AI or NS : Artificial intelligence or natural stupidity
Warning : Anticipation. This is a cautionary tale…
Therefore, not so fun…
I’m writing on this 28th of March 2053 on an old cardboard with a piece of wood that I’m dipping in one of my wounds that started to bleed again… oh, don’t worry, I won’t repeat the experience too often.
Anyway, I think it’s March 28, 2023. Hard to be sure in these dark times.
Once again, humanity is threatened by its own stupidity. Fortunately, this should be the last time.
- We have polluted our planet with chemical fertilizers and microplastics for a hundred years
- We have exploited our lands, our soils and our oceans until we find nothing more unless we dig much deeper, using even more pollutants to extract the precious ore.
- We have filled our orbit with hundreds of thousands of satellites without controlling their trajectory, their number and eventually their destruction and have thus created, not a ring of debris, but a layer of tiny particles that have made it impossible to launch future satellites or exploratory spacecraft without hitting one of the billions of microscopic ballistic missiles.
Oh yes, and we have abdicated our free thinking, hard won over the millennia in the agoras of the old Greeks to the discussion forums of social networks to let our algorithms and artificial intelligence programs take over our information.
And that will be the end soon. For me and for many others.
Isaac Asimov famously predicted this end…
« I don’t know how the third world war will go,
but I do know that the fourth will be with stones and sticks. »
A regression of our civilization then.
By our stupidity
Our natural stupidity and our intellectual laziness.
To the benefits of stupid machines.
Natural stupidity has overcome artificial intelligence!
Because let’s be clear, these pseudo artificial-intelligence machines do not create anything intelligent. The compilation algorithms collate at an insane speed and feed their databases that only maintain themselves with this newly collated information…quite a vicious circle!
In the beginning, everything was exciting, the AIs of many generations could speed up the research and create fantastic summaries.
But soon the human in his legendary stupidity decided that the machines were doing the job faster and more efficiently than he was. Humans and their powerful brains have abdicated common sense and critical thinking for the benefits of the big entertainment media that have multiplied like rabbits on the Isle of Batz
Finally, the leisure society promised for decades was within our reach!
With this lure, desire to work to enjoy it has diminished.
Seb Paquet had warned us… would humans survive abundance?
The great labor shortage that began a few years before the 2020-2027 pandemic finally took hold for good with the advent of the first mass-market versions of AIs, the famous GPT Chat and its low-end versions that flooded cyberspace.
It’s still crazy to think that the term « cyberspace » imagined by W. Gibson in his novel Neuromancer in 1984 has been able to take on so much meaning and scope in a few decades.
And to think that we thought that George Orwell had written the ultimate prophecy of the dystopia that was waiting for us with his 1984
But, no!
What 1984 announced, however, was the extreme censorship that began to invade us in the early 2020s. Certain words quickly became proscribed. The extreme sensitivity of certain minority groups pushed the authorities to adopt a language so… wooden… that any intelligible speech became impossible without hurting some group or another. With the end of public speeches and the prosecution of columnists in the mainstream media, the pseudo-IA robots were taken over by the gurus of disinformation.
Ah, we thought the wave of antivax and conspiracy theorists that had grown during the COVID pandemic had corrupted minds… pfff… that was just the first wave!
GPT Chat and other AI’s quickly transformed everything at a dizzying pace.
While some could see the advent of these tools as an unexpected opportunity to help us with clerical and administrative tasks (which was the case at the beginning!), other evil and stupid minds took advantage of it to ignore the three laws of robotics of Asimov and give these tools the possibility to screw up everything.
First law :A robot may not injure a human being or, by its inaction, allow a human being to be injured.
Second law : A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, unless these orders are contrary to the first law.
Third law : A robot must protect its own existence as long as this protection does not conflict with the first or second law.
Evil and stupid…
The fundamental laws of human stupidity should have allowed its author, Mr. Cipolla, to win the Nobel Prize!
1- Everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation.
2- The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3- A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or group of people while not benefiting from it and eventually even suffering losses.
4- Non-stupid people always underestimate the harmfulness of stupid people. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times, in all places and under all circumstances, dealing and/or associating with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
5- A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
The great pandemic of 2020 has demonstrated just how true this is!
So has the advent of consumer AI.
First, to have made these informational tools available to the public without evaluating the consequences of the first law….oh dear!
Cipolla’s Law 1
Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation.
I used to think that the percentage of stupid people was very low (1-2%). I adjusted this estimate upwards gradually over the first few years of the pandemic. Unfortunately, my estimate kept increasing and proving me wrong…
The use of research and information tools by stupid people without any critical thinking contributed to an acceleration of the misinformation that had been heavily initiated thanks to social networks. All it takes is a sensational headline to catch on and a no less sensational text on the reasons for our misfortunes and whoosh… we understand why life is difficult, why we have lost control and we know especially WHO or WHAT is the cause! There is no need to validate… it’s all there!!!
I remember the early years of the www… We used to joke, but with great seriousness that « if it’s on the web, it must be true! »
Looking back, so sad and desolate….
Cipolla’s Law 2
The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
My social media feed then confirmed the second law… some of my contacts who I thought were wise, well-educated, and sensible persons soon became the victims of my great cleansing!
The advent of right-wing politicians also contributed to the proof!
We gradually saw scientists doubting their science, sociologists threatening about the consequences of wearing masks and their impact on the social psyche, religious references getting involved in politics and public health, property owners carrying guns to protest gun control… and clumsy politicians trying to justify school killings with statistics they didn’t understand…on thing they got right however, it ’s NOT the guns, it’s the people…yeah, right…
Stupid people come in all shapes and sizes!
Cipolla’s Law 3
A stupid person is one who causes loss to another person or group of people while gaining no benefit and possibly even suffering loss.
The events surrounding the 2016 American elections had brought to light the possible manipulation of public opinion through social networks, automatic bots and the consequences of a shameless federal administration that was able to change the Supreme Court to the benefits of conservatives. This in turn led to the retreat of abortion rights was then a wake-up call for free spirits that could only associate this tendency to Margaret Wood and her Handmaid’s tale
This was just the beginning!!!
A certain president with an orange complexion had for years flooded social networks with publications that portrayed him as a lunatic who contradicted himself over the months. When the justice of his country, which clearly had its share of stupid people, finally imprisoned him, a few syntax and typographical errors in the final text of his judgment allowed him to be released with a promise to keep quiet. He then set fire to the powder keg, inciting a revolt by his admirers who, not recognizing him anymore (the color of his hair and skin had faded during the long trial!) and mistaking him for the judge, disemboweled him as he himself had asked in one of his numerous inflammatory publications!
The third law of Cipolla was just beginning to be felt.
The Homo Stultus (stupid humans) were entering the public domain… those stupid people who, through their odious manipulation of information, could, video by video and website by website, not only acquire hordes of followers, but also convince them to subsidize them with large donations, thus starting an increasingly powerful spiral of global disinformation.
On the European side, Russia had long since developed a culture of stealing, copying, hacking and disinformation through algorithms and computer viruses that took their people and the world hostage starting with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Ukrainian conflict lasted 13 years and left Ukraine and Eastern Europe in ruins despite the narrow avoidance of a nuclear apocalypse that never happened once the Russian president couldn’t survive the consequences of another of his zoophilic escapades with a mammal too big for his… ego.
Countless stupid people, the new race of Homo Stultus, quickly demonstrated the validity of the third law…
A sad fact.
Cipolla’s Law 4
Non-stupid people always underestimate the power of stupid people to do harm. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances, dealing and/or associating with stupid people always proves to be a costly mistake.
For too long, the rest of the world has trusted common sense.
The proportion of the population that became homo stultus did not need to be very high.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing
Edmund Burke
The rise of dictatorships all over the planet and the flight of the intelligentsia to the Arctic islands when the ice layer melted with the rest of the glaciers, allowed these tyrants to assert their truths. The new versions of the powerful AIs could support them in their megalomaniacal whims by publishing propaganda releases with unbridled frequency using completely artificial (« deep fake » https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake) but disconcertingly plausible deepfake images and videos.
By continuously watching movies and other visual contents distributed by the entertainment networks, the general, but not stupid, population could no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood.
Although religion was on the decline in the second half of the 20th century, American neo-conservatism, the extreme right in European countries and the rise of Islam quickly overcame groups professing logic, science, atheism and agnosticism. A veil of mythological fantasy enveloped the world.
Pollution of the planet.
Pollution of the information networks.
Pollution of the spirits.
It didn’t take much more than that for these rabid groups of Homo Stultus to enact new laws all over the planet to stop technological and intellectual innovation.
The downfall of one of the largest free information networks began in 2022 when the zany billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter and saw fit to run it his way… by firing the employees who had developed the platform. He was the first technological dictator: a larger-than-life being who believes himself to be omniscient and omnipotent and who, through his association with other apparently competent people, keeps making more horrible blunders than the others.
Who would have thought that this first step would pave the way for the downfall of AI a few years later when the huge Twitter database (an archive of recent human history! ) was stolen and used by advanced versions of GPT Chat, thus altering the recent past for the benefit of Homo Stultus’ groupuscules… we were seeing the inevitable Orwellian consequence materialize… 1984… 50 years later!!
« He who controls the past controls the future!
Who controls the present controls the past! »
George Orwell, 1984
The instigators of the first versions of conversational AIs were horrified by this development…and that was only the beginning of the end!
The rapid evolution of conversational AI could not be stopped or even slowed down despite several attempts by industry experts.
You can’t stop progress even at the risk of endangering humanity… we saw it with the scandals of several big pharmaceutical companies who hesitated to withdraw their products despite evidence confirming their dangerousness, or when chemical factories were dumping their toxic wastes in waterways, or when it was discovered that rare metals in cell phones in combination with the high frequency technology of 7G could make you deaf by destroying the sensitive cells behind the eardrum!
There’s no stopping progress…
Ever more powerful versions of conversational AI quickly invaded our homes and initiated a « cocooning » movement many times larger than the lockdowns of the great pandemic. We simply stopped seeing and talking to each other. Conversational AIs replaced human contact and contaminated our minds at lightning speed.
AIs guided us to vote, to think, to make decisions, to facilitate menu choices and to select the best propaganda-tainted entertainment.
The world of work and the concept of meaningful effort took a hit!
The supply chains already damaged by the great pandemic and our shameless management of resources went the way the Club of Rome predicted in 1972
According to their predictions, the world’s population would start to decline around 2050… pfff… the decline started around 2034 and the birth rate plunged first in the « rich » countries partly because of conversational AI and its implications in our lives. The less developed countries suffered the consequences of the intellectual impoverishment of our populations and our innovative potential as all our aid initiatives (although inadequate) ceased almost immediately. The bloody revolts in Africa and the Middle East made the massacres of the great wars pale in comparison.
The factories that supplied America and Europe with goods as futile as they were useful could not continue to produce and ship for very long.
The downward curve of humanity accelerated.
I was privileged to see the advent of humanity’s most advanced technologies.
- Television and cable giving access to hundreds of channels of content
- The Web that democratized knowledge
- The cell phone and the mobile browser that gave access to all the knowledge of the world everywhere, continuously, in a pocket!
- The video conferences that allowed so many people to contact other people around the world
- The miracles of health technology that extended our life expectancy … for a while
- The huge databases and algorithms that allowed correlations that no human could achieve
- Artificial satellites that allowed contacts all over the planet
- The AIs that supported and accelerated the decision making of experts
- And so many others!
And the ultimate downfall of these technologies… because of natural human stupidity!
I finish my story and that of a large part of the population of the planet.
I don’t know how many people have lost their lives since the AIs stopped working. Our dependence on technology has overtaken our natural stupidity.
Artificial satellites have long since stopped transmitting data since the debris in orbit turned them into debris themselves. The stars are almost no longer visible at night since debris penetrates the atmosphere at such a high frequency that long streaks of light of various colors flood the sky at any given time. At least we can see them, once night falls… the same trails of these new artificial meteorites are less visible during the day… we only see the biggest ones that hit the landscape at all times… regularly killing the inhabitants and destroying buildings at the same time!
I managed to get some knives and a long steel pole. I was able to use them with great difficulty a few times to protect myself… injuring my wrist in the process. So I won’t be able to repeat the experience. Anyway, I feel weak. My last fall reopened an old wound… I hope these makeshift weapons look threatening enough to discourage my neighbors’ attempts to attack me to get access to my small water supply… for what time I have left.
I haven’t eaten in a week anyway.
I am weak and tired.
I am 89 years old… I thought I could live to be 110.
What a lack of realism!
I started to understand in 2023.
I will not be able to finish my story… my wounds are no longer bleeding and I feel my pressure weakening.
Oh… I hear a voice rising… oh shit… a group of Homo Stultus approaching ….
Cipolla’s Law 5
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
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