"Bearish" understates my mood.
I think we're drifting into charlatanism, fraud and pseudoscience.
I think we're drifting into charlatanism, fraud and pseudoscience.
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[1] By "The Algorithm" I just mean the public colloquially reference to trending formulas used on TikTok etc, which I'm sure probably uses machine learning somewhere
There is a new secular religion underneath this.
"Uploading consciousness", "Aren't we all just data systems?", "We've built a neural network with as many (meaningless) neurones as the brain!"
It's the same disgust and denial at being biological animals that all religions foster.
Thankfully here, I think, the religion has predictions. It predicts a self-driving car, a "fourth industrial revolution", and so on. When these fail to materialise, some sanity will return.
(Of course they have already failed, the question is when in the next 5-10yrs people will realise.)
Huh, I didn't think of it that way! Good point!
I love history and a few weeks ago I read passage in a history book on a period in the early 19th century dominated by "American radicalism" (a liberal movement) and "transcendentalism" [1], when many hucksters and itinerant pastors profited off of the hype of industrialization. It immediately reminded me of the modern crypto / AI hype. In both cases, it actually is simply more smoke-and-mirrors to remove culpable human elements from a changing system --- by replacing it with "AI" and "crypto" (today), or the "invisible hand" and "radical self-reliance" (the 1820s-1830s US).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism - and history "rhymed" 100 years later - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135050842091057... and I would argue that it "rhymes" once again today with Musk following in Ford's footsteps, although with perhaps less intent than Ford