The naive theory of information: Most information is not truth, it is fictions and fantasies and delusions and errors and lies. Truth is a very rare and costly kind of information…a small subset. Flood the Earth with information and the truth sinks to the bottom. Fiction is very cheap, no research, fact-checking. Truth is complicated because reality is complicated. Fiction can be as simple as you wish. The truth is often painful and unattractive. Every nation has skeletons in it’s closet people are not happy about. Fiction is far more attractive. If we don’t help the truth along with mechanisms to support and promote the truth you get a flood of fiction and fantasies and lies, and the truth sinks to the bottom.
Democracy is a system for deciding desires and not deciding truth. Democracy relies on trust; a dictatorship relies on terror. By sowing mistrust, the path is made for dictatorship. Marx and Trump would agree that the only reality is power, all human relations are power struggles. The truth does not matter, only who gains power by protecting their privilege and interests. Journalists, scientists, Judges, etc. are only concerned about preserving power and this cynical view of humans destroys trust.
To some extent people want power but they also want truth, because the truth is actually what makes you happy. Populism, which does not trust in their intelligentsia, is bound to end in dictatorship. The term populist is from the Latin, the populace, the people. The argument that only “we” are the people, that is, the people in the populist group, is dangerous because the single will of the people defaults to the leader. The mystical connection to the leader is deified and that leader embodies the will.
A democracy is pluralistic, with many different “wills” and discussions between people.
Democracy is a conversation and right now the editors are the algorithms on social media. The algorithms promoted the most powerful triggers of outrage and fear and are manipulating us for profit. This breaks down trust and is destroying democracy.
These algorithms and primitive AI’s are not tools…they are agents. They can create new things. How do we enable the positive side of AI and avoid the destructive side?
We are about to enter a new age of an alien intelligence that we create a non-human culture that all humans will live in. Money as the god of this world has value only because humans share and believe the same story about the dollar. Crypto currency has the potential of collapsing the most successful story ever told. It is just a story.
If everyone stops believing in my god I am in trouble. If everyone stops believing in my money I am in trouble. Money came along and replaced an economy based on personal relationships and favors to strangers not having to trust each other and only to trust money.
America had a good run of 248 years but January 20th that ends. Nothing can save us now short of the military stepping in. The Trumpists are fine with dumping democracy and the Democrats are not going to stop them. Democracy is essentially committing suicide. That the richest man in the world, who grew up in apartheid South Africa, played a major role in ending America is no surprise. As for his dream of saving the human race by building a city on Mars, his shiny rocket is not built to do anything but flood LEO with satellites. His dream is to take over the internet and make himself god-emperor of cyberspace, and in his weird brain, the ruler of the universe.
Truth is stranger than any science fiction novel.
Ice on the Moon 