a child, seems glamorous. She cut me short. It wasn’t like that, she said gently, I hadn’t understood. She knew what desolation and loss felt like, and she wanted to spare my brother and me as much as she could. I see now that her reticence was characteristic of a whole generation — for example, the rubble women in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and other German cities, who cleared debris away with their bare hands and never talked about being raped by Russian soldiers; the survivors of the death camps who concealed the tattoo on their forearm; the women who went to the Gare de l’Est in Paris in the summer of 1945, waiting, often in vain, to greet emaciated lovers and husbands returning from deportation. My mother was one of those who waited for a man who never made it back. He was a silent presence in the house throughout my childhood, the man she would have married had he not died in Buchenwald. She kept her sorrow to herself and found someone else — my father — and they brought new life into the world.    I am the child of their hope, and I have carried their hopefulness with me all my life. Beside hope, they also gave us the houses and apartments we took our first steps in, the schools and universities that educated us, the highway systems we drive to this day, the international system — UN, NATO, and nuclear weapons — that still keeps us out of another world war, the mass air travel that shrank the world, the moon landing that made us dream of life beyond our planet, and the government investments in computing in the 1940s and 1950s that eventually led in the 1990s, to the laptop, the internet, and the digital equivalent of the Library of Alexandria on our phones. The digital pioneers of my generation — Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, Ellison, Berners-Lee, and so on — built our digital world on the public investments made by the previous generation.    Thanks to the hospitals and the clinics that our parents built, the medical breakthroughs that converted mortal illnesses into manageable conditions, together with our fastidious diets and cult of exercise, our not smoking or drinking the way they did, we will live longer than any generation so far. I take pills that did not exist when my father was alive and would have kept him going longer if they had. Medicine may be the last place where we still truly believe in progress. Ninety, so our fitness coaches promise us, will be the new seventy. Fine and good, but that leaves me wondering, what will it be like to go on and on and on?   Our time began with the light of a thousand suns over Alamogordo, New Mexico in July 1945. It is drawing to a close in an era so violent and chaotic that our predictions about the shape of the future seem meaningless. But it would be a loss