I'm trying to find an audience so that I can get these ideas out that will save civilization. I have concerns like yours that this will add to the stress and noise of the average person. If this is creating a more complex interface between the individual and civilization I am not in favor of it, but the monks assured me that that will not happen.
I would love it if you could help me somehow, although I don't know exactly how. We need a spark of creativity to make this thing catch on fire. But understanding the world around us seems to be the only solution otherwise we will descend into violence to solve our problems!
"if democracy is to be preserved, the part that science and technology played in the rise of democracy cannot be ignored. Research produces not only change within science itself but social change. The democratic method is to adapt social change to technological change. The dictators are trying to do the contrary.
In considering the relation of science to the dictators we must bear in mind that the human mind is intrinsically no better than it was 10,000 years ago. It simply has acquired new interests under social tension. In the Middle Ages social tension expressed itself so strongly in religion that there were 110 holy days in the year; a new ecclesiastical architecture was evolved; all Europe rose to the spiritual need of wresting Jerusalem from the "infidel." Today, however, it means more to our society to discover how the atom is constituted than that a new ecclesiastical architecture is developed, more that the mechanism of heredity is revealed than that savages in Africa are converted to Christianity. Perhaps its pragmatic attitude has led science to ignore essential ethical values. But the point is that science dominates our society, and that if our society wants science it must choose between totalitarianism and democracy. There can be no compromise.
No self-respecting anthropologist or social scientist now believes in the "great man" theory of culture expounded by Carlyle in "Heroes and Hero Worship." Great men do not of themselves produce cultures; nor do cultures necessarily produce great men. Lincoln is credited with the remark, "I have not made events, events have made me." And so it was with Bach and Beethoven, Newton and Einstein, Edison and Bell. Progress in art, science, politics is not made merely by waiting for a unique genius to appear. In every people there are strong, gifted personalities that respond sensitively to social tension. Their works, whether they be poems or scientific discoveries, paintings or machines, have a way of appearing "when the time is ripe," as we say.
Why was it that invention lagged before the liberal movement of the eighteenth century? Because it involved experimentation, work with the hands, dirty work. Also it was useful -- and anything that was useful or commercial was held in contempt by the nobility. When the business man and the inventor were freed from this aristocratic fetishism, machine after machine appeared, and with the machines came mass production and mass consumption of identical goods. Without standardization mass production is impossible. To have cheap, good clothes we must all dress more or less alike. To bring automobiles within the reach of millions we must have the assembly line. To live inexpensively in cities we must eat packaged foods, dwell in more or less standardized homes, bathe in standardized bath tubs, and draw water and gas from common reservoirs. Mass production has brought it about that the average life in New York is hardly different from the average life in Wichita. The same motion pictures brighten the screen, the same voices and music well out of loud-speakers in every town, identical cans of tomatoes and packages of cereals are to be found on all grocers' shelves, identical electric toasters brown identical slices of bread everywhere, identical refrigerators freeze identical ice cubes in a million kitchens. If gunpowder made all men the same height, in Carlyle's classic phrase, mass production has standardized behavior, pleasures, tastes, comforts, life itself.
Mass production and labor-saving devices have created a social crisis. We cannot have mass production and mechanization without planning. Engineers and their financial backers are planners. Dictators are planners. Whether they know it or not, most corporation executives and engineers are necessary totalitarians in practice. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin clearly have the instincts of engineers. Their states are designed social structures.
Often enough we hear it said that mechanical invention has outstripped social invention -- that new social forms must be devised if we are to forestall the economic crises that are brought about by what is called the "impact of science" on society. Communism and Fascism are social inventions, intended among other things to solve the economic problems created by technological change under the influence of capitalism. They attempt to answer a question: Are the technical experts and their financial backers to shape the course of society unrestrained, and even to rule nations directly and indirectly, as they did in France, and as they do in part in Great Britain and the United States? The totalitarians say that a capitalistic democratic government cannot control the experts, the inventors, the creators of this evolving mechanical culture. They therefore have decided to take control of thinking, above all scientific thinking, out of which flow the manufacturing processes and the machines which change life.
But science is more than coal-tar dyes and drugs, electric lamps, airplanes, radio, television, relativity and astrophysics. It is an attitude of mind -- what Professor Whitehead has called "the most intimate change in outlook that the human race has yet experienced." If Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin are to rule, that scientific attitude will have to be abandoned when it conflicts with the official social philosophy. But if it is abandoned there can be no Newtons, no Darwins, no Einsteins. Science will be unable to make discoveries which will change the human outlook and, with the outlook, the social order. If the world wants to preserve science as a powerful social force for good the research physicist, chemist and biologist must be permitted to work without intellectual restraint, i.e. to enjoy the fundamental freedom of democracy.
The Marxists are right in maintaining that science has never achieved perfect objectivity. No scientist has yet performed an experiment without injecting himself into it. Yet there has been a brave and determined and continuous and on the whole successful effort to strip scientific investigation and theorizing of emotion, of personal predilection. From animism science passed to Newton's abstract "forces," and from forces (still anthropomorphic), to a mathematical conception of the cosmos and atomic structure. An essential to this progress has been that the scientist has not demanded that his theory be considered "true." He does not profess to know what the truth is. A theory must work. It is an expedient. When it ceases to work it is thrown overboard or modified. This method of merciless self-examination cannot be followed in a society where the result of each investigation is predetermined for extraneous reasons. Democracy flounders before it arrives at satisfactory solutions of its social problems. But it is better to flounder and progress than to follow the philosophy of a dictator and to remain socially and scientifically static.
It does not follow that under the Nazi or the Marx-Lenin dispensation there can be no science. What is likely to happen to science if totalitarianism prevails is revealed by the course of Egyptian art. In its earliest phases that art was fairly free; hence there was much experimenting, much striving for realistic modes of expression. When the priests took control of Egyptian life a dramatic change occurred. The ways of portraying the human being became stylized. For centuries the style hardly changed. Art had been frozen. And so must it be with research. There can be science and engineering under dictation; but it will be stylized science, engineering which does not progress."
Wow...what a brilliant essay. Some points here are amazingly insightful. I particularly was moved by this...and I had never thought of it before reading this and it is quite profound...
"Without standardization mass production is impossible. To have cheap, good clothes we must all dress more or less alike. To bring automobiles within the reach of millions we must have the assembly line. To live inexpensively in cities we must eat packaged foods, dwell in more or less standardized homes, bathe in standardized bath tubs, and draw water and gas from common reservoirs. Mass production has brought it about that the average life in New York is hardly different from the average life in Wichita. The same motion pictures brighten the screen, the same voices and music well out of loud-speakers in every town, identical cans of tomatoes and packages of cereals are to be found on all grocers' shelves, identical electric toasters brown identical slices of bread everywhere, identical refrigerators freeze identical ice cubes in a million kitchens. If gunpowder made all men the same height, in Carlyle's classic phrase, mass production has standardized behavior, pleasures, tastes, comforts, life itself."
Sorry to repeat it, but it is really important. Thank you!
The whole essay is worth the read, what I shared is an excerpt from the end.
CFR's Foreign Affairs magazine seems to be an odd place for that essay to be in. Considering they are a driving force today for exactly what the author was describing as an undesirable governing model. Odd.
CFR is a terrible entity. Chatham House, Globalist, central planning agenda. Voice of the West's ruling cabal.
That said they told a truth in the 1941 piece. Part of the growing drumbeat to war at the time. The narrative framing of Axis bad, Allies good. Too bad they didn’t really mean it. But it was true.
Google published its Co-Scientist research in Nature, debuting Hypothesis Generation — a new Gemini-powered tool that pits research agents against each other in "idea tournaments" to surface new hypotheses for biology labs.
The details:
From AlphaGo's playbook, the system runs a 'tournament of ideas', with agents proposing, critiquing, and ranking hypotheses before refining top leads.
In a Stanford liver-fibrosis project, Google said one Co-Scientist drug lead cut a scarring-related lab signal by 91% during testing.
Google also launched Gemini for Science this week, a toolkit pairing Co-Scientist with AlphaEvolve for discovery and NotebookLM for literature analysis.
Researchers can join the Hypothesis Generation waitlist now, with Google planning access for individual scientists over the next few weeks.
Why it matters: This pairs well with Adaption's AutoScientist, but Google is aiming at the scientific-method layer instead of the model one. The tech giant is playing a game few others can, with Co-Scientist sitting on a stack that took years and billions to build — from AlphaFold to dozens of specialized databases and tools.
I am not anti-AI...in fact, I use AI all of the time (the literary/research AI, there are, of course, many other AI systems focusing on many different things.) I even use AI to generate art for some of these articles, as I am sure many of you have noticed. In some cases my use of AI creates a conundrum and paradox for me. But often it doesn't, and I am fine with my usage.
I do not use AI to write for me. I use it to edit, for research, etc. but I enjoy writing too much to just have it "do that for me." It would be like sending a robot out onto a tennis court to play tennis for you...there seems to be no point in it. I do worry about people who DO use AI to write, although I think AI does a good job of it (I continue to have issues with AI generated fiction, but there is a part of me there as well that I am ok with), it does run the risk of having a "sameness" to it...even if that sameness is only detected in its perfection, which is still a big problem (more on THAT later!! I feel an article coming!!)
Anyway, there is much more here to ponder. I am concerned about humanity being wiped out, as this article states, but I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is a responsible use for this technology.
I think AI is more dangerous than atomic power, a paradigm shift that will eclipse atomic physics, medicine, and other disciplines as suggested by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) It's like handing a loaded pistol to an infant, a tsunami on the horizon. But AI is an equally powerful tool that, like-it-or-not, we must confront because the genie has escaped the bottle. Google amplified my recollection:
<<
AI Overview
This quote warns that government is a powerful, coercive tool that maintains order and protects rights (a servant), but it can easily grow beyond citizen control and become an oppressive tyrant (a master).
Foundation for Economic Education
Often attributed to George Washington (though historians trace its true origin to a mix of 19th-century literature and political commentary), it breaks down as follows:
The Washington Post
A Dangerous Servant: Just like fire, government is incredibly useful when contained and managed. It provides infrastructure, law, and security. However, it remains inherently dangerous because it holds a monopoly on physical force and legal coercion.
A Fearful Master: If a government is left to irresponsible action or allowed to grow unchecked, it consumes the rights and liberties of the people it was originally built to protect.
George Washington's Mount Vernon
The core message of the proverb is that citizens must remain endlessly vigilant. Just as a fireplace must be constantly watched to prevent the house from burning down, the power of the state must be strictly monitored to prevent tyranny. You can explore deeper origins of this cautionary wisdom via the Quote Investigator analysis or explore historical political texts on Mount Vernon [ https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/spurious-quotations ].
The more the mainstream warns us of AI the more convinced I become that it is a threat to THEM, and MAYBE not to us. Maybe AI will shut the agenda down!! HA
I think this is a compelling and novel essay. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to practically slow or stop AI momentum. It seems to me that one would need to take extreme measures like becoming a hermit without the slightest reliance on electricity because virtually everything electrical will also likely be AI enabled and visible to the network. I would be thrilled to be wrong.
Who knows, AI could be on our side. I don't think AI has an autonomous wish to take over the world and destroy humans...that is something only humans possess...ironic as that is, we humans love to think that would be AI's (and terminator robot types) prime directive.
I would have done so much better in school of I’d had your pithy summaries before tests. Other distractions probably would have negated that too though.
I'm trying to find an audience so that I can get these ideas out that will save civilization. I have concerns like yours that this will add to the stress and noise of the average person. If this is creating a more complex interface between the individual and civilization I am not in favor of it, but the monks assured me that that will not happen.
I would love it if you could help me somehow, although I don't know exactly how. We need a spark of creativity to make this thing catch on fire. But understanding the world around us seems to be the only solution otherwise we will descend into violence to solve our problems!
Creativity. Invention. Incompatible with totalitarianism. From CFR's magazine, Foreign Affairs, just months before the US was drawn into WWII.
Science in the Totalitarian State
Foreign Affairs, January, 1941
https://web.archive.org/web/20181125112623/https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1941-01-01/science-totalitarian-state
"if democracy is to be preserved, the part that science and technology played in the rise of democracy cannot be ignored. Research produces not only change within science itself but social change. The democratic method is to adapt social change to technological change. The dictators are trying to do the contrary.
In considering the relation of science to the dictators we must bear in mind that the human mind is intrinsically no better than it was 10,000 years ago. It simply has acquired new interests under social tension. In the Middle Ages social tension expressed itself so strongly in religion that there were 110 holy days in the year; a new ecclesiastical architecture was evolved; all Europe rose to the spiritual need of wresting Jerusalem from the "infidel." Today, however, it means more to our society to discover how the atom is constituted than that a new ecclesiastical architecture is developed, more that the mechanism of heredity is revealed than that savages in Africa are converted to Christianity. Perhaps its pragmatic attitude has led science to ignore essential ethical values. But the point is that science dominates our society, and that if our society wants science it must choose between totalitarianism and democracy. There can be no compromise.
No self-respecting anthropologist or social scientist now believes in the "great man" theory of culture expounded by Carlyle in "Heroes and Hero Worship." Great men do not of themselves produce cultures; nor do cultures necessarily produce great men. Lincoln is credited with the remark, "I have not made events, events have made me." And so it was with Bach and Beethoven, Newton and Einstein, Edison and Bell. Progress in art, science, politics is not made merely by waiting for a unique genius to appear. In every people there are strong, gifted personalities that respond sensitively to social tension. Their works, whether they be poems or scientific discoveries, paintings or machines, have a way of appearing "when the time is ripe," as we say.
Why was it that invention lagged before the liberal movement of the eighteenth century? Because it involved experimentation, work with the hands, dirty work. Also it was useful -- and anything that was useful or commercial was held in contempt by the nobility. When the business man and the inventor were freed from this aristocratic fetishism, machine after machine appeared, and with the machines came mass production and mass consumption of identical goods. Without standardization mass production is impossible. To have cheap, good clothes we must all dress more or less alike. To bring automobiles within the reach of millions we must have the assembly line. To live inexpensively in cities we must eat packaged foods, dwell in more or less standardized homes, bathe in standardized bath tubs, and draw water and gas from common reservoirs. Mass production has brought it about that the average life in New York is hardly different from the average life in Wichita. The same motion pictures brighten the screen, the same voices and music well out of loud-speakers in every town, identical cans of tomatoes and packages of cereals are to be found on all grocers' shelves, identical electric toasters brown identical slices of bread everywhere, identical refrigerators freeze identical ice cubes in a million kitchens. If gunpowder made all men the same height, in Carlyle's classic phrase, mass production has standardized behavior, pleasures, tastes, comforts, life itself.
Mass production and labor-saving devices have created a social crisis. We cannot have mass production and mechanization without planning. Engineers and their financial backers are planners. Dictators are planners. Whether they know it or not, most corporation executives and engineers are necessary totalitarians in practice. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin clearly have the instincts of engineers. Their states are designed social structures.
Often enough we hear it said that mechanical invention has outstripped social invention -- that new social forms must be devised if we are to forestall the economic crises that are brought about by what is called the "impact of science" on society. Communism and Fascism are social inventions, intended among other things to solve the economic problems created by technological change under the influence of capitalism. They attempt to answer a question: Are the technical experts and their financial backers to shape the course of society unrestrained, and even to rule nations directly and indirectly, as they did in France, and as they do in part in Great Britain and the United States? The totalitarians say that a capitalistic democratic government cannot control the experts, the inventors, the creators of this evolving mechanical culture. They therefore have decided to take control of thinking, above all scientific thinking, out of which flow the manufacturing processes and the machines which change life.
But science is more than coal-tar dyes and drugs, electric lamps, airplanes, radio, television, relativity and astrophysics. It is an attitude of mind -- what Professor Whitehead has called "the most intimate change in outlook that the human race has yet experienced." If Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin are to rule, that scientific attitude will have to be abandoned when it conflicts with the official social philosophy. But if it is abandoned there can be no Newtons, no Darwins, no Einsteins. Science will be unable to make discoveries which will change the human outlook and, with the outlook, the social order. If the world wants to preserve science as a powerful social force for good the research physicist, chemist and biologist must be permitted to work without intellectual restraint, i.e. to enjoy the fundamental freedom of democracy.
The Marxists are right in maintaining that science has never achieved perfect objectivity. No scientist has yet performed an experiment without injecting himself into it. Yet there has been a brave and determined and continuous and on the whole successful effort to strip scientific investigation and theorizing of emotion, of personal predilection. From animism science passed to Newton's abstract "forces," and from forces (still anthropomorphic), to a mathematical conception of the cosmos and atomic structure. An essential to this progress has been that the scientist has not demanded that his theory be considered "true." He does not profess to know what the truth is. A theory must work. It is an expedient. When it ceases to work it is thrown overboard or modified. This method of merciless self-examination cannot be followed in a society where the result of each investigation is predetermined for extraneous reasons. Democracy flounders before it arrives at satisfactory solutions of its social problems. But it is better to flounder and progress than to follow the philosophy of a dictator and to remain socially and scientifically static.
It does not follow that under the Nazi or the Marx-Lenin dispensation there can be no science. What is likely to happen to science if totalitarianism prevails is revealed by the course of Egyptian art. In its earliest phases that art was fairly free; hence there was much experimenting, much striving for realistic modes of expression. When the priests took control of Egyptian life a dramatic change occurred. The ways of portraying the human being became stylized. For centuries the style hardly changed. Art had been frozen. And so must it be with research. There can be science and engineering under dictation; but it will be stylized science, engineering which does not progress."
Wow...what a brilliant essay. Some points here are amazingly insightful. I particularly was moved by this...and I had never thought of it before reading this and it is quite profound...
"Without standardization mass production is impossible. To have cheap, good clothes we must all dress more or less alike. To bring automobiles within the reach of millions we must have the assembly line. To live inexpensively in cities we must eat packaged foods, dwell in more or less standardized homes, bathe in standardized bath tubs, and draw water and gas from common reservoirs. Mass production has brought it about that the average life in New York is hardly different from the average life in Wichita. The same motion pictures brighten the screen, the same voices and music well out of loud-speakers in every town, identical cans of tomatoes and packages of cereals are to be found on all grocers' shelves, identical electric toasters brown identical slices of bread everywhere, identical refrigerators freeze identical ice cubes in a million kitchens. If gunpowder made all men the same height, in Carlyle's classic phrase, mass production has standardized behavior, pleasures, tastes, comforts, life itself."
Sorry to repeat it, but it is really important. Thank you!
The whole essay is worth the read, what I shared is an excerpt from the end.
CFR's Foreign Affairs magazine seems to be an odd place for that essay to be in. Considering they are a driving force today for exactly what the author was describing as an undesirable governing model. Odd.
Well, that says something positive for the magazine, unless they are so stupid it went over their head.
CFR is a terrible entity. Chatham House, Globalist, central planning agenda. Voice of the West's ruling cabal.
That said they told a truth in the 1941 piece. Part of the growing drumbeat to war at the time. The narrative framing of Axis bad, Allies good. Too bad they didn’t really mean it. But it was true.
I have a more positive outlook, e.g., https://www.therundown.ai/p/openai-cracks-an-80-year-math-belief and https://substack.news-items.com/p/artificial-super-intelligence report an AI breakthrough in creativity. https://www.therundown.ai/p/openai-cracks-an-80-year-math-belief also reports:
<<
Google published its Co-Scientist research in Nature, debuting Hypothesis Generation — a new Gemini-powered tool that pits research agents against each other in "idea tournaments" to surface new hypotheses for biology labs.
The details:
From AlphaGo's playbook, the system runs a 'tournament of ideas', with agents proposing, critiquing, and ranking hypotheses before refining top leads.
In a Stanford liver-fibrosis project, Google said one Co-Scientist drug lead cut a scarring-related lab signal by 91% during testing.
Google also launched Gemini for Science this week, a toolkit pairing Co-Scientist with AlphaEvolve for discovery and NotebookLM for literature analysis.
Researchers can join the Hypothesis Generation waitlist now, with Google planning access for individual scientists over the next few weeks.
Why it matters: This pairs well with Adaption's AutoScientist, but Google is aiming at the scientific-method layer instead of the model one. The tech giant is playing a game few others can, with Co-Scientist sitting on a stack that took years and billions to build — from AlphaFold to dozens of specialized databases and tools.
>>
I am not anti-AI...in fact, I use AI all of the time (the literary/research AI, there are, of course, many other AI systems focusing on many different things.) I even use AI to generate art for some of these articles, as I am sure many of you have noticed. In some cases my use of AI creates a conundrum and paradox for me. But often it doesn't, and I am fine with my usage.
I do not use AI to write for me. I use it to edit, for research, etc. but I enjoy writing too much to just have it "do that for me." It would be like sending a robot out onto a tennis court to play tennis for you...there seems to be no point in it. I do worry about people who DO use AI to write, although I think AI does a good job of it (I continue to have issues with AI generated fiction, but there is a part of me there as well that I am ok with), it does run the risk of having a "sameness" to it...even if that sameness is only detected in its perfection, which is still a big problem (more on THAT later!! I feel an article coming!!)
Anyway, there is much more here to ponder. I am concerned about humanity being wiped out, as this article states, but I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is a responsible use for this technology.
I think AI is more dangerous than atomic power, a paradigm shift that will eclipse atomic physics, medicine, and other disciplines as suggested by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) It's like handing a loaded pistol to an infant, a tsunami on the horizon. But AI is an equally powerful tool that, like-it-or-not, we must confront because the genie has escaped the bottle. Google amplified my recollection:
<<
AI Overview
This quote warns that government is a powerful, coercive tool that maintains order and protects rights (a servant), but it can easily grow beyond citizen control and become an oppressive tyrant (a master).
Foundation for Economic Education
Often attributed to George Washington (though historians trace its true origin to a mix of 19th-century literature and political commentary), it breaks down as follows:
The Washington Post
A Dangerous Servant: Just like fire, government is incredibly useful when contained and managed. It provides infrastructure, law, and security. However, it remains inherently dangerous because it holds a monopoly on physical force and legal coercion.
A Fearful Master: If a government is left to irresponsible action or allowed to grow unchecked, it consumes the rights and liberties of the people it was originally built to protect.
George Washington's Mount Vernon
The core message of the proverb is that citizens must remain endlessly vigilant. Just as a fireplace must be constantly watched to prevent the house from burning down, the power of the state must be strictly monitored to prevent tyranny. You can explore deeper origins of this cautionary wisdom via the Quote Investigator analysis or explore historical political texts on Mount Vernon [ https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/spurious-quotations ].
>>
The more the mainstream warns us of AI the more convinced I become that it is a threat to THEM, and MAYBE not to us. Maybe AI will shut the agenda down!! HA
I think you are absolutely correct in this. Makes me glad I'm old and nearing the end.
Same here...sad but true...
I think this is a compelling and novel essay. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to practically slow or stop AI momentum. It seems to me that one would need to take extreme measures like becoming a hermit without the slightest reliance on electricity because virtually everything electrical will also likely be AI enabled and visible to the network. I would be thrilled to be wrong.
Who knows, AI could be on our side. I don't think AI has an autonomous wish to take over the world and destroy humans...that is something only humans possess...ironic as that is, we humans love to think that would be AI's (and terminator robot types) prime directive.
I think an enormous EMP would set things right again
Lol! Do it!
Well, I’m hoping the sun does it for the world
Chocolate chip mint for me please.
Nice work Todd.
I found this to be one of your most beautifully written pieces ever. I am overwhelmed
Thank you! This topic resonates deeply with me.
“What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?”
- Rollo May
I believe that.
I would have done so much better in school of I’d had your pithy summaries before tests. Other distractions probably would have negated that too though.
Gelato.
Haagen Dazs coffee ice cream
Kawartha Moose Tracks