Our world is starting to look a lot like the one depicted in Mike Judge’s 2006 satire Idiocracy. AI chatbots are making people less curious. Social media has hollowed out two generations’ ability to react thoughtfully to bot-generated clickbait. We are, collectively, not in great shape.
Here are my top five issues with the world today — and what I think we can each do about them.
1. Climate Change
The oil lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars manipulating media and infiltrating education systems worldwide to teach children that climate change isn’t real. Despite that, the effects of a rapidly changing climate are now blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention.
I often feel very low thinking about it — the plastics polluting every corner of the planet, the wars driven by fossil-fuel greed, the cultural shrug. But there’s room for hope.
We can vote with our feet — by refusing to buy products that are bad for us or wastefully packaged. We can vote with our voice — by telling our political representatives to enforce the laws that already exist and to curb subsidies for oil, gas and coal. And we can vote with our hands — by marking the ballot next to candidates who champion local resilience over cheap soundbites.
2. AI
AI is being forced down our throats and wildly overhyped — billed as the thing that makes the Industrial Revolution look like it needs to go back to school and try harder. It’s hyperbole powered by greed.
The downside is real: people are losing vital skills, or never developing the critical thinking to make good decisions in the first place. We are raising a generation that cannot exercise judgement because Claude told them what to do instead of working it out for themselves.
There is hope, though, and it sits with us:
- As employers, we can be more mindful about how we leverage machine learning, large language models and chatbots — instead of rushing in and cutting junior roles to chase short-term margins.
- As teachers, we can educate the next generation on what AI actually is, what it can and can’t do, and how to use it without losing the skills they came to school to develop.
- As parents, we can challenge our kids’ behaviour, set positive examples, and support them in failing safely so they can develop their own judgement.
3. Social Media
Quick. Hit that like button. Share this post with your friends. Look at that ad for something cheap, built in a sweatshop, and guaranteed to break the moment you open the box.
You have got to love what social media has done to two generations and counting. Designed to be as addictive as possible, devoid of ethical governance, and generally a cesspit of despair.
It’s for the ads, you see. If you’re not outraged and depressed, you’re using it wrong.
There are ways out of this — and no, banning social media for kids isn’t one of them. Hear me out.
Social media companies must be held to account and forced to stop being manipulative, exploitative and addictive. We have governments. We’ve agreed to live in a lawful society. Letting billion-dollar mega-corporations operate as if those rules don’t apply to them is disgraceful.
If this were tobacco, it would be banned. Or at the very least, every login screen would carry a health warning.
Telling social media companies to “do better” is like telling a banker to stop counting money. We need to attack the root cause, not tap the symptoms with kneejerk reactions designed to win headlines.
4. Copyright
I was in two minds about whether this belongs with the AI section, but it deserves its own point. Copyright law used to protect artists and stop corporations from using their work without credit or payment. Then corporations turned the same laws back on the artists, and on the public.
Now we have mega-corporations like OpenAI and Meta openly admitting they trained their large language models on pretty much anything they could get their hands on. Meta literally had staff pirating content for the training set. Whether it’s code on GitHub, the writings of your favourite author, or your kids’ art project — it’s all been ingested to train an LLM that’s then sold back to us.
I hope we can remember that the laws still apply, and not just shrug and move on. If we let the people running these corporations get away with it, we set a dangerous precedent for everyone else. Laws have to be upheld to mean anything. Tell your political representative.
Otherwise it’s a free-for-all, and the future starts to look as bleak as some of the AI-generated art that already represents it.
5. Happiness
Finally, we need to talk about what it means to be happy in a world that is starting to resemble a dystopia.
While most countries fixate on GDP — Gross Domestic Product — money and endless growth on a planet with finite resources, Bhutan set itself a different goal:
Make people happier.
Instead of measuring success in financial growth and tonnes of exports, Bhutan measures the happiness and wellbeing of its citizens. Instead of burning down forests to make space for cattle farming or other destructive agriculture, they plant trees and champion stewardship of the natural world. Bhutan is, in fact, the only carbon-negative country on the planet — it absorbs more CO₂ than it emits.
Gross National Happiness (GNH), introduced by Bhutan’s Fourth King in the 1970s, is a holistic development philosophy that prioritises wellbeing, cultural preservation, environmental conservation and good governance.
Let’s give that a try.
The Bottom Line
The world isn’t broken because we lack the tools to fix it. It’s broken because we’ve handed too much of our agency to systems and corporations that profit from us not pushing back.
None of these issues gets fixed by a hot take, a viral post, or waiting for someone else to do something. They get nudged in the right direction by ordinary people, choosing differently, again and again.
We can do this. It just requires us not to give up.
KYAL <3
