In the past, only certain people had access to, or claimed to have access to knowledge and fed it to the masses.
Then we learned to read and figure stuff out on our own.
Now with AI and Big Tech, we’re going back to only certain people having access to knowledge (or claiming to have access to knowledge) and feeding it to the masses.
I think this perception of increased global ignorance may not withstand scrutiny — for starters, global statistics continue to reflect a rise in median education levels over time — but is an increasingly popular intuition that is likely bound to a few adjacent factors, namely:
1. Increased access
Many social spheres have become more inclusive, and perhaps none more-so than those found on the World Wide Web. In other words, you are more likely to encounter ignorance today than 20 years ago not because ignorance is more prevalent, but because those with less education have recently “joined the chat.”
2. Shifting goalposts
What used to be considered minimum required knowledge in a particular era, WRT a particular domain, is now considered insufficient if not obsolete. The most obvious examples relate to Information Age technologies, but include important changes in the realms of finance, climate, economics, and social theory.
3. Expanded range of lifetime education
Measured in years, there is now a much greater spread between groups with “low” versus “high” education rates. This just means the potential difference in those who know more or less is greater, which can easily lead to a perceived decline in knowledge, critical thinking, etc.
Whether more localized or transient effects may trend in the future due to historic shifts in education policy (or technology like LLMs) is yet to be seen. But there is little evidence to suggest that we are witnessing either the end of a golden age of free thought or the beginning of a dark age of ignorance and intellectual atrophy.
It ain’t AI, that’s just an accelerant. Conservatives have been hammering away at education for decades. The devaluation of expertise and intelligence as a primary goal goes back decades.
Trump is the guy who says out loud, finally, what we’ve known all along. They love the uneducated. They didn’t have to ban the books, in the end. They just had to tell us they were worthless and that our opinions were equally as valid.
The world cycles like this. The problem is, this time the idiots have Oreschnik rockets.
Double down with that, with googles new plans for gemini to overtake search… they really are going that direction… combining that with musks currently failing but obvious goal to make grok agree with right wing concepts. It’s really quite a terrifying end direction. Especially when you think of the end result of the AI replacing search on the long term of things. Because the chilling effect it has IF it works. IE say if google actually correctly agregates everything on the internet, and even IF it perfectly differentiates truth from BS. What happens to the places that actually do the work to get that truth, when people don’t click to their pages. No ads or subscriptions, means they get nothing, which means they eventually go bankrupt, and thus no new information gets fed to the AIs, and the only ones that are left to make pages to give new sources, are governments and corporations that have motive to convince the data lords to see them favorably.
Sometimes it is not that they have the knowledge, but that they claim to have the knowledge in order to control people. For example, if I convince you that I know what a god wants you to do, and you believe me, I can control you.
When I was 10, my parents sent me to catholic school. I question everything I ever get told. So when these nuns told me that thunder was the sound of God bowling, and lightning was him taking flash photography of his perfect game, I had questions.
What catholics absolutely HATE is critical thinkers asking questions that expose their bullshit.
So I thought “If god has existed for thousands of years, and he always plays a perfect game of bowling, who is he trying to impress with a photo of a perfect game?”
And when I asked that question, I had to go to the principals office for being disruptive. I didn’t mean to be disruptive, and so I asked how I was being disruptive. Which got me in further trouble.
If someone stands up from the crowd and self-identifies as an expert on a specific topic, that person will be listened to as an expert.
Yeah, definitely. Legitimate or not (and probably more likely not), we’re going back to: What does god want me to do oh “wise”
AIpriest? I can’t think for myself.
It’s not like in the absence of priests and organised religion in the West (since at least the days of Nietzsche) people were existential intellectuals trying to understand the deeper things in life, lol. As you can see, they just become hedonistic degenerates and/or money-worshipping freaks… and now, if they seek guidance, all they have is Elon bots. 🙃😭
But, TBF, there were always at least a couple flies in the ointment of Roman Catholicism (and all offshoots, ofc; and please don’t get mad dear believers, I wish there was a less triggering way to say what I’m about to say), being a state-religion created by the Western imperialistic hegemon after they kidnapped and murdered the local anti-imperialist religious and political leader that sought reform, by co-opting his image, making him an anthropomorphic deity a la Zeus, placing him in a tripartite pantheon and then mostly going along with “faith without works is valid” Paul (John Brown is the antithesis of this, even within the fold of the church, because he actually read the Bible and understood the overall themes and lessons, and believed in God and righteousness in earnest… but not everyone is a brave, selfless and almost compulsively moral student of scripture, ofc) and “your sins are forgiven if you believe in all this anthropomorphic deity crap” nonsense. Basically, it was always cooked, and there’s nothing in the Western civilization’s toolbox to fix it.
Believe it or not, you will need to at least understand belief and not just “information about this world processed through the senses” to even consider morality in earnest, think civilizationally long-term, and shape a society that one can be proud to be part of. Only in this context can we have some “ground rules” instead of moral relativism in order to build something on stable terrain instead of quicksand. But we’ll see where the Western civilizational project leads to, especially if resources become as scarce and life is as uncomfortable as it is in the rest of the world… we all know you’ll go full Mad Max (things aren’t even bad and OF is popping!), so it’s better to start changing things in advance.
