Mini-story: Existential

By the time we realised, it was obvious that we were too late. For decades at least, philosophers — and scientists, latterly — had been warning us. You can’t have one thing without the other, they said; no upside without downside. They were of the opinion that there was a single trajectory, inevitable due to the nature of human beings and by extension their work, that would lead inexorably to a single outcome. They were wrong. About the outcome, but not the process. We ought to have seen it coming, and in fairness, some did. They saw it by extrapolating human cunning and ingenuity, and our passion for knowledge. Our love of science, and industry, and technology. Our innate need to understand, and then to master, the world around us. It led to so much good. But also, from time to time, also to evil. We watched as warfare evolved into the 20th and then the 21st centuries. We watched as first our dedicated computing devices, and then virtually everything in our lives, became more…