Artificial Ignoramus’s
The Jetsons, Big Brother and The Flintstones
“The Internet is turning to shit”, that’s what Vikid had been thinking.
At first it had just been a whiff of something sweet, the distinct smell you learn to recognize as a new parent. Your little bundle of joy, fresh as an alpine meadow, starts to emit something that needs urgent attention and a clean up operation.
The experienced parent takes care of things quickly. It’s vital to avoid nappy rash and a very irate baby. The new mum and dad often have to learn the hard way…
Our Internet also once was a baby, it also once was a bundle of joy. When it finally emerged from gestation in the late nineties, we were all so excited.
However it occurred to Vikid, as newly hatched parents, we didn’t take care of some urgent hygienic requirements and now we have of face some giant rashes.
The child we birthed has turned into a mental and achned adolescent.
There have been many crimes committed, at first they were small, and innocent. The diaper was easy to clean up. However that wasn’t done properly, potty training wasn’t given and now we have a beast that’s defecating anywhere it wishes.
But enough about poo. We’ve sniffed that analogy dry (almost).
Let’s think of a Photocopy of a fotocopy of a fxtowbeo…
Each copy gets worse than the last one, until it becomes worthless. It’s degrades exponentially in fact. That’s the feature of the analogue world.
The great digitization effort of the last decade, turning everything we can from movies to music into the famous 1’s and 0’s was meant to be a defense against that. Digital media does not degrade. You can effectively copy it infinitely.
No one told the music industry that. Now it’s a Zombie. All we have left is Taylor Swift and We will never ever, ever, get back together.
Humpty Dumpty…
A small crime committed, no one cared because the Music industry was populated with throbbing dicks. They deserved it…
Then the crimes got more serious. We get the rise of FAANG, a saber-toothed monster with cute icons and turtle necked technocrats for lubrication. But enough about them, enough ink has been spilt.
Vikid wanted to talk about AI and how it married the worst aspects of the digital with the worst aspects of the analogue world. Multiplying shit with shit.
We are told this is a revolution. We are meant to think this technological marvel will finally take us to the age of the Jetsons.
Vikid was here to tell you, it more likely will take us the way of the Flintstones but first through the gates of Big Brother…
It will do so on the machinations of “visionaries” such as Elon Musk, Sunder Pitchai, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and others like them. Look into any one of them closely, their histories, their ethics, their actual technical prowess and behold the dissonance that will shake your cognitive capacities to their limits.
But this has less to do with them actually. They are the tip of a systemic pile of feces.
AI is modeled on many technologies but chief amongst them are neural networks, back propagation and curve fitting using linear algebra and a hell of a lot of statistics. That’s how the sausage is made.
In general this means the relationship between the inputs (data) and the output (more data) is effectively non-deterministic and more over un-analyzable. Which means it can’t be checked for “correctness”.
Basically, AI generates output that closer to Chinese Whispers rather than the Encyclopedia of Britannica.
Anyone who has used this technology knows this. For the time being we can take any output with a grain of salt, “fact check it” and get something useful out of it. Often quicker than doing it manually.
The output is like analogue but it gets copied at the speed of digital, recursively and infinitely.
But Vikid asked himself Why?
It’s cause the internet has gone to shit. Useful, accurate and more importantly, unbiased, information is no longer easy to get to.
Google search results are horrific. Filled with ads and ranked by whoever games the SEO engine. Independent human made, insightful content is at the bottom of the list, if it can be found at all.
There are several reasons, censorship, copyright laws, political interference, corporate profits, corrupt media organizations, cartel behavior, lobbying etc… all play their part.
However today, the most consequential reason is the rise of AI.
Artificial Ignoramus’s feeding off each other.
See the output of one AI, feeds the input of another. OpenAI feeds, Claude, who feeds Gemini, who feeds copilot, who feeds Llama who feeds OpenAI. Each ignoramus’ output serves as the input of the next one.
Multiplying infinitely.
No one cares, cause everyone is making money. Well not everyone, it’s mainly those visionaries (and their investors) listed above. They sell you the Jetsons. What you will get is Big Brother, that thing Jeff Goldblum is looking at, followed by the Flintstones.
These handful of ignoramus’s work enormously faster than all 7 billion humans combined and now there’s nothing left to stop them.
Think about it.
And that’s ,