Electric monk: Difference between revisions

Everything we know about the information revolution tells us they cannot be far away. Scrappy little [[Wikipedia]], crowd-sourced and free-for-all vanquished forever the grand, longevous ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. [[Reddit]] vanquished the [[master of the universe|masters of the universe]]. Yet, we insects, still crawling on 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 like cups on some giant [[Ouija board]], and all this just to ''monetise'': to extract value from the magical well of human weakness into which it jams its stent, thereby consigning us by degrees to stale, mute, digital oblivion.

Okay, okay; enough already of the nihilistic dystopian moaning — the [[JC]] is a glass-half-full sort of fellow; this isn’t really his style.  

Here’s the question: ''why does this sorry state of affairs persist?''  

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 do, will you miss it? — there will always be plenty to keep you busy.

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.

 

 

Like so: if by mapping, tracking and anticipating all human frailty, [[artificial intelligence]] can predict with greater confidence than can even we what our next moves will be — and this does seem to be the present state of play — then ''the machines can emulate human frailty''. They can ''impersonate'' it. One cannot tell the two apart. We cannot, and a machine cannot.

 

If a machine can perfectly ''impersonate'' us, it can ''fake'' us. The point must soon arrive, therefore, when ''we can deploy [[AI]] to doom-scroll on our behalf''. And that ought to be devastating. Think [[GameStop]], only with the [[Redditor]]s tooled up with the same tech the hedgies have. While the machines joust furiously at each other we can escape through the side entrance and go back to what we were doing.