Author: dlongm01
Technology Against Humanity
TV advertising as politics
Have TV ads (in the UK anyway) become more ‘ideological’ lately, politicising how to live in a darker world?
…’fulfil your self’; ‘be better/more talented/euphoric/safe/in control’ etc. by eating chocolate, jolly betting, using deodorant or, for women, social power thru bladder control …
Stoppit!
Our future.
If things go on like this we will be living in an algocracy (government by algorithm). It can still be a democracy of course but there won’t be an easy way to know whose promises to believe.
So, no change then!
Now there is …
Somewhere, years ago, I read one the the shortest science fiction stories, just one page of a paperback. The plot line depicted a clever bloke who who tinkered for years to build a super-duper computer; it got better and better (chess and all that), could answer all kinds of questions about arcane maths and philosophy.
A quote:
“How inappropriate it is to call this planet Earth when clearly it is Ocean.”
Arthur C. Clarke
Free speech
Frederick Douglass said: “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
A car is not a horse
https://stephenfry.substack.com/p/ai-a-means-to-an-end-or-a-means-to
A transcript of a very good speech that Stephen Fry gave recently. It’s about AI (or Ai as he prefers to call it …) and the very serious problem of understanding the future we face in its presence.
He reminds us that a car is not a horse, that a plane is not a bird, that technology does not imitate. By the same reasoning, AI is neither a brain nor is it intelligent. AI does not imitate.
Let’s get over it.
The next time I read that AI endows computers with the ability to do things that an intelligent human can do I will rip up the book, article or delete the podcast.
A car is not a horse and does not do horse things. AI is not intelligent and does not do intelligent things.
History is about the future…
For reasons I won’t go into I just read this paper:
Readman, P. (2005). The Place of the Past in English Culture c. 1890-1914. In Past & Present: Vol. Feb. (Issue 186, pp. 147–199). Published by : Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society. http://www.jstor.com/stable/3600854
It discusses the role of history in creating an understanding of the past as a way to understand our present, and then from that we gain an understanding of what we should become present and an idea about what we want to become, i.e. history is about the future as much as, if not more than, the past.
Harder than you think …
A trivial thing perhaps but it’s harder than you think to change browsers.