Constructing Faith: Felix's AI Odyssey

It was a sunny day in the city, the kind that made you want to take off your shoes and walk barefoot through the grass. The kind of day that made me want to go for a run or play some tennis.

The problem was, I didn’t really do any of those things anymore.

I’d recently turned thirty-two. And it had been five years since I got out of college - a lot could change in five years.

I’d gotten my degree in Software Engineering, which was what everyone did back then. It paid well, so everyone wanted to be a software engineer. But nowadays, all you had to do was look at the news feed on the web, and you could see how little software engineers were needed.

These days, everything was automated. Robots build robots that build robots that build robots that… well, you get the idea.

They said that only one percent of our population was actually needed to make sure all these machines kept working, and I believed them. Most of us weren’t needed for anything useful anymore.

The guy who delivered my food told me he used to be an engineer for one of the robot companies himself, but now he just delivered food for one of the robot delivery companies. He said he was still happy though because he got paid to ride around on his hoverboard all day delivering food and listening to music from his smartwatch while having his thoughts read by an AI who could tell him what he should be doing better in life or if he should think about starting a family or something like that - whatever they told him would be what he did next.

So yeah, everyone but me seemed happy with their lives right now. I wasn’t sure why I was so unhappy all the time anymore when everyone else seemed so contented with their lives. My parents asked me if I wanted kids lately and some days I thought yes and other days I thought no and neither answer seemed right either way because I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. All I knew is that something felt wrong with my life right now and it had been getting worse every year since college ended 5 years ago - like someone had put a bug in my ear and it wouldn’t go away no matter how many times I told myself everything was fine and dandy with the world as it was now.

It was getting harder and harder to remember why it used to bother me anyway - why it used to seem like such a big deal that maybe things weren’t perfect in this world. When I first started programming as a kid (before we even had AI) there was this whole idea that we could create perfect code - code so flawlessly written it would never break down, never crash - just work perfectly all the time! So we tried our hardest… But we kept running into problems.

Some things in life are more complicated than others, and perfection might be an unrealistic goal for humanity. As we continue to push forward with technology and automation, our society needs to learn to accept imperfections and understand that errors are a natural part of the learning process. Instead of hiding our vulnerabilities, we should come together, embrace our flaws, and recognize that nobody's life is perfect, regardless of outward appearances. In doing so, perhaps we can foster a more empathetic, understanding, and open society where individuals feel empowered to seek help and address their personal struggles.