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by college_physics
1252 days ago
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Rapid digitization (and the automation that can be built on top of that) is the development that makes your points an urgent and hot potato issue - if there ever was one. Information in its various manifestations (from a song, to a painting, to an answer to a coding question, to a piece of knowledge about the universe, to news updates about states of the human world etc) requires some human effort to be generated but can then be 1) replicated indefinitely at practically zero cost and 2) modified, adapted, integrated, reused in infinite ways using algorithms, to the point of potentially wiping out any original signal in an ocean of digital noise The impact of this inescapable reality is explosive for all sorts of economic and political assumptions that have dominated practically all our historical experience [0] I see not evidence whatsoever that we are (collectively) coming to terms with this dynamic so the immediate future will continue being "interesting". The positive scenario is that the zero marginal cost society will somehow find ways to preserve humanistic principles: Find ways to refactor and control all this digital tech so that the focus is once again on humans, their welfare and truthful relations with other humans. [0] information processing seems to have started with agricultural oligarchies etching cuneiform on stone to keep records of tax and loans |
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