Yeah, this is crazy. I think it is the symptom of a deeper problem we are facing as a society: Tech has increased our ability to spread messages. But what it h

Yeah, this is crazy. I think it is the symptom of a deeper problem we are facing as a society: Tech has increased our ability to spread messages. But what it has not increased is our ability to validate those messages. In a sense, we have perverted the original idea of the computer. The computing pioneers of the 1950s and 60s saw the computer as a tool to help us deal with the complexity of the world's problems [1]. What we have focused on instead is to use computers to make our information landscape even more complex than it already was. It is very telling to look at our advances in A.I.. GPT-3, for instance, can produce massive amounts of pausible sounding content. But what it cannot do is verify a piece of information. That, right there, is our problem in a nutshell. We've already seen it play out in Trump, and in Covid. And we're going to see it play out in many, many more ways in the years to come. [1] Doug Engelbart, I believe, had this system in the 1960s. He had the idea that organizations would input all their knowledge into that system. And the system would then help them draw connections, show them gaps in their knowledge, make predictions, give them suggestions on what questions to ask or experiments to run, etc.. He believed that, eventually, such a system could be used at a global scale. So that, ideally, no human would ever again waste his time trying to solve a problem that has already been solved by someone else, no matter where or when. And that we as a species would, instead, be able to focus all of our intelligence on those questions and problems that are yet unsolved.