INTERN’SC - No one can stop change

INTERN’S C

ORNER Saskatoon Damm

Growing up, summer was a three-month interlude from rigidly structured school days. Each morning, I’d wake up and think, “What will happen today?”

While I had routine activities in summer, the gaps between them and those anticipatory mornings were some of my first experiences with the unknown. Everything felt new yet manageable. The fall’s promise of a return to school’s structure grounded me. It compelled me to label chaos, change, and uncertainty as part of growing up.

Upon leaving high school and attending college, I realized life now remembers summer unbounded: there is no explanatory fall that will make certain of uncertainty in three months. This uncertainty brings me back to the question, “What will happen today?” I wonder about the timeframe I can replace today with and still provide an answer. The point of thinking about this question this way is not to be accurate but rather to see how far in the future I can envision a reasonable possibility. A timeframe I settle I is three years.

Even as jobs do not encompass all of life, they can be useful to consider the accelerated pace of change in the world. In comparison to my three-year outlook, I think about what my parents would have said at age 19. They wouldn’t have known what job they would work in 20 years, but they would’ve had concrete options of what they could do, such as being a financial planner or teacher.

As I look forward, I don’t see a list of job possibilities as they would have. It’s not a multiple-choice question of whether I should be a journalist, doctor, or accountant. Instead, it’s the uncertainty of whether these jobs will exist or be recognizable in 20 years as the world changes faster than ever with developments in technology, specifically in artificial intelligence (AI).

In 2014, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking discussed the risks of advanced AI: “It would take of take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

I won’t attempt to address the frightening, sci-fiesque piece of his warning, but his sentiment about being able to keep up with change is accessible to anyone. The world is not at the point where humans are superseded by AI (although some tech industry leaders have predicted AI will surpass human intelligence by 2030), yet people today are confronted with unprecedented unpredictability. Change has and will continue move faster, and people will still only be people, with limitations and flaws. I wonder, who are we to think we can handle the expedited change?

“School” is not coming back. Looking to fallacies of stability for the sake of comfort is unsustainable in an endless summer of compounding change. Still, I fall back on nearsighted ignorance, intimidated by the stakes of the unknown. Today, I’m looking for to the start of the NFL season.

— Saskatoon Damm

The Gilman school district was contacted by phone and email for an interview but did not respond.