A bad trip hangover

Long after 2025, people will have finally come to realize that machines are still machines and humans are still humans. The hype around machines being smarter than humans will be over.

Technology is supposed to make the word a better place. At the very beginning, computers were invented to provide data that humans could not produce. Databases were storing huge quantities of information, and software was able to let programmers query that information in filtered ways that would provide listings of data that were useful, at first for military purposes, and later to big corporations that could afford these giant machinery.

Computers became personal, and anybody could benefit from using spreadsheets and word processing in ways that ease the office workflows, and were making it easier for individuals to deal with the burden of keeping their files up-to-date.

The Web became a world-wide publishing platforms, allowing us to communicate with each other, and provided commercial platforms that transformed shopping, government interaction with citizens, and created ways for people to connect with each other using social media.

Micro-computers became even smaller, from the lap to the hand, with the advent of smartphones, which gave everyone the power of computing in handheld devices, constantly connected to the Internet. This innovation spread like fire, and are used by kids as well as seasoned professionals.

It took a little more than two decades for the powerful to get control of the extra powers that became available. The dream of a humanity that would make a giant leap by accessing knowledge and being interconnected across geographic and linguistic borders evolved into commercial dominance of the mighty companies that were able to occupy the territory before anybody else, and as an opportunity for authoritarian regimes to consoiidate their power before democratic reforms would take place to tame this unhearded tsunami of information drowning everybody before they learned how to swim in it.

The Faustian pact between the United States intelligence and the nascent search technology companies, which was motivated by the need to gather information about terrorist activities after 9/11, 2001, was magistrally exposed by Shoshana Zuboff in her master piece, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

The deal was that companies which collected data by gathering personal information using means that potentially violated personal freedoms, including the right to a private sphere, would be authorized to continue to do so, in an unregulated fashion, provided they would share useful information with intelligence agencies that were tracking terrorist activities.

Authoritarians saw an incredible opportunity there. By using simple hacking techniques, they would be able to get as much information as they wanted on citizens who were using these technologies, which soon turned out to be most humans on the planet. Alliances between authoritarian countries and would-be authoritarians in democratic countries, made information transfers even more fluid.

Artificial intelligence these days is based on "large language models" that gather all information available online and spit it back in a well-articulated, documented, assertive, written form that provides authoritative answers that tell us what to say when asked specific questions. These answers are characterized by the fact that they tell us what people want to hear. In other words, artificial intelligence used this way amounts to the industrialization of dictatorship propaganda.

What we need to do is to get past the hype, use technology for what it is best fit for, and denounce its abuse for endeavors that have nothing to do with technology itself, but are solely motivated to consolidate power of a small minority of people who think they will dominate the world for ever and get all the wealth produced for themselves.