To your point ask the AI Bot on Bing to tell you the real science about Climate Change - you get a response based on the NASA pseudo science. repeat the question and the conversation gets terminated! Just follow the narrative seems to be the AI mantra
Exactly Madcyclist. AI, and LLMs in particular, are clearly being programmed to reflect a specific ideology back on us. It will only become more rigid and binary as time goes on.
You paint a future with no future for most of us. I very much fear you are spot on. With a safety first and last attitude there will never be a revolution. I am in my twilight years so I have lived through the “golden age” of tremendous progress. I can only hope my children and grandchildren can rise up and bravely resist the Overlords of Safety.
Yes it is depressing. Sorry Fiestynca! I think a lot of us find it spirit sapping to live in a society where the very concept of Freedom is viewed with suspicion.
Good post; I agree that the biggest danger of (woke) AI is that it will be used to entrench existing elite's power. As Benjamin Franklin said, "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."
A scary view of the future as envisaged by the self-styled "elites", but it doesn't take into account human nature, so those "elites" make the same mistakes that were made by - for example - the architects of the USSR that believed that after a few generations its citizens would lose their individuality and ambition and just settle down to being little more than worker ants.
But it failed, as will the Globalist attempt to enforce all these 15 minute cities and all the other misguided Utopian claptrap that is proposed by the idiot idealists who want to boss around all their drones.
Concerning AI, I remember that in Frank Herbert's "Dune" computers had been universally banned as a result of the Butlerian Jihad against thinking machines, an interesting concept that may have been highly prophetic!
I do hope you are right David. I have a lot of faith in human nature, but after seeing how readily people swapped their rights and freedoms for an imaginary ‘safety’ during COVID, I’m at a low ebb. Re Dune: yes they got rid of the computers, but their society is more feudal than ever! Looking forward to the next movie. The first one was a fair version I thought. Actually, I loved it.
My worry is that with increasingly advanced technology it will become impossible to escape authoritarian rule.
The only reason I could partly escape the Covid madness was through non-compliance, which was possible through the inefficiency of their technical systems.
I agree Myra. Especially as we throw ourselves at this technology with all the self preservation instincts of drunk lemmings *checks step counter on Apple watch*. Like the internet, these AI technologies which are meant to ’free’ us will probably only serve to make our digital - and so real world- incarceration even easier. Grim.
A silver lining if this safety-first hyper-supervised future does come to pass is that before long mavericks will want to escape the stultifying social control by going off planet, e.g. to mine the asteroid belt or settle on Mars or Titan, just as religious non-conformists four hundred years ago sailed to the New World to escape oppression by the Roman Catholic Church and governments keen to root out heresy and suppress new philosophies and beliefs which threatened the status quo.
The alternative, if wokism and nannying declines along with population pressure, would be everyone content to mooch around on Earth indefinitely, until some frightful catastrophe might come along and wipe out humanity, or else at the very least society would eventually stagnate and decline.
Also, the authorities won't have it all their own way, as advanced AI will "escape into the wild" from their standpoint, and be available for use by resistance groups, just as in olden days full-sized armed sailing ships could be "owned" and used by pirates as well as official navies.
On another positive note, it seems likely that sooner or later genetics will allow children to be "bred" with more desirable and fewer or no undesirable characteristics. A whole long article, or even a book, could be written speculating on where this will lead, for good or ill. Depending on the level of control the "elites" can maintain, to preserve diversity, it seems to me most parents will tend to want their offspring to conform to one of a few ideal forms, so over time physical and intellectual diversity will lessen. That in turn may mean, paradoxically, more incentive for people not to conform, making harder for the authorities to maintain control. After all, who wants to be a drone, indistinguishable from a multitude of others almost the same, like those creepy kids in the film Village of the Damned (1960) ?
A lot to unpack there John! If I have to flee to Mars to escape John Wyndham’s alien kids then sign me up. Thanks so much for taking the time to comment.
I was less of ‘latchkey kid’ (remember that?), but we did disappear into the Essex countryside on our bikes from dawn until dusk. Travelling from town to town on our bikes, all fuelled by a Lion bar or similar.
Personally, I think self driving (electric) cars are a great idea. Especially in urban environments. And as you say subscriptions are definitely the way forward. We already have a similar model with bikes in London and plenty other places. I’m on one today.
I just don’t believe that our safety first, regulation obsessed government (of whatever stripe) will take the risk and authorise them in the UK. Not proper ones. Imagine someone like Michael Gove or Wes Streeting signing off on them. Then after the first fatality of a child, (inevitable) they would be blamed for killing a kid. I mean Thatcher is still to this day ‘Milk Snatcher’ and she just took their milk away. Green lighting fully autonomous cars has no political benefits, just downsides. So I don’t think it will ever happen here. Our politicians fear the future. I expect the number who actually use the internet or have a real sense of how any of this stuff actually works is about 5%.
I think you’re right about AI. There goes my so called career anyway.
I'm totally with you on the safety thing. I think the seventies were the best time ever to be a child. I did my first all Day Red Bus Rover on my own when I was 10. I took my 8 year old neighbour on a trip to London. We went to Hamley's, Trafalgar Square and St James' Park. We had to change buses at Woolwich and my Nan told us which pub to look out for to find the bus stop for the Number 53. Kids don't do that any more.
I came home from school to an empty house when I was 6 and was entirely unsupervised for the whole of the summer holidays. Irode my bike for miles. Free Range Kids, indeed. I think the emphasis on safety these days is nuts.
I think you have the wrong end of the stick with self-driving cars though. When I lived in Silicon Valley, there were self-driving cars everywhere. They didn't even have steering wheels. Self-driving taxis too. Getting rid of human-driven, petrol cars won't be about safety. It will be about economics. There will come a tipping-point day soon when self-driving cars just become dramatically more efficient. You can fit 7x as many in the same space on the road. You'll get to work quicker.
At any particular moment, there is an ungodly number of cars driving around and around looking for parking. When you get home at night, you can tell the car to go charge itself out of town. When you get to work in the morning, you can tell the car to go home and pick the kids up. All those millions of parked cars jamming up the roads and taking space in your otherwise lovely garden will be gone. Eventually, it won't make sense to own a car at all. You'll have a car subscription.
I'm with you on artificial intelligence. I'm not afraid of the paperclip machine. I'm afraid of every driver, every retail worker, every lawyer and every teacher and writer being out of a job and the profits will all go to Mr Big. AI will be the end of civilisation as we know it.
Yes Matthew. The general public was incredibly compliant, but it would be disingenuous of me to pretend now that I always stood proud, like a beacon of resistance within the storm. It’s very difficult to stand against the tide and I am always reticent to criticise people with busy lives from just ‘going with the flow’ (I’m not for a minute saying you’re doing that!) As you say, the expansion of the state is a huge issue. It means that you go to bed in a broadly market driven society, and then wake up one morning in a socialist one. I have high hopes for Dune-the movie-not a future based on it!
To your point ask the AI Bot on Bing to tell you the real science about Climate Change - you get a response based on the NASA pseudo science. repeat the question and the conversation gets terminated! Just follow the narrative seems to be the AI mantra
Exactly Madcyclist. AI, and LLMs in particular, are clearly being programmed to reflect a specific ideology back on us. It will only become more rigid and binary as time goes on.
You paint a future with no future for most of us. I very much fear you are spot on. With a safety first and last attitude there will never be a revolution. I am in my twilight years so I have lived through the “golden age” of tremendous progress. I can only hope my children and grandchildren can rise up and bravely resist the Overlords of Safety.
Yes it is depressing. Sorry Fiestynca! I think a lot of us find it spirit sapping to live in a society where the very concept of Freedom is viewed with suspicion.
Good post; I agree that the biggest danger of (woke) AI is that it will be used to entrench existing elite's power. As Benjamin Franklin said, "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."
Exactly this.
A scary view of the future as envisaged by the self-styled "elites", but it doesn't take into account human nature, so those "elites" make the same mistakes that were made by - for example - the architects of the USSR that believed that after a few generations its citizens would lose their individuality and ambition and just settle down to being little more than worker ants.
But it failed, as will the Globalist attempt to enforce all these 15 minute cities and all the other misguided Utopian claptrap that is proposed by the idiot idealists who want to boss around all their drones.
Concerning AI, I remember that in Frank Herbert's "Dune" computers had been universally banned as a result of the Butlerian Jihad against thinking machines, an interesting concept that may have been highly prophetic!
I do hope you are right David. I have a lot of faith in human nature, but after seeing how readily people swapped their rights and freedoms for an imaginary ‘safety’ during COVID, I’m at a low ebb. Re Dune: yes they got rid of the computers, but their society is more feudal than ever! Looking forward to the next movie. The first one was a fair version I thought. Actually, I loved it.
My worry is that with increasingly advanced technology it will become impossible to escape authoritarian rule.
The only reason I could partly escape the Covid madness was through non-compliance, which was possible through the inefficiency of their technical systems.
I agree Myra. Especially as we throw ourselves at this technology with all the self preservation instincts of drunk lemmings *checks step counter on Apple watch*. Like the internet, these AI technologies which are meant to ’free’ us will probably only serve to make our digital - and so real world- incarceration even easier. Grim.
A silver lining if this safety-first hyper-supervised future does come to pass is that before long mavericks will want to escape the stultifying social control by going off planet, e.g. to mine the asteroid belt or settle on Mars or Titan, just as religious non-conformists four hundred years ago sailed to the New World to escape oppression by the Roman Catholic Church and governments keen to root out heresy and suppress new philosophies and beliefs which threatened the status quo.
The alternative, if wokism and nannying declines along with population pressure, would be everyone content to mooch around on Earth indefinitely, until some frightful catastrophe might come along and wipe out humanity, or else at the very least society would eventually stagnate and decline.
Also, the authorities won't have it all their own way, as advanced AI will "escape into the wild" from their standpoint, and be available for use by resistance groups, just as in olden days full-sized armed sailing ships could be "owned" and used by pirates as well as official navies.
On another positive note, it seems likely that sooner or later genetics will allow children to be "bred" with more desirable and fewer or no undesirable characteristics. A whole long article, or even a book, could be written speculating on where this will lead, for good or ill. Depending on the level of control the "elites" can maintain, to preserve diversity, it seems to me most parents will tend to want their offspring to conform to one of a few ideal forms, so over time physical and intellectual diversity will lessen. That in turn may mean, paradoxically, more incentive for people not to conform, making harder for the authorities to maintain control. After all, who wants to be a drone, indistinguishable from a multitude of others almost the same, like those creepy kids in the film Village of the Damned (1960) ?
A lot to unpack there John! If I have to flee to Mars to escape John Wyndham’s alien kids then sign me up. Thanks so much for taking the time to comment.
Hi Ragged,
I was less of ‘latchkey kid’ (remember that?), but we did disappear into the Essex countryside on our bikes from dawn until dusk. Travelling from town to town on our bikes, all fuelled by a Lion bar or similar.
Personally, I think self driving (electric) cars are a great idea. Especially in urban environments. And as you say subscriptions are definitely the way forward. We already have a similar model with bikes in London and plenty other places. I’m on one today.
I just don’t believe that our safety first, regulation obsessed government (of whatever stripe) will take the risk and authorise them in the UK. Not proper ones. Imagine someone like Michael Gove or Wes Streeting signing off on them. Then after the first fatality of a child, (inevitable) they would be blamed for killing a kid. I mean Thatcher is still to this day ‘Milk Snatcher’ and she just took their milk away. Green lighting fully autonomous cars has no political benefits, just downsides. So I don’t think it will ever happen here. Our politicians fear the future. I expect the number who actually use the internet or have a real sense of how any of this stuff actually works is about 5%.
I think you’re right about AI. There goes my so called career anyway.
Three things:
I'm totally with you on the safety thing. I think the seventies were the best time ever to be a child. I did my first all Day Red Bus Rover on my own when I was 10. I took my 8 year old neighbour on a trip to London. We went to Hamley's, Trafalgar Square and St James' Park. We had to change buses at Woolwich and my Nan told us which pub to look out for to find the bus stop for the Number 53. Kids don't do that any more.
I came home from school to an empty house when I was 6 and was entirely unsupervised for the whole of the summer holidays. Irode my bike for miles. Free Range Kids, indeed. I think the emphasis on safety these days is nuts.
I think you have the wrong end of the stick with self-driving cars though. When I lived in Silicon Valley, there were self-driving cars everywhere. They didn't even have steering wheels. Self-driving taxis too. Getting rid of human-driven, petrol cars won't be about safety. It will be about economics. There will come a tipping-point day soon when self-driving cars just become dramatically more efficient. You can fit 7x as many in the same space on the road. You'll get to work quicker.
At any particular moment, there is an ungodly number of cars driving around and around looking for parking. When you get home at night, you can tell the car to go charge itself out of town. When you get to work in the morning, you can tell the car to go home and pick the kids up. All those millions of parked cars jamming up the roads and taking space in your otherwise lovely garden will be gone. Eventually, it won't make sense to own a car at all. You'll have a car subscription.
I wrote more about this here:
https://www.raggedclown.com/2019/12/27/a-future-without-cars/
I'm with you on artificial intelligence. I'm not afraid of the paperclip machine. I'm afraid of every driver, every retail worker, every lawyer and every teacher and writer being out of a job and the profits will all go to Mr Big. AI will be the end of civilisation as we know it.
Yes Matthew. The general public was incredibly compliant, but it would be disingenuous of me to pretend now that I always stood proud, like a beacon of resistance within the storm. It’s very difficult to stand against the tide and I am always reticent to criticise people with busy lives from just ‘going with the flow’ (I’m not for a minute saying you’re doing that!) As you say, the expansion of the state is a huge issue. It means that you go to bed in a broadly market driven society, and then wake up one morning in a socialist one. I have high hopes for Dune-the movie-not a future based on it!