Date: 2024-10-19 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00025452
TPB COMMENTARY DRAFT
WHERE DOES THIS BELONG
This commentary was attached to #25435
WHERE DOES THIS BELONG
This commentary was attached to #25435
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
PREVIOUSLY LOCATED AT #25416
This went into their feedback ...
@Peterbnyc Thank you ... this series is one of the most efficient ways of learning a lot about the way all of the world actually works ... or doesn't. I am 83 years old and know something about the last several decades. I was educated at Cambridge where I learned how to learn and I have been doing that now for more than 60 years. Bottom line, I have concluded that too many aspiring leaders are doing it for the wrong reason ... not so much to be a good leader but more to be a rich leader. We ... the People ... are not part of the equation for far too many leaders at the top of the pyramid (OUCH) whose primary goal is simple .... POWER and WEALTH. My version of modern accountancy and accountability ... TrueValueMetrics.org ... has the goal of changing the decision making process so that quality of life for everyone is the driver of big decisions much more than simply more profit for the few at the top of the pyramid!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am not impressed with the manner in which knowledge is distributed in the modern world. There is an amazing amount of knowledge, but this knowledge is not widely distributed and even less widely understood.
Worse ... in the modern world the flow of information has been weaponized to influence people rather than to 'improve' people. Maybe this originated back in the 1920s and 1930s when Madison Avenue was perfecting the art of advertising and maybe the bad use of advertising and propaganda goes back to Joseph Goebbels and Nazi misinformation. I believe that Goebbels worked in America in the advertising world before he became the chief propagandist of the Nazi Party.
Nazi propaganda was promulgated in an analog world of communications. Modern misinformation now travels over a digital infrastructure that is many times ... or is it many millions of times ... faster and more ubiquitous than what Geobbels had to work with. This is a worrying situation.
I am 83 years old and have been interested in the progress of technology since I was about 9 years old! Right now, I am not particularly impressed with the amount of knowledge that young Americans seem to get from their education in combination with a huge flow of useless information that they are getting from social media.
Modern AI ... artificial intelligence ... is both good and bad. For me, it has been pretty clear for quite a long time that social media, the internet and the digital technology ecosystem was also both good and bad. As something of an outsider, I see a situation where some people are able to profit mightily from all of this while for most people it is a rather valueless waste of time.
It annoys me that the modern world has become so unequal ... at a level of inequality that exceeds anything in the past. Progress for people and a better life is rather weak, even though the progress and power of technology has been amazing. Something is wrong with the priorities that those with decision making power have embraced!
Peter Burgess
ANOTHER PIECE OF COMMENTARY
LOCATED IN #25433
There have been a lot of 'fads' during my lifetime many of which 'fizzled' quite rapidly. but others eventually merged into the normality of life. I am tempted to see AI as something of a 'fad' while also recognising that some part of it will find its way into our normal lives.
How AI evolves depend a lot on the motivation of those who are working on it and their broader understanding of how the world works. My sense from observing the emergence of the 'tech industry' over a period of well over fifty years is that a certain amount of idealism rapidly gets replaced by financial opportunism along the lines of a virtual 'wild west'.
I have been an advocate for technical innovation for as long as I can remember ... and there is no question in my mind that the progress of technology has enabled 'progress' in my lifetime in a way that is more positive than probably any time in history.
Technological progress during the Victorian era was very rapid and very observable ... coal fired steam generation for railroads and driving factories and steamships was very visible and enabled a big wave of industrial production. What has happened more recently has been more subtle but perhaps as consequential. Like the 'industiral revolution' the modern 'digital revolution' there is a massive amount of 'pollution' together with the 'good'.
My impression is that a lot of the institutions that were established to minimise damage from the inustrial era and not up to the task of minimising damage from our current age. Far too many indicators of serious issues in our modern socio-enviro-economic system are trending in a bad direction, and little seems to be getting done to change this. I am bothered that what is going on in the AI space is making things worse, not better!