The Upheavals [of Artificial Intelligence] Can Escalate

Criticism Is Always Easier Than Constructive Solutions.

There Were Studies That Asked People In Different Cultures To Draw Pictures Of Their Enemies, And The Pictures All Looked Remarkably The Same. They Always Had Exaggerated Canine Teeth And A Certain Sort Of Expression. That Led To Speculation About Whether At An Earlier Stage In The Human Experience We Were Hunted By Some Sort Of Carnivore.

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.

Individual Web Pages As They First Appeared In The Early 1990s Had The Flavour Of Person-hood. Myspace Preserved Some Of That Flavour, Though A Process Of Regularized Formatting Had Begun. Facebook Went Further, Organizing People Into Multiple-choice Identities While Wikipedia Seeks To Erase Point Of View Entirely. If A Church Or Government Were Doing These Things, It Would Feel Authoritarian, But When Technologists Are The Culprits, We Seem Hip, Fresh, And Inventive. People Accept Ideas Presented In Technological Form That Would Be Abhorrent In Any Other Forms