This is fine.
thoughtmerchants.comThis is something I think about a lot. We have societal issues with critical severity that are effectively marked WONTFIX. The latest innovation in consumer tech is only going to feel more and more absurd.
Agreed. A bunch of tech professionals I work with, in private, talk about how scary AI is but nobody dare say anything in public as to hurt the bottom line. Add that to climate change...
I'm vastly more afraid of panicked Shock Doctrine citzens being whipped into giving governments free hand in passing Total Information Control ultra PATRIOT Act power grabs than I am of AI.
For sure it's going to be messy af where we are going.
Manufacturing disinformation will scale up like crazy. But already there is a sizable world economy on certain propagandizing vicious bastard states, doing this shit manually, at global scale. The additional magnitudes are, but for now, but not stressing me out, and in fact creating the potential for us to start caring more realistically, creating the seeds for a return to journalism or other better high trust systems that we've already lost.
And there will be more automation, more 'jobs lost'. But again I think this probably more just exacerbates & spotlights wicked nasty gross problems with class & power that we already direly need to tangle with, that are already extreme.
But the story here is irresistible. We are manufacturing so much consent to spend oodles and oodles of effort & time trying clutching our pearls over this topic. We are already so far along in convincing ourselves how afraid we should be.
I think about the state of the world every day.
I feel that especially computer science has tought my brains ways of simplifying and therefore understanding complex systems. The world is obviously complex, but the more information you gather, the clearer the image becomes of total and massive changes that are incoming.
We need a new ism - not communism, not capitalism. Something new, better, something addressing the huge cultural, political, technological, biological problems we face.
Thoughts?
Stop.
The world has had enough CS brains thinking they can use data to solve non-CS problems. Most of what masquerades as "simplifying complex systems" has actually been "dehumanizing systems and eliminating nuance in sacrifice to economies of scale".
Make your world and the immediate world around you a tiny bit better every day.
I totally get where you are coming from, and 100% agree, but you don't understand me at all. I'm not talking about data.
I'm talking about the world as a complex system of physics, chemistry, biology, society, politics, economics, digitalics (lol we need a new word for the digital world), its history, present, future. I think about how the technology is progressing on an exponential curve.
We NEED to be thinking about things at this level. Just look where the world is headed!
A quote from wiki: "accelerating change is the observed exponential nature of the rate of technological change in recent history, suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be accompanied by equally profound social and cultural change."