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(dis)Information is Power

In 1990 Alvin Toffler (best known for his book Future Shock) wrote a book called “Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century” (Goodreads). In that book, Toffler described three types of power:

  • Force (physical power)
  • Wealth (economic power)
  • Knowledge (the power of information)

Or, as it is better described on his chapter 2: Muscle, Money and Mind.

After the first decade of 21st Century, I would add one more type: Deception.

Since several years back the access to information has become massively fast and easy. One person can access to old and new information in a matter of minutes (or seconds) with one hand. The growth of Internet, information services and social media engineered to connect everyone with everyone helped to share what is happening in one remote part of the World with everyone around the glove in just a few minutes. This is so big that nowadays news agencies and newspapers are way behind of spreading breaking news as they cannot keep up with the pace of how news are shared through Internet. And the true is that today, every person with a mobile or computer with Internet access is a real “news agency”.

In my opinion this is great. Never in history we had such a big megaphone for the people and the opportunity to (a) spread any news which is happening in real time and (b) access to most of human knowledge everywhere.

But as always, every great advance has its drawback. The nature of Internet is to be open and democratic; and although some countries try to block and control it, they will be putting doors to the field. This will give an advantage for some people to spread false information intentionally and hide it with half trues; doing it in a smart way and continuously so false news will easily become true news where even the most prestigious newspapers will print their front page with them.

Fake news are now a fact when a couple of years back no one believed this can be happening. Today a normal person can have a big audience of several thousand people who can read/watch/listen what this person says (think in an average youtuber or blogger who easily can reach these numbers of followers). This is power and as all kind of power can be used wisely or foolishly.

Here is where deception comes out strong. The era of information we are living on is sometimes used to spread hoaxes and frame an illusion to the wide audience that is built to generate some kind of benefit to the ones orchestrating it. We have recent examples with the new populism used with some politicians and successfully achieved their goals: Trump campaign, Brexit and recent VOX campaign in Spain are good examples of it.

This is a very interesting and complex topic: why people are blindly following ideas that, when they are deeply analysed are smoke bombs? What I think about this is that people do not well understand some topics, they build an opinion under their own logic, share this opinion to a wide audience and there are other people who believe them. This make a perfect primordial soup for guiding and manipulate thoughts if someone knows how to build a masterplan for this.

Sometimes can be difficult to scape from these trends. However I believe there are ways not to fall on this; one simple way is to contrast the news with different sources, find the original source and most important COMMON SENSE; even if its definition is changing… But this is a different story for another post.

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Evolution or Utopia?

Another complex topic, another difficult post to write so… again, bear with me if I ramble too much.

We have been told that we are living in the best and most advanced society of what we know so far; and I am partly agree with it. There is no doubt that there have not been a society more advanced in history if we consider our technology, medicine and life expectancy. As for what we know so far, we are lucky to live in a time where we are seeing pinnacle advances almost every day.

And yet we do not believe it. At least not widely as it supposed to be if it is really the case. In fact, there is a hopeless feeling when people talk about how are we evolving in our society and what human race is becoming. There are resounding reasons to feel like this:

  • We are immerse in a social crisis where fundamental values like empathy, common sense and kindness are being supplanted by materialism, envy and corruption.
  • Social isolation has drastically increased in mass societies and hyper communicated; which is a paradox.
  • Generally speaking, in most modern countries have been a turn over within their communities where criminals are being victimised, and victims being criminalised.
  • Populism is a global trend now and people are making important decisions and choosing their leaders following an immediate response without thinking enough the consequences even for the mid term.
  • The geopolitical framework is the most instable of the last 60 years. This is triggering global threats for each new conflict that fires up.

These are some of the reasons (I don’t want to make the post that long) and examples for each there are a lot. Even while I am writing this post I can feel this hopeless feeling but we must always think in a wider perspective of the things. I am more inline with the opinion of some sociologist which is that our global society is starting a period of change; and this is good news because when we speak of change on global society means evolve to a better place.

Don’t take it wrong though. This does not mean it is going to be an easy and effortless. I believe the change we are going to suffer will be one of the biggest, a big leap. But this will cost huge amount of suffering, periods of apparent darkness and several turning points leading us to a better society.

One important role to play in this theatre of change will the technology. We are already immerse on a tech-time but we barely scratched its potential for us to achieve things we still cannot envise yet. The AI is one part of the forthcoming technology advance that will have an important impact in this change; specially the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) which will allow us to recreate human level intelligence completely to help us and it will be the starting point to achieve the long-time dreamed free-job society where human will just live and robots will work to sustain financial, tax and social care needs. It sounds utopian, at least for now, but the pathway for this is closer that we think.

There is a lot to talk about these lines. Right now I am reading a book that talk about this analysing the AI today and the paths it is taking for the future; all from a technology perspective. Once I finish it I would like to make a new post talking about all is discussed there but if you like this topic, I strongly recommend to read Life 3.0: Being human in the age of Artificial Intelligence from Max Tegmark, a Swedish-American physicist and cosmologist from the MIT and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization backed by big names such Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking, and whose work has helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.

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