data dumb
There are many kinds of dumb. The ideologically dumb who cannot see their own stupidity through the gauze of a particular ism, is common. Marxism is the easiest example of that, but there are many others in our modern age. There are the religious dumb who have adopted a true belief and cannot break loose for fear of losing themselves to doubt or worse, losing friends. The simplest kind of dumb are the self-serving sort who steal or lie or kill for their own immediate advantage without seeing the consequence. Then there are the really very, very, dumb who combine a few different kinds of dumb together for the inevitable result, and then blame others.
Intelligence is usually not a factor. There are as many high I.Q. dumb as there are the naturally impaired. In fact, most lower I.Q. individuals have learned to guard against dumb-think after earlier experience taught them the basic facts of life, and being commonsensical, they stick to what makes them happy. They might then be misled more easily than others, but their understanding of the mistake is more straight-forward.
Lately, we have turned up a new sort of dumb—temporarily new—one that has grown exponentially in our vapid, technologically dependent, culture. We now have recent generations of bright minds made dumb by the memorization of data—something a cheap computer can do better. That is like counting the grains of sand on the beach. With the coming of AI, this will be the first cohort to be marginalized. And, importantly, because they have never been taught to think for themselves or to find worth for other reasons than the mathematical, statistical, or the pre-ordained, they will be the most angry with the world that then reduces them to beggars, and they will most easily be directed by nefarious minds to war, or riot, or worse.
When convenience becomes the standard of value, or efficiency, or speed, rather than beauty, or quality, or purpose, then the inevitable result is a data driven culture. This will serve the purpose of malign minds for a time, but then they will find the numbers themselves inconvenient. Such populations are not as productive, are costly to maintain, and besides, the robotics age has arrived. A war, or a plague will be just what the doctor ordered.
Because most schools, public or private, have failed to teach values of any kind, other than the reductive insanity of woke, in order to keep students in line and their parents cowered, and because critical thinking has long been out of fashion, a significant portion of the population is already essentially helpless, while also being demanding. This new welfare society is a kind of faux aristocracy, a royalty of privilege bestowed on them by technology they cannot make or create or fix themselves but will always demand ever more from. Think of an enormous version of a little shop of horrors with the echo of ‘feed me, feed me’ from every corner as it grows. And it will have no better end.
“If a man will not work, he shall not eat,” is the Biblical aphorism most recently translated into shortened form as ‘them that works, eats.’ Such a simplistic philosophy does not sit well with minds of the western liberal welfare society that we have today. And it will not stand. They will not be re-educated, or they cannot be re-educated. Mike Rowe is terrific, but he cannot save them all,
The singularity you have heard so much about, ‘A hypothetical future point in time when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and then be able to self-replicate and improve itself autonomously,’ dependent on compliance, of course, has already been achieved. And failed. Even as the minions of this outcome are busy trying to find the necessary energy, their numbers are diminishing. Love does not fit in the box. It cannot be programmed. There is no algorithm for it. Just chemical lust. And lust does not produce children, except by mistake. Importantly, it does not produce children who can think for themselves.
A Wikipedia definition: “In mathematics, a singularity is a point at which a given mathematical object is not defined, or a point where the mathematical object ceases to be ‘well-behaved’ in some particular way, such as by lacking differentiability or analyticity.” I think it is easier to simply think of it as unique.
In practice, it is uniquely undefinable. And thus, useless for any practical purpose other than to write dystopian novels. The eschaton has already been immanentized. Our utopia is here. If it doesn’t look like much, that is only because it is so much less than you had before. The feces underfoot are merely the illusion of our misconceptions.
Knowledge is not manufactured. What was not known before becomes knowledge. It is empirical. Knowledge is discovered. But it was always there to begin with. There really are no voids in the universe, just what we have not yet discovered. And, despite the effort of the best of minds to pretend otherwise, AI has no means of discovery. Data is knowledge, if you like, but then so is a grain of sand. Data is numbers. Knowing the number of grains of sand on the beach does not make you wise. Finding a way to turn silica into chips is smart—not dumb. AI is dumb. Using the chips to store knowledge in useful ways, that might be wise. But the AI will not imagine that until told to do it by a better man.