I am very much on the pro side of science. When applied correctly, learning from past mistakes, building on the hard work of your predecessors and making improvements (even incremental) has shown time and again to be the way the world works. One day your painting pictures on the cave wall of hunting bison, the next you have a camera, then by the end of the week someone creates television.
But this process is interrupted by the mass of people who try to decide what exactly the number 47 means today, what the dark secret of someone wearing purple is, and trying to insist their arch enemy was making a Satanic hand gesture when they really were just picking their fingernails.
And the process is interrupted by evil scientists. Not the movie trope scientist that speaks with a Hungarian accent, has a Tesla coil burping away on the lab bench and a hunchbacked sidekick. More like the bazillion medical doctor Twitter accounts that either not an actual doctor of the field they claim they are or even sold their soul out because grifting on the Internet is more profitable to them than actually caring for other people. I’m not going to say any of the names here. I’m waiting for my big day testifying at the trial, because the book deal will get me the big bucks.
Which, if you haven’t figured it out on your own is exactly the problem. Money as a necessary evil creates an atmosphere where people can and do make choices to survive getting through their mundane existence. It doesn’t where you fall on the good vs. evil spectrum today, if the opportunity presents itself can you honestly know today something resembling a moral compass will stop you from tomorrow making methamphetamine to get enough cash for chemotherapy?
Money is the dominant social identifier. Power, fame, status, attention…these others go hand in hand with money so often. There always has been and always will be evil scientists muddying up the waters. It’s actually pretty easy. When you are a genuine expert, you also know what DOESN’T work. But sounds real good. Maybe, if I pretend that I discovered element number 472 on the periodic table I can get famous, steal government research funds, and get off from my jail sentence by getting pregnant, having my cult hire high powered lawyers to dismiss my rape case or simply say, “I’m sorry!” and my opening the portal to the dark dimension that unleashed Cthulhu while oil drilling will all be forgiven.
Artificial intelligence has been getting lots of press lately. Great. Just great. Like the grifters need any more toys to give them better results. One day they’re photoshopping, the next day they’re making “deep fake videos”, by the end of the week there are chatbots spouting out believable doctoral theses.
As I review content about misinformation, I personally wonder if, for example, climate change models ever factor in some estimation for how much the average human being is a complete and utter asshole. It doesn’t seem like it. It seems more like they estimate the current rate of sea level rise, predict what year Ron DeSantis’s Florida office is underwater based on that, and ignore how grifters are gonna grift and fight tooth and nail to keep grifting.
For a long time, a huge part of the problem has been social progress versus technological progress. This graph may help:
The red line is social progress over time. The green line is science building on itself. This is by no means meant to be anything resembling any kind of exact plotting of actual data. Just a rough idea. It is also worth wrapping this up by clearly stating that since I don’t see this talked about much, this is very much my opinion instead of a claim of being definite reality. I reserve the right to gloat when Griftbot 3.2 modifies that graph to make the green line human happiness vs. the red line of investment into Griftbot 4.0.
No comments:
Post a Comment