“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge that we’ve been taken.”
That’s a quote from Carl Sagan in his invaluable book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Written in 1995, on the cusp of our digital age, Sagan’s insights have proven astonishingly accurate. More than 25 years ago, he warned against the dumbing down of humans that would arise as we began consuming knowledge in pieces, in bits and sound bites. Sagan warned that we would soon be consuming “lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, and especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
Sound familiar? Think of the wave of “experts” that has arisen among us lately, folks who have “done their own research” on politics, science, climate change, vaccines, you name it. It reminds me of a recent New Yorker cartoon, wherein a man turns from his computer screen to his wife and says, “Honey, come look! I’ve found some information that all the world’s top scientists and doctors missed.”
What Sagan didn’t predict, at least not to my knowledge, was the onset of artificial intelligence, those voracious search engines run by giant tech companies that feed on every morsel of online information and regurgitate it to be used in art, literature, and research.
It’s garbage that creates garbage. If there’s a mistake in a piece of content, it gets indiscriminately picked up and amplified as a fact, and re-amplified with each ensuing search. It’s called AI “slop,” which is a perfect term for it.
I’ve written about this before, but when you search my name on Meta AI, it says I was the lead singer of a band called Gun Club. That is only “true” in the sense it is now reported as a fact about my life in some online searches. I’m stuck with it.
This sort of mistake happens millions of times a day, as AI scours and plagiarizes the web, doing non-coherent “research,” creating content that ends up in term papers, on social media, and in the news. These false results can eventually skew and dilute even formerly reliable sources, such as Google.
The problem worsens when it comes to imagery. AI can produce a “photograph” of anyone doing anything — a picture of Bruce Springsteen jumping the Grand Canyon in an Evel Knievel suit? No problem. A picture of Kamala Harris in a Chinese Army uniform? Piece of cake. Elon Musk even posted one of those to his millions of X followers. It’s not art. It’s a screensaver, an avatar, propaganda. It’s disposable visual slop.We’re being dumbed down whether we like it (or know it) or not.
To make things worse, AI uses massive amounts of electricity, as does crypto-currency “mining.” (I’m still waiting for someone to explain how bitcoin works as anything other than an unregulated Ponzi scheme along the lines of Beanie Babies or baseball cards.) Here’s a clue: If Trump is selling it (and he is), it’s a scam, designed to remove your actual money from your actual bank account.
Memphis is now the home to “Colossus,” the largest supercomputer on Earth. It’s Musk’s xAI operation, which is bringing tens of jobs to our community while taxing the power grid and running unregulated, polluting gas turbines 24 hours a day. You want more details about the deal? Good luck.
Memphis is also getting a new crypto-mining facility that will bring a couple of night watchman jobs to a big field in Hickory Hill filled with rows of “container buildings” surrounded by an 8-foot-high chain-link fence. It will eat up power at a prodigious rate, but MLGW officials are mum about it. Maybe if we put AI on the case, we’ll get some answers.
I know I’m nearing “old man yells at cloud” territory, but since I have to remind myself to do the following, I’ll remind you as well: Take time each day to remove yourself from artificial life. Read a book. Take a walk. Listen to music. Move! Life is short and love is more than a heart emoji on somebody’s vacation photo. Don’t let yourself be bamboozled.