Acceleration sickness

Breakfast this morning, strawberries, flown from South Africa. "Apartheid strawberries", half raw white, the other blackened. A microcosm of inequality, where what should have integrity and unity is torn apart. Like that Star Trek episode where Capt. Picard puts his hand into a temporal anomaly and instantly grows gnarled yellow finger nails, these strawberries have partly crossed the Swartzschild radius of a singularity somewhere between Johannesburg and Heathrow.

I cut off each end and eat the thin pink middle slice.

I think of kids now turning up at university. Burned on the outside, still frozen in the middle. Eyes like child soldiers. Confidently opinionated, worldly about things far beyond their capacity, but still junior-school children inside. Unable to add up, read or write, but "able to talk an agentic AI" into designing an encrypted inter-planetary satellite communication system. In their dreams. WTF have we sold them? What have we turned them into?

Both strawberries and our young people suffer what I'd call acceleration sickness. Our society is afflicted by obsessive compulsive fetish for "efficiency". It's effect on everything is a devastating plague.

Half-baked vibe code shipped full of errors. Voice transcribed legal and medical notes brimming with critical life-threatening mistakes. Incorrect travel directions, dangerous recipe instructions. The quality of the info-sphere fell off a cliff. But look on the bright side - you can have it right now, no effort, no waiting. We arrive without the journey. Witness the ultimate triumph of form over function, appearance over reality, desire over accomplishment, quick results over understanding, blind belief in technology over what actually works.

I gobble down the strawberrie, accelerating into the day, going nowhere, but faster!