This is not a blue Monday post. In fact the colour it should have is red. But I’m not angry. Perhaps the colour is beige, as I’m not surprised by what is happening. 

Talking of colours. I believe it was an orange politician who said we are in the era of fake news, but not even he must have known the extent of it.

How many people are aware that our news feeds on our phone and on our social media feeds are a personally curated echo chamber of our thoughts and searches?

Perhaps people have less in common these days, because none of their news is common. 

I wonder how many people have actually read or know the contents of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It was written in 1932, and explores / predicts that the world will get to a point where there is technological control, mass consumerism, and the suppression of individuality, replacing freedom and meaning.

The algo has a rhythm and we are all dancing. But when the music stops. So do we. 

Are our self preserving instincts also disappearing?

I for one, think we are sleep walking into an AI disaster. It won’t stop, and we wouldn’t want it to, as its use cases are vast and will deliver amazing results but it has to be harnessed.

Social media is already weaponised to keep us engaged. The sad thing about this, is that most people don’t know it. Dopamine junkies with sad faces and no real friends. I don’t say it as a critique. I say it because it’s true. More needs to be done to get people offline and into the real world. People need relationships, not transactions. The pendulum has been allowed to swing too far. Why? Money. As Aldous predicted, consumerism is running wild. At the expense of our well being, our finances and the planet. 6 companies run the world, and they are all commercial. So this won’t change unless people change their habits on mass.

This started off about deadly sin #2 greed. But it could cover them all. Social media is bringing them all out of people. 

The noble peace prize winning ‘godfather of AI’ thinks we are doomed. As whilst he thinks AI can be harnessed he doesn’t think the people with the reigns will even attempt to apply them. Let alone properly.

The old adage that whilst technology takes jobs it creates others is not true here. It’s different. The human in the chain will be the least efficient part of any AI model. What if it decides it doesn’t need us. Humans without purpose, with free time and access to everything would be the biggest sin of all.

This is not something to be dismissed as speculative or conspiracy. It’s happening in plain sight.

Whilst it is believed that Aldous met once with George Orwell, he did make one notable critique of 1984, and that is what I will conclude with.

“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons.” – Aldous Huxley.

Was he right? Maybe dopamine is that sedative drug mentioned as narco-hypnosis.