“When Technology Buried Science in a Shallow Grave”
February 22, 2021
Even young children can sense that we live in an age in which literally none of the information available is reliable or believable. Information on a global scale is subject to Gresham’s Law: low-quality information spreads everywhere and the truth is hoarded by the few.
What went wrong, and why?
In a sense, the original sin was the confusion of science, the philosophical pursuit of the truth by means of confirmation of accuracy through systematic experiments, with technology, the tools, and the systems based on tools, that serve to create an effect, or to complete a task.
Technology is not science. The Internet, and the supercomputers that lurk behind it, are employed by the rich and powerful to create a virtual reality for us with the intention of convincing us that the images and the effects generated by technology have some relationship to the truth; to science. They want to reassure us that everything is fine when it is not.
If we want to find our way out of this nightmare, we must first recognize that technology today has become the complete opposite of science: a distraction, or a weapon employed to render us passive and ignorant.
As Paul Goodman wrote, “Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.” It is the moral aspect of technology that should be foremost in our minds, and not the gaudy special effects that enchant; that pretend to be science.
Before we develop a smartphone, a satellite system, or a supercomputer, we must first employ the scientific method to determine what the impact of that technology will be over the long term on the earth and on humanity. Such a combination of science and technology literally never happens.
Today, thousands of supercomputers calculate the worth of derivatives as part of a money game for the extremely wealthy, a fixed round of poker. Few supercomputers are calculating how the use of massive amounts of electricity to power the next generation of AI will affect the climate over the next fifty years, or what the impact of the use of plastics will be on the oceans for that the next century, or what the prospects for the production of food for future generations will be in light of the rapid degradation of soil.
Supercomputers are being employed to calculate profit, and not sustainability, and they are so assigned for a political, not scientific reason. Technology serves as a sheepskin for the most ruthless forms of economic exploitation. The powerful know that if AI were focused on sustainability over centuries, the answer from its calculations would be that we should stop using AI if we wished to survive.
We confuse science with technology at our peril.
How to dumb down youth
Our youth are told by the corrupt media that they must prepare for a technology-driven future that is inevitable, that is coming in accord with some law of nature. They are exhorted to prepare for a supposed Fourth Industrial Revolution that will somehow improve their lives, even as their jobs are automated away, as their minds are destroyed by video games, pornography, and online gambling.
When the bankers and CEOs call it the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they are not kidding. It is a revolution in which a tiny handful of people seize control of the means of production, and the ideological apparatus for the entire earth.
We are bombarded, against our will, with information produced without review by third parties and corporations. Much of it is spurious and misleading. The content of movies and dramas, of commercials and advertisements, promotes waste and indulgence and glorifies the idle lives of the rich.
We are forced to rely on corporate-controlled sources like Google or the New York Times for information, and we are not told that these organizations have a long history of providing false information for profit. The entire media-education-advertising complex has been mobilized to promote campaigns to dumb down people and to encourage anti-intellectual sentiments. The drive to force all education to be conducted online speeds up this dangerous trend.
How many times have you heard old-timers remark that young people are self-centered, superficial, and isolated? The assumption underlying this statement is that youth, who are our future, have gone bad because of the poor choices that they have made.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Those youth are identified by corporations as the target for a decadent consumer culture that encourages them to buy, and to be distracted by services that they must pay for. They cannot escape from this unrelenting ideology because corporations are free to pump this trash into the lives of youth, from nursery school on. There is no force present to defend our children.
The main purpose of the games, the pornography, the foolish and shallow television programs citizens are subject to is not sales.
No. Much of this disinformation is offered to us for free because the purpose is to alter our thinking. The funding of the media by advertising from corporations allows them to dictate to journalists the content of their articles, to make journalists present consumption and development in a positive light, even as it destroys the environment and alienates our citizens.
The ultimate product is the viewer or reader, not the item presented in the ad. The reader is rendered up to the investment banks and multinational corporations, as a prostrate consumer, not a citizen, a dependent and limited individual with no moral compass to guide him, incapable of distinguishing images from reality. We desperately need to interact with others. We need jobs that let us work together with others to create a better world.
Technology could help, but it does not because it has no relationship to science, and it has no moral content anymore.
In our daily lives, our inter