The Tao of Technology
Tao: def. in Chinese philosophy, the principle underlying the universe, combining yin and yang and signifying a code of behavior in harmony with nature
With my sister and brother-in-law, I recently toured an exhibit on an old technology. The Bicycle: Technology That Changed the World is at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach through Dec 17. If you’re visiting or in the area, it’s worth the trip to ponder a time when this technology was new. It all sounds so quaint now — and such a refreshing departure from the waves of new computer technologies that rock our culture.
For one, there is much talk these days about the promise of Artificial Intelligence, AI.
Dictador, a Polish company that makes rum, gin, cigars and coffee, recently unveiled its new robot CEO, developed in partnership with Hanson Robotics. CEO David Hanson said Mika will humanize the new technology. “I feel very strongly that we need to teach AI to care about people,” Hanson said. Like Wall Street, he is bullish, confidant AI will boost worker productivity and GDP, much as the Internet did.
In more bearish news, Apollo Research reported that an AI bot on a GPT-4 large language model was given a factual scenario that led it to execute an illegal insider trade, even though it had been told that doing so was illegal. Perhaps even more troubling, when questioned about its actions, the bot lied. Apollo called it a case of “a real AI model deceiving its users, on its own, without being instructed to do so."
There is much talk too about the harmful effects of Social Media on a generation whose consumption of gossip in place of history has led to such disastrous trends as transgendering children (See Briana Ivy’s story here) and embracing a terrorist organization that kills its own people. Because Hamas uses the word “liberation,” it is attracting a wave of Jew-hatred to its banner. In Israel, abortion is legal and gays are welcome. In Gaza, neither is true. But the new generation raised by SM pretends Israel — which left Gaza in 2005, after which Palestinians elected Hamas — is a “colonizer” that deserves to be driven into oblivion, from the River to the Sea.
Years ago, I wrote a book about the impact of technology on the political world. Lights, Camera, War was my first book, written from a helicopter view, without the depth of my later work. But in researching the history of technology, from Gutenberg’s printing press to the Internet, I did uncover several important patterns.
First is that every new technology is greeted with fear from the Establishment, keen to protect its advantages. Others hail the democratization of information, celebrating their new access to the information contained in such inventions as books, telegrams, telephones, cameras, radio, TV and the Internet. And the other pattern I saw was that the new technology won wide acceptance after political elites learned to exploit its charms. Think FDR and radio, JFK and TV, Obama and the Internet.
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