Are You Ready to Face the Neo-Dark Age?
https://medium.com/@chris.anilao/neo-dark-age-or-neo-renaissance-0547588a3f2d
Are You Ready to Face the Neo-Dark Age?
https://medium.com/@chris.anilao/neo-dark-age-or-neo-renaissance-0547588a3f2d
12 Comments
Are we on the brink of a Neo-Dark Age, or can we use our technological advancements to create a Neo-Renaissance? This article explores the the crossroads humanity faces, focusing on the challenges posed by the internet, AI, and the gap between our moral frameworks and technological progress. With divisions growing and misinformation on the rise, it asks whether we are prepared to navigate this era. Join the discussion and let me know what you think.
Interesting way of framing it. It could even be both at the same time depending on your caste
I find the claim that “without norms the internet amplified the darker impulses” weird. First, the Internet uses the same social norms the rest of a given society uses. Second, in my personal experience the internet amplifies the good, not the bad. People are willing to help out a total stranger, whether by giving advice or by giving to charity fundraisers, or by just talking
When discussing the Dark Ages, you basically are talking about technology. The previous centers of learning and political power had collapsed. Europe and the Levant were in a long developmental interregnum of feudal stagnation.
But the printing press had not been invented. You take the same exact scenario at the start of the Dark Ages (~5th century CE) and add the printing press, everything changes, and likely not just intellectually. The Church would never have established a monopoly over literacy.
A Dark Ages today, would involve vast masses of ignorant people striated like fat on a ribeye by all the intelligence we have today plus some. Sounds like more or less what we have already.
The Dark Ages was a massive plummet in the learned classes and their retreat into monasteries. The plummet was due to the collapse of the societal and political infrastructure that made learning happen — patrons, for example.
That problem simply will never repeat itself. Knowledge and culture is free and can no longer be held back.
To follow along with the article’s inspiration, we are actually overdue for the Bell Riots.
i don’t know about dark ages but i do know it has gotten a lot more difficult to sift through all the bs to find accurate information online these days. there is so much mis/disinformation out there and a huge portion of the public either doesn’t know how or doesn’t care enough to dig for truth.
Couple of casual remarks:
Somewhat counterintuitively I don’t think the current cultural landscape is conducive to entering a dark age because we are so focused and concerned about the state of the culture. This isn’t normal, and even your own article is evidence of a sort of hyper-vigilance that historically I don’t think is characteristic of cultures that were about to enter a dark age. I could be wrong, this is mostly based on intuition, but it’s a pretty strong intuition.
The other possibility you bring up is a new kind of Renaissance, and you offer the idea that optimism is a precondition to that outcome. I think that idea seems fair enough, and anecdotally I do have a sense of a slow and cautious rise in optimism from many people on the culture front. I can see that a lot of effort is being put into hashing out the philosophical underpinnings of our issues, and that is a personal source of optimism for me.
Don’t forget the rise of dogmatic and authoritarian religious institutions during the Dark Ages, which is exactly what we see today.
Here’s a sad thought experiment: suppose we made an digital currency in which you can’t buy into it, but is awarded like pay for engagement in social media. Upvotes and likes. If you contribute well, you become a high earner.
Similarly, bots become illegal in that regard, and can be “fined” for automated behavior.
And it can’t be converted out for cash, but is used to pay for things like Chat GPT tokens and other open source/ non-profit SaaS usage.
What kind of effect would that have for fostering productive discussions in threads, while implementing a non-monetary reward for open source developers?
It depends on who is in charge. Do we have visionary leaders like the U.S. Founding Fathers who rightly chose to distribute the power of government, rather than centralize it into a single despot? Who chose to share the opportunities of new land and frontiers, rather than claiming it all for themselves selfishly? We are now at “end stage capitalism” and the future appears dark if we continue in a path where the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. I don’t know know if people can change, but if the leaders don’t change, we will face a dark future with the rich seeing all the benefits of technology, and the poor living a pre-1900 lifestyle with no modern conveniences. Or a French Revolution civil war, or worse. It would be nice if we could move into a modern socialism where everyone is cared for and the rich share. I just don’t think it’s in human nature to do so.
Star Trek did not have self-aware AI for a very long time. With Data and the holodeck it began to emerge, but computers in TOS and earlier seemed relatively primitive. I don’t think we would have had Starfleet if there was AGI in 21st century Earth. Humans were still firmly in control for centuries.
I’m ready but then I’m sceptical by nature and I heeded the words spoken by my elders; Don’t believe everything you see hear and read.