The Stars We No Longer See

Amusing Ourselves to Death - A Brave New World of AI

Too many people worry about what will happen when AI is smarter than us.

I’m not worrying about that. I wish we had that problem right now. AI is frequently stupid and accidentally brilliant.

I’m afraid of no longer being able to see the stars because of all the ultra bright AI city lights flooding the sky.

I miss seeing those darn stars.

All the signal is being drowned more and more by irrelevant noise. AI has demoted us to raccoons rummaging through trash to find valuable content that matters to us.

Every month the noise is leveling up and getting better at creating mimetic signal. Every day more and more people use the sophisticated megaphone to produce noise with fake substance.

We’re currently having the con artist Frank Abagnale from the movie Catch Me If You Can constantly flooding our timelines with slop. Every single minute that passes the trash heap we must rummage through is growing.

Sayonara to all the stars.

I’m not worried about Nineteen Eighty-Four. We are currently living more and more in a Brave New World.

A Brave New World of AI

As a kid, I loved reading dystopian novels, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Brave New World, The Time Machine, and many more. As a teenager, I always believed Nineteen Eighty-Four was more likely to become true than A Brave New World.

Until Neil Postman surprised me with his brilliant book Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Neil Postman compares Nineteen Eighty-Four and A Brave New World, and comes to the conclusion that A Brave New World is more likely to come true than Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Stuart McMillen made a beautiful visual summary of the argument.

In essence the argument boils down to this:

We frequently worry about censorship or information being concealed. This definitely is a problem but there is a much bigger problem happening. We should worry even more about becoming so distracted that useful information gets buried in a sea of irrelevant pleasure.

This is precisely what’s happening right now.

Censorship Ain’t Our Biggest Problem

Trump can get away with all his nasty shenanigans not because of censorship, though that’s definitely happening too. All his insanity is already out there for the whole world to see. He is a convicted felon, even with the Epstein files not being fully released.

Trump has mastered the art of pulling wool over people’s eyes by spouting so much bullshit it can distract us from what’s really going on. Remember when he suggested we should inject disinfectant as a treatment for coronavirus?

A Brave New World is currently unfolding before our very eyes.

AI is flooding social media with irrelevant and fun content, like Elsa from Frozen singing Golden or a Jazz Version of Michael Jackson singing Billie Jean. This lazily and hastily generated AI content is competing for our attention with real artists.

When I search for a review of something I want to buy, more and more I’m confronted with fully AI-generated videos that waste my time by pretending they actually reviewed the product.

If I perform a search on Google, I’m presented with an AI answer that frequently completely misses the point.

When I visit Reddit, more and more posts are written by AI that pretend to offer substance but only want you to buy the product they’re promoting.

Everything online is simply getting worse and this doesn’t jibe with the fact that AI supposedly is getting better.

What worries me the most?

Today, when you travel on the train, there are more people looking at their phones than the outside world.

We’re living in the age of Amusing Ourselves to Death. Huxley was right, and Orwell was wrong.

We should stop only worrying about the truth being concealed, we should worry about the stars we can no longer see.