50,000 suicides. That’s about the number of dead in the US alone. The American suicide rate has been increasing since the late 90’s and that to me feels like a connectivity correlation. Of course it is just a drop in the bucket compared to the 61 million people who died (vs. 134 million born) in 2023. Nearly 3 million of those came from the USA, which shows again that the number of suicides is a drop in the bucket. However, it isn’t. Suicides–that voluntary act of surrender touch people in a different way. It rattles–especially when it comes from an unexpected source. I suppose you would argue who would be expected to kill themselves, but the larger issue is that we are all here together on this planet trying to survive until some of us decide to not to.
Today was supposed to be freewrite friday. I was supposed to be getting back to making characters for an upcoming novel. I saw this stat and it floored me. A lot of what I’ve been seeing statistically has floored me lately. Part of what I am trying to do in the new novel I am planning is to look at the numbers and see how a system might think and respond to the data. The story is about AGI and in it the AGI is designed for mimicry purposes but I want to talk about other forms of that programming and how AGI may respond to data. That means understanding the data myself. Data like the material gathered in Our World In Data. But first I need to be able to stomach what I am seeing.
Some Thoughts:
- I way too often say American when referring to the USA. There’s more America than that–even up here in the north.