First they came for …
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!
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!
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.
“How inappropriate it is to call this planet Earth when clearly it is Ocean.”
Arthur C. Clarke
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.”
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.
A trivial thing perhaps but it’s harder than you think to change browsers.
Reading Audrey Watters’ 2nd Breakfast post today, stimulated a comment I wanted to make: https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/agents-versus-agency/.
But I am undergoing a major cancellation of subscriptions (I found I have been spending over £300 per year on various things over and above my internet subs and hardware maintenance). This has to stop! So, while offering comments on posts like Audrey’s is in part evidence of how good and therefore stimulating they are … BUT it’s too often a paid-for feature. A barrier to dialogue.
Chiang discussing an early science fiction story about a super-intliigent childr – ‘ The Hampdenshire Wonder’ (1911)’, “generally considered to be the first fictional treatment of superhuman intelligence, or ‘superintelligence’ – an idea that at the turn of the 19-20 century was an almost inevitable turn of thought as evolutionary thought became embedded, If human evolution kept going, what came next?
From the novel a striking quote:
“Don’t you see that ignorance is the means of our intellectual pleasure? It is the solving of the problem that brings enjoyment—the solved problem has no further interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action ceases; when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect knowledge implies the peace of death.”
And in summary Chiang says: “Nowadays we associate the word “prodigy” with precocious children, but in centuries past the word was used to describe anything monstrous. Victor Stott clearly qualifies as a prodigy in the modern sense, but he qualifies in the older sense too: Not only does he frighten the ignorant and superstitious, he induces a profound terror in the educated and intellectual. Seen in this light, the first novel about superintelligence is actually a work of horror SF, a cautionary tale about the dangers of knowing too much.”
A striking idea in Ted Ching’s essay about the 1911 nol ‘The Hampdenshire Wonder’ depicting te birth, childhood and fotunes ofa superintelligen tboy he wite that,
“In the future ‘intelligence’ may be regarded as a historical curiosity, like phlogiston, but until we develop a more precise vocabulary, we continue to use the term. Our contemporary notion of intelligence first gained currency around the time that Beresford was writing, and one can see how that converged with the idea of the superhuman in The Hampdenshire Wonder.”