5 ms·

1984 was only limited by Orwell’s imagination on what was possible with future technology.

by elboru 4y ago

EGreg 4y ago
1984 and Star Trek’s “Data” androids were also limited by what the public can take in as an interesting story. Minority Report would be boring if it was logical: the guy would be caught immediately, the end. Instead if moving large disks, they’d use WiFi. Everything would simply not move, every criminal would be caught, nothing interesting would ever happen anymore, except inside some software which can’t be shown on screen. A realistic Data android would be hooked up to the matrix like the Borg, and would interact with humans the way we interact with a dog. There would be nothing interesting to show.
- KineticLensman 4y ago
  Yes. I never understood why Data had to type rather than just use wifi
  - teddyh 4y ago
    Two reasons: Firstly, Data is supposed to be a character on TV, and we can’t empathize with computers. The in-universe reason is that Data was designed to be, as much as possible, an artificial human, and not a robot merely functioning in human society.
- ihatepython 4y ago
  I think you should focus more on the Borg, instead of "Data" with respect to the dangers of AI The Borg were a great enemy, at least in the 2nd and 3rd season. The writers shouldn't have let the lowly humans defeat them.
andrewmutz 4y ago
I think 1984 is a perfect example of the limitations of this type of thinking. 80 years ago Orwell (and other authors) saw a future where technological power has gone entirely to the governments and are being used to oppress citizens. The future played out completely differently. Government is far more open and transparent. Citizens routinely use technology to check the power of the state (recording police abuse on smartphones, sharing on social media, transacting stateless currency). When it comes to technological change, pessimism always feels smarter than optimism, but it has a poor track record.
- alwaysbeconsing 4y ago
  Good point, and important to remember. But also the pessimism may have actually helped us get to where we are, by vividly warning about the alternatives.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  a lot of it got outsourced to the private sector.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  > recording police abuse on smartphones, So American police brutality is in the process of being solved right now?
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    It's closer to "solved" than when the police could just say that nothing happened and people would be non the wise.
- int_19h 4y ago
  1984 was sort of a worst-case extrapolation of the following trend that Orwell described in 1944. I'd say that as far as the trend itself goes, he was plenty accurate. --- I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible. As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the USA. Whatever the pacifists etc. may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book The Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuhrer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.
StrangeATractor 4y ago
One part that was pretty relevant to AI today was how songs were written by machine. Not sure why but that always stuck with me.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  In 1984 human creativity is a threat to the state's existence. The Inner Party is literally working on dumbing down langauge through the generations to limit what can be thought. Machine creativity poses no such threat.

1984 was only limited by Orwell’s imagination on what was possible with future technology.

by elboru 4y ago

1984 was only limited by Orwell’s imagination on what was possible with future technology.

1984 and Star Trek’s “Data” androids were also limited by what the public can take in as an interesting story. Minority Report would be boring if it was logical: the guy would be caught immediately, the end. Instead if moving large disks, they’d use WiFi. Everything would simply not move, every criminal would be caught, nothing interesting would ever happen anymore, except inside some software which can’t be shown on screen. A realistic Data android would be hooked up to the matrix like the Borg, and would interact with humans the way we interact with a dog. There would be nothing interesting to show.

KineticLensman 4y ago
Yes. I never understood why Data had to type rather than just use wifi
- teddyh 4y ago
  Two reasons: Firstly, Data is supposed to be a character on TV, and we can’t empathize with computers. The in-universe reason is that Data was designed to be, as much as possible, an artificial human, and not a robot merely functioning in human society.
ihatepython 4y ago
I think you should focus more on the Borg, instead of "Data" with respect to the dangers of AI The Borg were a great enemy, at least in the 2nd and 3rd season. The writers shouldn't have let the lowly humans defeat them.

andrewmutz 4y ago

I think 1984 is a perfect example of the limitations of this type of thinking. 80 years ago Orwell (and other authors) saw a future where technological power has gone entirely to the governments and are being used to oppress citizens. The future played out completely differently. Government is far more open and transparent. Citizens routinely use technology to check the power of the state (recording police abuse on smartphones, sharing on social media, transacting stateless currency). When it comes to technological change, pessimism always feels smarter than optimism, but it has a poor track record.

alwaysbeconsing 4y ago
Good point, and important to remember. But also the pessimism may have actually helped us get to where we are, by vividly warning about the alternatives.
sharemywin 4y ago
a lot of it got outsourced to the private sector.
avgcorrection 4y ago
> recording police abuse on smartphones, So American police brutality is in the process of being solved right now?
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  It's closer to "solved" than when the police could just say that nothing happened and people would be non the wise.
int_19h 4y ago
1984 was sort of a worst-case extrapolation of the following trend that Orwell described in 1944. I'd say that as far as the trend itself goes, he was plenty accurate. --- I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible. As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the USA. Whatever the pacifists etc. may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book The Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuhrer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.

StrangeATractor 4y ago

One part that was pretty relevant to AI today was how songs were written by machine. Not sure why but that always stuck with me.

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
In 1984 human creativity is a threat to the state's existence. The Inner Party is literally working on dumbing down langauge through the generations to limit what can be thought. Machine creativity poses no such threat.