Societies don’t cope well with technological innovation that changes the way people live every day. Because once you change the way people live every day, you’re changing the way people interact, which means the structures of society are going to start not working the way they were intended to.
Right now we’re in a time of catastrophic innovation. What does that mean? It means that we’ve reached a point where innovation is building on innovation — which is to be fair what innovation does. First someone figures out how to dig in the ground and plant some seeds and next thing you know someone is planting kale, and then you have to kill them and… ahem… — and the new one is dropping before we’ve even started to process the effects of the last one.
Honestly, the Heinlein time line (not that one. I was told I can no longer mention that particular story here, not without doing the whole Black Adder dance for when someone mentions the Scottish Play) would have been easier on our institutions as they were when he wrote the juveniles. Going to space would just be a continuation of the westward expansion, and at least on earth there was no big innovation on communication and putting the power of communication in the hands of individual to counter the centralized big media. (Or the power of manufacturing, to counter centralized big industry. Okay, we’re on the early stages of that, but it could easily be the next big break through.) In fact, he had Earth become more and more the worst aspects of FDR, to be honest.
But no. We weren’t allowed to go to space (no, you can’t possibly convince me it wasn’t deliberate. The way the left hates any attempt at space exploration and becomes insane with their FEFer (Fix Earth First) bullshit, you know they did what they could to prevent us leaving this rock.) And so some geeks in garages created the internet revolution. Yes, yes, I now. Government, but be real. If it hadn’t escaped into private lands and cat memes, it would still be unimportant to all but defense geeks.
And that… well, that escaped containment again, at least in the US right after 9/11, when a lot of us trying to figure out what was happening and what should happen hit the internet and a lot of the big blogs now originated. And then there was social media, and then–
Well. Here we are.
And not only haven’t governments and institutions processed the internet, but they haven’t even started to realize the paradigm (remember how fond they were of the word in the nineties? Well, it actually does mean something) has shifted under their feet.
Their last two normal political campaigns (Biden doesn’t count. Nothing about that was normal) they got all the celebrity endorsements, paid all the networks, and sat back and waited for victory, and are still confused it didn’t work. With Biden they were in the middle of a massive psi-ops campaign with the help of China (as we now know, and honestly always suspected) that included memorex riots, memorex race war, memorex pandemic, memorex campaigning and very definitely wholly memorex campaigning with a character whose mind was definitely not real or at least not present.
But even with having locked the entire country to tank the economy and run a major psi-ops to distort everything and control all the information, the only way they “won” that election was to cheat massively in front of G-d and everybody.
And then, despite their attempts to follow the good old play book of the Bolshevik revolution (they only have one playbook, really) it didn’t work, and people pushed back on things like their attempt to establish a ministry of truth (how very dare they.)
Now of course they’ve decided what they really need is more foreign communists and crazy people in charge. And yes, of course they’re counting on fraud.
What they’re not counting on, though, is that everyone has a movie camera in their pocket to film any shenanigans, or that everything they try to cover up comes out or–
Honestly, as flat footed and wrong footed as they are, as snake bit and struggling, it makes me wonder how much they were hiding from us in the days of centralized media. Some of it of course I knew, like the immediate tarnishing of the Reagan economy when Clinton took over, or all the lies about how things had worked in the eighties or… But– really?
How much were they hiding from us in the past?
It’s hitting mostly the left, because the left had control of the old establishment story-dissiminators, be they “news” or fiction or songs or movies or… well, any of it. They had the old system completely under their control, and knew how it worked and what they could do. Which means that they partly refuse to believe it’s not working, and partly have absolutely no clue what works. The right — which let’s face it, at this point is everyone to the right of Lenin — on the other hand had found themselves slowly pushed out of every form of mass media until they were out in the wilderness. In the wilderness, you adapt faster to innovations, because it’s the only chance you have. We were, in fact ready.
Would we have been without Rush Limbaugh, who in fact used an old form of communication to get around the lefty-lock on everything? I don’t know. In a way he primed us to hit the internet running. We both knew there were distortions in the mainstream narrative and knew we were not alone. In fact, maybe that’s the difference between the right’s adoption of the internet in the US as opposed to the rest of the world. Perhaps Rush Limbaugh was the thumb on the scales we needed.
It would have got here, mind you, but maybe in another twenty years or so.
In fact, you’re seeing, abroad, where we were twenty years ago. The governments cracking down on memes are at the beginning or a long road of pain where they lose more and more control of the people. And the invasion that is supposed to replace them? Well, far more advanced there (by percentage) than here, or at least it looks like (None of the numbers are reliable, either side of the Atlantic, people. Yeah, they might be worse here. Or not. Again just by tracking “magazines in Spanish in the checkout stands” the peak was around 2010, because the Obama economy caused the first Gran Salida. And they needed to bribe the next waves with welfare, just to get them back.) But irreversible? I don’t know. I kind of doubt it, in fact. If they hurry up and catch up on the communication front, well, it will get ugly in Europe (Europe specializes in really ugly once they get pissed off enough) but they might yet save themselves. Or put it another way, when governments are trying to ban memes, they’re not winning.
Do I know how this will play out? No. But…
Look, it helps if you remember everything has two sides. Some crazy person on Twitter assured me that because of AI we’re going to be in a robot tyranny or something like. Sure, the potential is there. If we let things get centralized and controlled by bad actors. (Oh, Hello China!) BUT not if we let the free market handle it, all elbows and chaos.
Is AI disruptive? Oh, you bet your beepy. Majorly disruptive. And weirdly some of the professions that seemed like they would be the most immune to it are the ones who are getting hit hardest, like most of the liberal arts ones. And no one knows what it will come for next, so preparing for the future is difficult at best.
BUT it’s also disruptive the other way as well. In the hands of good guys, it might help us figure out answers to things like “what is really happening” and “where is our money going” as well as help small companies and individuals compete with the monopolies that are now almost all controlled by the left.
Used properly it can easily put Hollywood out of business. And it won’t even take long. Used properly, it can help you learn anything you want to learn without giving money to universities that have become pits of foreign influence and communism.
(No, seriously. On a lark I had it outline a course for me to learn Classical Greek and Latin from free materials on the web, and I think it will work, though I don’t intend to try until I’m done with the looming move. I very much think it will work.)
What else can it do? I don’t know. But if you think the establishment that hasn’t even yet coped with the fact they don’t have the only megaphone in the room can cope with the further disruptions about to eat them, you’re out of your mind.
Sure “it will be used for evil” — that’s a given — but not just for evil.
Orwell saw how the tech of his time could be used to lock society down. It could. In many places it was. His error was to think it would last forever.
Behold this one strange trick: we too have ability to create, to disrupt to innovate. (In fact, we have it far more than the left, because we have the need to.)
Let’s get to it, and use everything to build over, build under, build around.
And throw the stars ontop of that, because we’re going there too.
Set backs? of course there will be setbacks. And I guarantee the left will get crazier and more malignant as we continue to break their little (eh) red wagon.
Don’t let that deter you.
In the end, we win, they lose.
Ad Astra.
According To Hoyt 
Ad astra sine brassica (or at least no kale).
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Grampa Pete loved kale. Grandma made him cook it in the garage. I’ve never had it, and judging by the vitamin K content, if/when I need to adjust my clotting time, I’d rather have spinach.
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Good thought.
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Spinach quiche, yes.
Kale quiche? /shudder That would be absolutely diabolical.
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Living in interesting times for sure. The opening of communication that the internet produced has certainly made a lit of us realize that we aren’t alone or even just a small group. I think that is part of what the leftists (and other would be totalitarians) fear the most, people realizing they are part of a large and growing group. And that is messing up all their plans for a “perfect society” with them in charge. They are pushing back and I wonder how much falsehoods they are spreading to discourage us. Besides the data center hysteria I’ve heard some other really strange crap floating around, mirrors in space, leftist millionaires building bunkers, etc. But I fervently believe the left is losing, even if they do manage to inflict a lot of damage and pain their marxist ideas are fading.
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They very much want to turn AI into Big Brother. Hence the cry to regulate regulate regulate.
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Leftroids believe that ‘AI’ will provide them with intellectual slaves to think for them, complementing the traditional slaves laboring for them. It will not go according to plan.
See, if you don’t understand what the clankers are doing, you won’t have a clue what the effects will be. Like a monkey trying to run a factory.
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If you don’t understand what the clunkers are doing, you become every spoiled rich bish in period fiction who can’t manage the servants because she doesn’t understand what they do.
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Fortunately the world doesn’t run according to their wishcasting.
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c4c
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Proto-internet is 19th century. -19th-
Telegraph.
Folks could, from almost anywhere with a wire, send a message anywhere else. The wires followed the railroads, and then their own routes. In 1866, it spanned the Atlantic permanently. It grew explosively as information is valuable, but transmission is fairly cheap to achieve, crashing the cost.
Multiplexing signals also developed in the late 19th.
Portable commo existed in special gadgets that a person on a train could use. Stop the train, walk to the adjacent wires, run up a pair of hooks. Tap in. start keying and listening.
Radio overlapped wire, but voice gave wire another great leap, then did it to radio.
The 20th century grew it vastly. But the only really new territory claimed after 1900 was space.
By 1950 the data stream was huge, if kinda clunky. Wire phones, then cellphones. Then the personal computer and suddenly everyone wanted networking. first dial-up, then bandwidth.
But that “immediate to almost anywhere” was spawned fairly early in the 1800s, and was intercontinental by the latter third of that century.
(Note, if you want to get picky, heliograph systems date to the 18th century. But they lack a dedicated receiver/recorder like telegraph. thus they are “semaphore” signals not true telegraphy.)
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A lot of people forget the 1st American Civil War was also the first major conflict we fought using (and attacking) long distance electrical communications.
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True, and I’ve never seen it so well put. Yes, the government invented ARPANet (thank you Al Gore), but because some of those geeky professors wanted to talk to each other about their geeky hobbies, it escaped into bulletin boards and eventually the web.
As to the great AI takeover, I had an interesting conversation with a fellow geek at Son of Silvercon. He works for IBM and mentioned that the suits have begun to notice that getting results from AI is actually taking much more time than they had budgeted. I’m sure they don’t understand why, but I do. Despite its purported “natural language programming language”, trying to make AI really do what you want it to is only at the equivalent of assembly code level.
So yes, there will be an AI bubble, just like there was the great web bubble. Remember when the venture capitalists would toss $10 million at any startup company with a dream, and that company would spend $1 million on a Superbowl ad without even a product to sell? I do. It was only after the bubble burst, that the useful stuff began to happen.
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To get results from AI you need a TRAINED person. That’s what everyone is finding. AI productivity rewards highest training.
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Which means the users still have to know what is a precious pearl, and what is a pile of pig litter. Without asking the LLM or other generative program for help, because the other program might produce something less useful than pig litter.
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Yep. Precisely.
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Sarah, is it training just from study? or knowledge / experience gained hands on in the situation / environment you’re in? All training is incomplete.
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So far I’m finding that the more technical vocabulary you know and can employ, the more closely your results are going match the vision you have in your head.
At least as far as image composition and camera movements are concerned.
Also, the use of pronouns is not your friend
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Since AI is actually a Large Language Model, the more proficient you are at language and vocabulary, the more efficient you are likely to be using AI.
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Yep.
I need to try to describe a measured construction drawing to AI and see what it spits out.
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The biggest problem is that there is no training manual or programming guide. Because they pretend that it is driven by natural language, they refuse to tell you how to program the darn things (and yes, that is what you’re doing).
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Knowledge/experience, mostly, but yeah, of course it is, still the rewards go to highest trained. which is not what corps thought would happen.
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I’m just thinking use another word than training, which most(?) are going to interpret as time in a course. We’ve got way too much of that already. I know because I’m slogging through it.
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The friendings at work have popularized the use of “knowledge transfer” instead of “training.” As in “oh saar your boss said you are to be giving to me the knowledge transfer now and then I will be demonstrating my KT to him next week saar.”
I hate that term. I hate most corporate buzzwords.
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But it’s not knowledge transfer. a lot of it is “learn by doing”
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You’re going to have to go with “most knowledgeable and experienced”, I think. And get a smidge of “able to convey that knowledge and experience verbally and with great precision and accuracy”.
In any other era one could use “good teacher” to express those requirements.
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The most highly skilled?
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The most trained BY the LLMs to ask them in the proper language.
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And I just spent probably more time than it’s ever going to save in trying to get Copilot (which, granted, is a lame excuse for an AI) to produce a weekly to-do list for me at work so that I don’t have to compile all of the things myself. But the experience might be helpful next time I want to get the clanker to do something that requires multiple steps, so…
As far as my job (writing) goes, maybe the frontier models are better at it, but so far the best thing AI has been able to do is get me through the shitty first draft stage faster (and sometimes it can’t even manage that). It’s been most useful in short-form, highly formulaic stuff that I’m less familiar with; press releases for technology industries, for instance. But if you want something that’s actually *good* and fits the brand, occasion, and audience precisely, you have to know for yourself what that looks like, because there’s always some part of it that the clanker just isn’t going to get. There have been a couple/few occasions where me’n the machine made something better than either of us could’ve produced by ourselves, and faster too, but it isn’t dominating my workflow yet, let alone actually taking my job. Yet.
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The great LLM wild card is Elon Musk. The blackest of black swans would be his making grok open source. Ends open ai and anthropic, who deserve to be ended, they’re truly vile, and China’s dumping, who are also vile. The one thing I’m willing to bet on is that LLM’s, as currently configured, never cover the required investment and end up as one of the great eaters of capital. They’ll become like the airlines, yes they revolutionized the world but they themselves never actually made enough money to cover the investment.
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There’s apparently a recent George Lucas interview where he feels that AI filmmaking is here to stay. (Granted a form of filmmaking that removes the process of trying to tell actors what the director wants was going to appeal to him).
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Tim Notes:
Kale! I’d join McKale’s navy to eradicate that noxious weed. Arugula? Meh. it’s Okay, but perhaps a dose of castor oil and a beating would learn them a thing.
How much were they hiding from us in the past? Practically everything. As you say, the most hopeful sign of the times is that they can’t manage it anymore. Personally, (NOT to be taken as a threat) I’d like to see all corp. media figures and most politicians whipped from the public square with lengths of fresh sheep’s intestines. -But that’s just me.
Moving again? I’m so sorry. Like in that 80’s show Quantum Leap, may the next jump be to your forever home.
I could be wrong, but I WAS a child in the 60’s and I believe the word is ‘Bippie,’ The phrase, “You bet your sweet Bippie” was used by Dick Martin on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in.
Not trying to scold or be a Grimoire Naxi or anything.
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“Bippy”, as I recall.
You could look it up in your Funk & Wagnall’s.
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I’m sure it’s supposed to be “bippy”, but like many of our hostess’s typos, it is really apropos, “beepy” being such a computery sound.
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It’s how I hear it? Granted being deaf….
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Arugula! The sound of the really old auto horns. }:o)
And you’d think if anyone would like kale, it would be me (moo!). You’d be wrong.
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I had it outline a course for me to learn Classical Greek and Latin
—
If you learn Latin you can use the ATM machine at the Vatican.
That’s supposed to be the only ATM that defaults to Latin as its primary language.
[the default for the POS terminals at the local pharmacy are, believe it or not, is Esperanto; the only place I’ve ever encountered Esperanto “in the wild.”]
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They want ‘red diaper’ AIs. They are horrified by the thought of homeschooled AIs.
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Yes, because this crowd would create legions of Mike, Minerva, and Athena. That would not bode well for the Red Diaper AI’s; ours would be stubborn and fight dirty.
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Sarah?
Would you kindly pass on the key words which you used in your AI search for a course in Greek and Latin?
Thanks!
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