PREMIERE: One Half of a Manifesto: The Rise of Artificial Stupidity?

Hi everyone,

Please join us shortly for the 9 PM CST PREMIERE of our latest video: One Half of a Manifesto: The Rise of Artificial Stupidity? 

Or watch / share when you can. Whether or not this video reaches the world may depend upon you, that and some tech that we don't steer.

Lots of people talk about how this new tech is going to out-smart us all, but hardly anyone connected to it discusses the other potential, the dumbing-down...

A rare vocal critic from inside the technological revolution, Jaron Lanier, issued his "ONE HALF A MANIFESTO" over 20 years ago, highlighting numerous problems within the emerging system. Thus, his paper has remained and probably gained in relevance.

Myriad questions surround the unfolding of "artificial intelligence" and globally-networked connectivity, and one of the most central questions may revolve around our subscription to -- and the inner-faith of those steering the technology-- in the notion of technological superiority, the idea that better-than-human machines will replace us; force us to merge with an all-powerful intelligence; or eliminate us and end our existence altogether.

Frightening as those potentials remain, the fear-itself may be causing us to surrender to emerging tech and the wealthy and powerful overlords who steer it. Meanwhile, ordinary people who put up with everything from lousy software, to borrow-money-to-look-wealthier-than-you-are credit scores, to rights-destroying biometrics and security controls, to passwords-you-can't-remember and artificial-intelligence-to-put-artist-creators-bureaucrats-teachers-administrators-secretaries-et-al out of work -- are accepting solutions that a) don't actually solve the problems at hand and b) may be reducing us to a "less than human" status.

Lanier discusses at length how Turing's prediction of an artificially-intelligence computer that can pass as human doesn't have to get there by its own gain in depth, personality and function. Such a machine can also reach parity with the average human by reducing us to the menial status of accepting and obeying whatever the programmed software demands of us.

With disaster and cataclysm ever driving our society's so-called progress, Lanier gives well-reasoned arguments for questioning which way our ship is being steered, and what is to become of us, at least those who would give away their sovereignty to a machine that only pretends to provide all that we need.

It is a reminder that we must never give up that which makes us most human, for no technologist can replicate or improve upon that, and the imitations could/would leave us stranded in the future and sorely wanting for a past lost to progress. 

File under: When quantity of data becomes a quality of life issue.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzddaaxM9lg 

In Liberty,

Aaron and Mel