83,357
edits
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
||
Line 2: | Line 2: | ||
:—The late, greatly lamented {{author|Douglas Adams}}, {{br|Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency}}}} | :—The late, greatly lamented {{author|Douglas Adams}}, {{br|Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency}}}} | ||
Someone hi-jacked the revolution, and we are too distracted to do anything about it. | |||
Scrappy little [[Wikipedia]], crowd-sourced and free-for-all, vanquished forever the gargantuan ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. [[Reddit]] bested the [[master of the universe|masters of the universe]]. Yet, we insects crawling over the planet’s face — we seem on the end of a perpetual hiding from new-economy conglomerates with their [[artificial intelligence|artificially intelligent]] engines exploiting our innate horror of boredom; filling our heads with a clangorous noise that pleases us by obscuring the abysmal ''silence'' that otherwise would predominate. | |||
In this way we are aggregated, parsed, tracked, anticipated and nudged around | In this way we are aggregated, parsed, tracked, anticipated and nudged around as if we are cups on great [[Ouija board]], and all just to ''monetise'' us: to extract value from the magical wellspring of our collected human weakness: a value that gushes uncontrollably every time we doom-scrolling or needily chase a like, share or comment — every neurotic push notification consigning us by degrees to stale, mute, digital oblivion. | ||
Okay, okay; enough already of the | Okay, okay; enough already of the dystopian moaning — the [[JC]] is a glass-half-full sort of chap; this isn’t really his style. Regular readers will know the [[JC]] is no subscriber to the dismal futurism of {{author|Ray Kurzweil}} or {{author|Daniel Susskind}}. Unless by occupation you mindlessly follow predefined rules — and if you that is your occupation, will you miss it? — there will always be plenty to keep you busy. | ||
So here is the thing I don’t understand: ''why'' is it like this? Why is this technological revolution such a drag? ''Where are our electric monks''? Everything we know about the information revolution tells us they cannot be far away. | |||
For, even if your operating theory is that our [[Meatsack|fleshy cerebella]] are no match for the overwhelming power of a [[neural network]], there is still a limit. Our friends at [[LinkedIn]] hint at it, with their underwhelming [[AI]]-assisted “predictive comment” functionality. Not because it is so ''hopeless'' — I mean, ''[[happy work-iversary!]]''? M’lud, I rest my case — but because ''the fact that it can even exist'' points us at a route out of the Matrix. | For, even if your operating theory is that our [[Meatsack|fleshy cerebella]] are no match for the overwhelming power of a [[neural network]], there is still a limit. Our friends at [[LinkedIn]] hint at it, with their underwhelming [[AI]]-assisted “predictive comment” functionality. Not because it is so ''hopeless'' — I mean, ''[[happy work-iversary!]]''? M’lud, I rest my case — but because ''the fact that it can even exist'' points us at a route out of the Matrix. |