Technology — in its roots, once a process of development that yielded tools to solve problems and assist mankind — has now virtually supplanted its creators, and assumed the roles of caretaker, manager, developer, and arbiter of truth.
Now people, with their multitude of enduring problems, are finding that the face of technology has been personified and given grandeur — imitatively human and playing at roles of authority and empowered to make operational determinations of increasing consequence.
Emulators are becoming judges and gatekeepers. This is no accident; this is no side effect. The product is working as intended.
Already, we are witnessing alarming cases where glorified algorithms — hardly accurate, reliable or neutral, nor endowed with any true or actual wisdom, understanding, or discernment — are restricting (or, if you insist, safeguarding) access to the necessities and routines of life as we know it.
Someone programmed it to be that way.
These personified tools are being misconstrued as superior and even superhuman, while living humans have been invalidated by the technology, humiliated and labeled as something less than human. A world of flesh and breath, turned inside out and upside down by codes and signals.
This Kafka-esque situational dynamic, and its associated army of automated agentic-pseudo-brains-in-command, have already been loosed into our world. Its parts are replicating, spreading, and growing into the roles we once held.
Answering increasingly to the mirrors that were crafted by human hands, ordinary people may soon find, at any given turn, a system that is compromised and infiltrated and thoroughly unaccountable to anyone, and inaccessible to many who stand to be locked out for reasons that would never satisfy anyone with a conscience.
One machine-entity told a woman that she didn’t have a human face; another that she wasn’t a ‘unique human’; another determined that a man was someone else, someone who was accused of a crime.
These imitative processes have already assimilated all the knowledge that humans have among themselves, or so we have been told; yet we are left with endless questions of significant gravity about the future yet unfolding now before us:
Who authorized this? (And since when?)
Why has anybody accepted it?
What are people falling for?
Does this system stand to benefit anyone, other than certain people who would gain personally, and other than by a system that seeks to operate beyond its own rightful (constitutional) restrictions?
How could it be stopped, or overridden, if need be?
Can it be stopped or shutdown at all?
How long until people could lose the power to check and correct its increasing power to define and determine the parameters of the world we inhabit?
We continue to be left with more questions than answers about what is really going on here and what all of this is ultimately for, but it might be the understatement of the year to say we find it highly doubtful our country is racing to spend billions upon unimaginable billions on infrastructure and systems jamming something that hallucinates (aka “lies”) into every facet of our society just so students can shut down their neural pathways using Chat-GPT to do their homework for them and guys can generate images of anime girls with five boobs to talk to because they’re lonely on a Thursday night.
A very grim picture of the future is quickly coming into view. It’s Kafka, but this is also Idiocracy.
When an adult stands there in physical reality and lets a computer system override their own brain and eyeballs about what is happening — what is happening in the reality taking place right in front of their faces — we have a serious problem.
This is so very hard to watch.
And insane. And stupid. So incredibly stupid.
Changing out one kind of stupid for an even more “efficient” brand of technologically driven computerized stupid is… ultimately still stupid at the end of what is becoming a very long day. It should go without saying that just because one version of that stupid is dressed up in more technology than the previous version, does not make it less stupid than before.
In many ways, it makes it even more stupid.
