As one of the original champions of the power of digital information and commerce, trends of the last several years have been devastating. The internet became consolidated, censored, and propagandistic. Search tools that used to provide vast access to unheard truths became playthings of the elites to manipulate the public mind.
At the same time, the silliness of “smart” technology started to dominate our lives. It hit TVs, refrigerators, thermostats, building security, and even light switches. The absurdity of it all came home to me when I bought a new lightbulb that required me to download an app to change its brightness. The dimmer switch was invented some 65 years ago and works better than this silly thing.
Meanwhile, the soundtrack to the digital age became the ubiquity of digital beeps and other strange sounds. Even my own dishwasher is somehow programmed to give off fully 9 loud beeps when it is through drying, as if I need an appliance screaming at me because I might be thinking about something else at any one time.
So sick of this has everyone become that the owner of an apartment unit I know is working to fix the intercom system in the building that was fully functional in the 1940s and broke along the way. He wants it back just the way it was to replace all the rest of this unworkable digital technology. Trouble is that he cannot find anyone who knows how to fix it!
Sites that were once open source became nothing but delivery systems for powerful elites to message to us. At some point, it became clear that Wikipedia was wholly unreliable. Every entry on anything even slightly controversial started blocking anything that ran contrary to an approved message.
It wasn’t just Google and Wikipedia. Matt Taibbi is correct here. At some point the internet in general became “an unwieldy obstacle to knowledge.”
So much of the wonderful promise from early in this century lies in ruins today. This happened to social media, for example, that promised new forms of community and social connection. As it turned out, the doubters were correct. Facebook friends were not real friends, and the platforms designed to show off your best life became feeders of sadness and envy. Once the news value disappeared, they became enormous time wasters that drained away productive hours.
Then you had the problem of data collection, insecurity of privacy, and the commodification of our personal habits, shopped around the digital marketplace and ultimately sold to governments and their contractors. This was a disaster that, to my knowledge, no one had predicted 25 years ago. Now it seems very obvious: the marketplace turns our lives into tradable goods while governments use information systems as methods of tightening control.
I recall having public debates with people on this back in the early 2000s. My opponents warned that something was going wrong, while I was somehow sure that the libertarian ethos of the tech entrepreneurs would protect us. I was wrong and my opponents were right. Nothing turned out like I had hoped.
The machines have begun to control us instead of the reverse. I found this out recently on a layover flight when they wouldn’t let me board because somehow, three layers back in the production structure, someone had failed to press the right button. Everyone knew I had a paid-for ticket and my name was on a seat but the machine kept flashing some one silly thing. No human could do anything about it and I had to miss the flight, stay overnight, and book another the next day.
We look at all of this mess and wonder if it was all worth it. Are we really better off now than we were, say, 15 years ago or even 5 years ago? It doesn’t seem so. There needs to be a major rethinking of everything. Taibbi goes further and says it outright: the internet needs to be smashed and completely rebuilt. I cannot disagree.
I would like to propose, however, that artificial intelligence (AI) itself might be some of the solution. So far, there is a genuine competitive marketplace in these large language models. The first iterations under the Biden administration were painfully woke and obviously generating the wrong answers. But then the marketplace heated up and that came to an end.
The platform X just released its Grok AI model in a downloadable app, with version 3 vastly better than the one first released six months ago. It is truly a marvel, not only explanations but its citations. Everything it tells you in answer to your question is backed up with source material that can take you deeper. This source material is balanced and broad, and you can decide the credibility for yourself. The graphics service that is built-in creates photo-like images of stunning beauty with the right prompts.
Ever since Grok 1 came out, I found it a worthy replacement for all search engines, the main ones of which have become corrupted in the last 5 years. Now I feel emancipation from them completely. This one app is a worthy gateway to information sources. I’m confident about this new path, for now, because the industry is nonprofit, largely open source, and heavily competitive.
Having been burned once already, however, I’m not going to make the same mistake twice and celebrate AI language models as the path to the utopian future. They still make plenty of mistakes that have to be corrected by human intelligence, as any genuine expert will tell you. There is the grave danger that they can be mistaken for truth, and I feel sad for students of the future who come to believe they won’t need to know or understand anything anymore because AI does it all for them.
It is up to the mature people in the room to make it clear to the young that there is no substitute for real books, genuine study, actual learning, and deep wisdom born of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes from an app in a few seconds of clicking. These tools can help as shortcuts, reminders, and prompts to learn more but they are nowhere and ever a substitute for knowledge of your own born of deep study. I say that knowing full well that a full generation is going to be tricked into believing otherwise.
Why, then, should I be happy about AI? Because it could eventually blow up the tech cartels, cause the search engines to fall into disuse, and ruin the business model of many millions of junky webzines that live entirely on feeding ads to their users. It is disruptive of what is a bad system, and that is much welcome and hugely needed.
And this raises a serious issue. If the underlying data used by AI is damaged and declining in quality, AI will produce results that are also damaged and declining, on a growing basis. The dumber we get, the dumber AI will become. That’s because, Changizi continues, AI “is a mirror—one that reflects back the collective insights of human thought, refined through centuries of open discourse. If we allow the mechanisms that generated that knowledge to atrophy, no amount of computational efficiency will save us. The intelligence behind intelligence will have been lost.”
Let’s not make the same mistake we did 20 years ago in thinking that the new technology will save us. It won’t. Civilization has to save itself. Technology provides tools of efficiency but not and never insight, creativity, virtue, and wisdom. Regardless of what apps we download, we still have vast work to do to make and keep civilized life elevated and beautiful.
