“Human intelligence is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it.” Television “conditions our minds to apprehend the world through fragmented pictures and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction. A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read . . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity.” —Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections , 1988 A confirmation of what some of us have already observed. Notice the FT’s columnist invoke of a ‘positive’ aspect of implementing AI: productivity and ‘helping restore middle class heart’. The impact on capitalism’s performance is what should be our concern, according to such a view.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51