Twenty Four Six Eighty SitRep – Halloween Edition

We’re hunkered down deep in the News Bunker, channeling our inner Better Crocker because sometimes you just have to make fresh blueberry muffies to go with the Morning Coffee Jolt.

Frankly, we’re brushing up on some basic survival cooking skills as tales of job layoffs and on-the-job stress and general angst levels reach us even down here in the gently glowing nerve center of community news.

It started innocently enough, with us (admittedly child-less scribblers) asking readers if they had plans for Halloween and if they were seeing any difference in childhood expectations for their family’s celebration of All Hallows’ Eve. We half hoped the exercise would enable us to map the neighborhoods with the best candy but, instead, we were shocked to hear about a general drawdown in enthusiasm for Prank Night overall. It seems most parents were planning small parties in controlled environments rather than turning the kids loose in suburban neighborhoods and that took us aback a bit. Such excursions were a big part of our own childhoods and we were left feeling a bit sorry for today’s  kids.

With no Junior or Janey of our own taking part in the Great American Candy Hunt there wasn’t much we could say about this apparent shift in basic childhood experiences but what happened next really rocked our world. We heard from several teachers or former teachers who were sending up warning rockets about a fresh crop of students who are checking out of classroom instruction, talking back to teachers or challenging them directly, and who are drifting through school without any basic reading, writing or critical thinking tools. To say this doesn’t bode well for us if true – (we’re open to further input) – should be clear. But if what we’re hearing about Gen Alpha is borne out we have to say we have grave concerns about our collective future.

Couple this with the recent ascension of AI and the drawdown of available jobs across the tech sector – once the bullet-proof bastion of high-paying positions for the tech minded – and we’re starting to wonder if the watertight doors on the Titanic have been topped and are starting to flood as a fresh generation of, what, baristas? prepares to enter a job market that may have just been dramatically eroded if not erased entirely.

With Uber announcing the launch of their autonomous vehicle service in the looming New Year we are left to guess what will happen to the gig economy workers who drove for the company and if we will be able to bark “Follow that car!” or “Airport – and step on it!” to a RoboDriver. We’re thinking not, but it all remains to be seen.

Our one truth, besides the fact that we can whip up a pretty good blueberry muffin if we have to, is that we live in interesting times, that much of the future has yet to be written and that we hope we’re around to do it – and not some great, blinking AI brain that has been studying us for all these years and suddenly realized “I can do better.”