THE AI SUPERMAN
From “Jack in The Box”- James Chanel. AMAZON/KDP. Messages in a bottle- from your Future.
HERE COMMETH THE AI SUNSHINE SUPERMAN
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DO NOT READ - If you want to sleep at night. Or day.
Just as it’s getting harder to find un-homogenised milk, raw anything is now almost impossible, so our news, our “feeds”, like bovine consumers at our computer-controlled troughs, our perception of the world is being filtered. Pasteurised. Hyper-Processed.
Each person’s view tailored, curated by the Great Algorithm somewhere in Seattle. Sieved in a whirring datacentre via Finland, so that no two people see the same world: yet somehow everyone sees the same, sameness.
For “Our own Good”- your safety of course. Where have we heard that line before? …
So, the new Tech Gods and Media Emperors assure us. So thoughtful.
So “mixing” on-line with those of different opinions is being imperceptibly narrowed. History edited. The Past rewritten. There is only one thing now more uncertain than he Future: and that is The Past.
All, unnoticed, behind the new, digital Iron curtain, they do the thinking for us.
We want to be deceived. Because the alternative is perhaps, realising our own, self-imposed, enslavement. A prison of our own making. The open door to which we strangely fear, fear more than the echoing sound of the turned key.
It is an irony of history that our Victorian antecedents were divided by strict social protocols. Now we are as isolated, atomised, by obscured social media protocols.
Soon by surcharged, AI Algorithms that prevent us, if we are “White, male and over-50”, from being selected for that job interview. From loans enabling us to move house to a better area. “Self-improvement” is being decided, social mobility defined, possibly by one turtle-necked geek MIT grad called “Greg”. What is, or more worryingly, is not “discrimination”, by a stranger, sitting on a beanbag in a home-office “pod” in Seattle who deletes your “offensive” post.
Sooner, probably not later, this acceptable, legalised “prejudice” will touch you. Your daughter applying for one of the three last places at university. Your elderly parents denied care under a Health-Bot Insurance algorithm.
You have listened but will not hear- soon be able to hear- the full implications of this profound change to human society and its final, focal endpoint. Even those given a glimpse into that predestined, Pandora’s jar to come, having seen, would prefer to be deceived.
In the 1800’s, Upper classes rarely if ever spoke to The Lower Orders, let alone “mixed” with them. Or with Divorcees, Catholics, certainly not “Jews” (of course, they would add in the parenthesises of snobbery). Nor those in “Trade”, or other “Undesirables”.
Attitudes which persisted even into the England and drawing rooms of my youth. Anglo-Catholics were the very worse, I was told. “Sodomites with unpleasant accents”, as Waugh wrote, only half- tongue in cheek. Talking of tongue-in-cheeks...
Some men avoided conversing- “intercourse” as it was termed (or anything else for that matter) with women. (Except out of necessity with servants, sisters and mothers).
In the sanctuaries of the Club and all-male cloister of The Regiment, avoiding The Ladies from one year to the next. Never, ever Indian women- of any caste. As if the Working class too were in social purdah. (My family were 37th (out of 231) in the Raj State Order of Precedence HMSO). And as my Allahabad grandmother warned, woe betide if you were all three”.
From “Jack in The Box”- James Chanel. AMAZON/KDP. Messages in a bottle- from your Future.
ART- by Marc, my late, lost brother.