Age after Age

Yes yes, I'm still alive and all that jazz.
And I'm sure I've lost all my readership.

I've been trying to write, but it has been a slow thing.  I don't want to make excuses.  Suffice it to say, getting overwhelmed with work is a vicious circle.
I plan on getting back into the grind of things this week.

So I thought I would make this post today to bring to light some news on one of the passions my wife and I share - the environment.
Call me a tree hugger if that's what floats your boat, but in this day and age, it would be remiss of you to ignore the overwhelming evidence that the environment is changing, and we are the cause.

But this post isn't about trying to convince you that the environment is changing.  If you want to argue it, I point you to this resource.  Just look up whatever argument you have, and see how it has been thoroughly and completely debunked by actual science.

No, the point of this post is actually names.  In particularly, the name of the age.
Some of you might know that Mesozoic Era, that of the dinosaurs (another subject I am very passionate about), consisted of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods (which are also split into numerous stages).  A few of you might know that after the Mesozoic came the Cenozoic, the current era, and that we are currently in the Quaternary Period.  But, as I said earlier, these periods are broken into small stages, or "epochs."  A very select few of you may say that we are currently in the Holocene Epoch, or even the smaller subdivision of the Meghalayan Age (did I mention I'm a nerd?). If you are one of those people, I commend you!

But you might be wrong.

The scientific community is currently debating on the first change of epochs since, well, science.  From what I can tell, the only thing stopping them is determining the exact year of the change, which is currently likely to be somewhere between 1945 and 1964.  That means a good portion of you may have been born in a different age and epoch, as we may now be in the Anthropocene Epoch and the Homogenocene Age (though I may be wrong about that second one).

Why this change?  Anthropos is Greek for "man."  This is the Epoch where man has changed the environment to the point where every part of it has been influenced by our actions.  Since the mid-twentieth century, more than half of all wildlife on the planet has died, and 90% of all large fish have died.  The cause?  Pollution, climate change, and over-hunting.  We, humans, have affected the Earth so much that we now have an Epoch.  Most of these epochs are marked by extinctions, and this one is no different.  We are, indeed, in the middle of the 6th major extinction-event of the planet, and we are the cause of it.  If we aren't careful, we'll be marking the end of the Cenozoic as well, but let's hope it doesn't get that bad.

Which leads me to a final point.  There is another "age" we are in, supposedly.  We live in the "Information Age."  This is a 20th and 21st century historic age defined by a rapid shift from an economy based on industry to one based on information (computers and the like).  At this point, I'm sure I've bored you and you've moved on, so now I can get to the real point of this blog post - a secret letter to my wife.

The macarons are good.  Take some with you to work.

Now, back to the blog post, just in case someone really was paying attention.

I propose that we have left the Information Age, as of 2016.  I propose that we are entering the Misinformation Age - an age where truth has become harder and harder to determine, where news is formed by lies and social media, where governments make entire entities dedicated to influencing people through fake news and propaganda (such as the Russian-based Internet Research Agency).
There is a new Artificial Intelligence software that has been implemented to write simple news stories with language that makes it indistinguishable from human writing.  I worry about this because I am trying to make it as a writer, and I don't want some computer muscling me out of the market.  Experts worry about this, because it could be used to flood the internet, and even news shows, with entirely made up news that would be almost indistinguishable from real news - lies that you couldn't tell were lies.  This could topple governments.  For now they are trying to keep this AI under guard.

The problem is, history tells us that attempts to prevent progress always fail.  It will happen.  Combine this with the increasing levels of complexity in photo- and video-manipulation, with the computer programs that can put any words you like into anyone else's mouth (yes, these are real), and I fear for the future.  We know there are agents out there whose sole purpose is to sew discord, to fan the fires on both sides of any argument they can.  This sort of thing should scare all of us.  And it both follows the model of Orwell's classic 1984 as well as puts it to shame.

The victor may write history, but the anarchist writes the future.