"Artificial Intelligence Is Making Everything Dumber"

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/artificial-intelligence-is-making

> For decades, video footage was the gold standard for evidence that something had occurred. For a few sweet years there was a period when anything significant that happened in public would usually be recorded on video, because in any group there was bound to be a few people with a smartphone in their pocket, and then those videos could be shared with the world as evidence that the significant thing had occurred. Now whenever there’s footage of a crime, or an act of government tyranny, or just a famous person doing something ridiculous in public, people aren’t going to believe it happened unless it’s corroborated by eyewitness testimony.

> So in that sense we’ve sort of backslid to where we were before the invention of photography, when eyewitness reports were the only thing we had to go by. A video can help illustrate what the eyewitness is talking about, but without a physical witness willing to attest to its veracity, it’s often not going to be worth much in terms of proving that something happened.

> Which of course serves the powerful just fine. Videos of genocidal atrocities, police brutality, and authoritarian abuses have been causing a lot of headaches for our rulers these past few years, so they’ll be happy to see the information ecosystem entering a new era where inconvenient video footage can be dismissed with a scoff.

#AI #AIDanger #FakeNews #Dystopia #CaitlinJohnstone

My meaning is that technical development is neither good, bad, nor neutral. It is a complex mixture of positive and negative elements. Some are good and some are bad, if we want to use moral terms. It is impossible to dissociate them and thus to achieve a purely good technique. Also, good results do not depend at all on the use which we make of technical equipment. In effect, even in such use we ourselves are modified in turn. --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology

Analyses which appear very rigorous, which are built on statistics, and which make no reference to these problems are the most dangerous. For they, too, are ideological, but they pretend to be purely scientific and have an appearance of strictness that one does not find in more rhetorical but more honest studies. --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology

Some of them find it good, and a sign of freedom, that devices (e.g., Minitel) can be used to maintain pornographic and obscene verbal relations. To see common people degraded is a wonderful pastime for aristocrats. --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology

Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song

Paul Lynch's Prophet Song has won the Booker Prize for 2023, but the Irish author's work is a deeply odd and disturbing work of fiction I thought about Brexit, Trump, and the forces gathering on the horizon: The Freedom Party in Austria. The National Front in France. The People’s Party in Denmark. Golden Dawn in Greece. Jobbik in Hungary. Law and Justice in Poland. Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. A tectonic shift was occurring in western democracies. I thought, too, about the […]

https://www.pottbayer.de/2024/10/16/why-paul-lynchs-prophet-song-is-one-of-the-strangest-books-ever/