Loose Threads
I don't like being meta-textual but these short snippets don't really stand as complete ideas on their own. I was not able to see the path to consolidating them into a complete whole. So instead I'll be putting them here separately but together.
Virtual Knowledge
We have virtualized all our knowledge. Sorry, I mean digitized.
This should mean that (almost) anyone can access (almost) any knowledge at any time.
What an incredible achievement!
Yet somehow doesn't that feel hollow?
Like I didn't say anything wrong, but in spirit what I said rings false?
The knowledge humanity has accumulated over the centuries was not paid for.
The ancient Egyptians aren't paid license fees for Aspirin.
Neither Gutenberg nor the (slightly less) ancient Chinese are paid license fees by HP.
The very idea would probably shock them.
That very idea might very well shock you.
You and I know we cannot access a great sum of human knowledge. It's locked behind subscriptions or memberships. The products of the intelligentsia (both legitimate and those less so) are obviously too valuable for those of us who cannot afford them. Never mind the fact that without the knowledge of those who came before, they wouldn't even have been able to produce them.
But there's another problem too. While we may not have access to a lot of knowledge, we have access to an overwhelming amount of information. Anyone can say anything and if you look, you can read or hear it. The issue is there is a difference between knowledge and information, but its subtle. And you'd need knowledge to spot it.
We've virtualized all our knowledge.
Shallow
We have more information available to us than there has ever been in human history. The magnitude of this information, the size of "Big Data" is incomprehensible. Even before the AI boom, it was insane, and it has doubled since then. The estimates are measured in zettabytes (a trillion gigabytes).
Now to be clear, not all of this information, this data, is useful. Especially nowadays. Almost all of it is unstructured. Almost all of it is unverified. But it is still a ridiculous amount of information. You'd think we could make use of it somehow.
Turns out the "best" tech "minds" decided the most useful way to make use of it was to make a generator. We now have machines that took this information (structured by humans) and use it to create even more unverified information. Cool. We sorted part of the trash pile to make a trash machine.
It's interesting that those who have access to big data, always seem to end up thinking so small.
Back Ache
Some people seem to be more focused on speed or efficiency that we might get from AI than the fact that humans get less skilled. "If a less skilled human produces the same result with the help of AI, what is the difference?" It's very difficult to explain to those people that there is a significant difference.
There's even the next level argument when you bring up the costs and impacts of the AI infrastructure itself, "The environment wasn't being fixed before AI" or "AI will figure out how to fix it". Yet when they talk about the cost, they always seem to be referring to the electricity bills, rather than anything else. I feel like the electricity bills minimize the true impact, because an electricity bill subsidy would "solve" that without addressing the underlying issue.
AI uses a lot of resources and our civilization is bending over backwards, allowing this cost bloat, this damage to the environment and our society, in exchange for promises that may or may not be achievable, and are at the very least not achievable soon.
At some point, we stop bending over backwards, but our back might be broken by then.
Sheesh
Imagine if you woke up in the morning went to your living room and found a fifty foot metal pole going through it. You'd be reasonably taken aback, your living room has been turned into a giant kebab.
Your shock might change to a different emotion when you find the people who put the pole there.
You'd probably ask them to remove it.
"Don't you know how difficult it is to remove it?" they'd say.
"You're actually one of the lucky ones, some people had their dog or their grandma impaled when they were put in. Stop complaining," they'd continue.
That feeling, the one you're hopefully feeling right now, it's a little bit like how I feel when I think about systemic issues.
These people, the ones who put the pole there and the ones who defend the pole simply because it's already there.
How many of them do you think it'd take to change a light bulb?
Sorry, that was a trick question.
The light would stay dead.
It's too difficult to change it after all.