I'm Hoping The Reader Can See That

Back In The 1980s, When The Internet Was Only Available To A Small Number Of Pioneers, I Was Often Confronted By People Who Feared That The Strange Technologies I Was Working On, Like Virtual Reality, Might Unleash The Demons Of Human Nature. For Instance, Would People Become Addicted To Virtual Reality As If It Were A Drug? Would They Become Trapped In It, Unable To Escape Back To The Physical World Where The Rest Of Us Live? Some Of The Questions Were Silly, And Others Were Prescient.

Mobs And Dictators Were Made For Each Other, And When Mobs Appear, Dictators Will Soon Flourish.

We Imagine "pure" Cybernetic Systems, But We Can Prove Only That We Know How To Build Fairly Dysfunctional Ones. We Kid Ourselves When We Think We Understand Something, Even A Computer, Merely Because We Can Model Or Digitize It.

Governments Oppress People, But So Do Mobs. You Need To Avoid Both To Make Progress.

The Attribution Of Intelligence To Machines, Crowds Of Fragments, Or Other Nerd Deities Obscures More Than It Illuminates. When People Are Told That A Computer Is Intelligent, They Become Prone To Changing Themselves In Order To Make The Computer Appear To Work Better, Instead Of Demanding That The Computer Be Changed To Become More Useful.