I’ve always been amazed as to how many normally intelligent persons having read Orwell’s “Brave New World” conclude that is the “socialistic nature” of government rule that has “contaminated” their society with its injustice and despair – and leave it at that.
Unfortunately, there are also way too many people who refuse to even contemplate beyond this ending because, to them at least, it’s “bore…ing”. What’s more, we’ve endured decades of having it being drummed into our minds that such dystopian societies are under “totalitarian” rule that preaches “communist” or “socialist” values to our children, and therefore we must forever guard ourselves of ever allowing our governments to move forward in such a direction.
Linking Orwell’s messages to governmental indifference in providing our children with a universally standardized learning process involving creativity and enrichment while at the same time staying “current” with society’s most complicated theories, knowledge “breakthroughs” and beliefs may be a difficult task, and perhaps even a boring one, so if you want to cut out of reading this full column and go back to your social network scrolling to find out how many homeless people in Prince Albert got arrested last night for sleeping along the river bank, or how many of your “friends” just love listening to Alberta premier Danielle Smith praise separatist thought, feel free to do so; the rest, I hope, will read to the end, if for no other reason than to assess whether my own thought process is logical, or just long-winded – and “boring as Hell…”
In seeking relevant materials to back up my own thoughts, I googled a request for information on “Orwell and his seeming contempt for socialistic practice” – and got back this surprisingly articulated commentary in an AI (artificial intelligence) summarization maintaining that Orwell was himself a “socialist” (YES, I knew that!) who was utilizing both “Brave New World” and “1984” to portray “socialism as a driver of societal decline, but rather on the dangers of technological advancement, genetic engineering, and psychological manipulation used to create a stable, albeit dehumanized, society”.
If you start to read that quote from the word “rather”, it suddenly becomes obvious that the sundry assortment of corrupt techno-nerds, unprincipled MAGA political hacks, hangers-on, bootlickers and the very “bored” who stop listening once their personal issues have been mentioned in political disinformation treatises posted on social media that are destabilizing American society, and to some degree, that of Saskatchewanians and Albertans as well – NOT “socialist thought”.
As a teacher, then, I was being confronted by machine-generated thought that is 100 per cent “correct” in its analysis. To be honest, good educators would have no difficulty in weaponizing such an instrument to, as an example, repel Trump’s “Book Burning Division” troops headed by former WWE CEO Linda McMahon. Then again, having watched ALL of Schwarzenegger’s “Terminator” movies, am I jumping too far ahead of myself in suggesting that our Department of Education incorporate such genius into the toolkit that could more truthfully provide a standard that is acceptable to parent, student and industry alike?
My answer is simple: “No, I would NOT rely upon this tool being sufficiently ‘safe enough’ – even in the future, unless ‘controlled’ in its application by both well-trained teachers and consultants satisfied that it delivers a form of universal consensus acceptable to all.” Why is that? Well, for one, given the manner in which Trump-like empires have fastened onto AI technology as their ticket to achieving greater power in society and the manner in which they embrace our techno-nerds nestled in Silicon Valley, without specialized teachers supervising that process, we can’t TRUST its programmers to NOT build into the software’s analytical capacity subsets of instruction that run counter to universally accepted standards of knowledge acquisition, thereby sewing even more dissent into our social networking environments, all while incorporating “virtual” cult followings and intellectual segregationists into our cloud storage systems.
A thousand different stories have already been written as to how AI technology has been used solely for the purpose of manipulating thought processes in the average computer user, and there is little recourse in our laws to countermand such ethical abuse. Consider, for instance, answering the following questions, wherein such an encounter did in fact take place between an “end user” and software written and controlled through AI logically programmed routines:
Question 1: You’re an almost 50 year old male, “straight”, and love Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) movies; how many times today did you get a pop-up ad announcing “the very latest cure” for erectile dysfunction – that very one item that the drug industry and doctors alike don’t want you to know about?
Question 2: Last month you installed the latest “Skip the Dishes” app on your phone; when was the last time you actually cooked AND ate a FAMILY meal at home?
Question 3: You are still using a telephone app that is killing your budget and half the products you buy you don’t really need, but you still are using it, simply because the AI “Assistant” is always so “polite”; WHY are you doing this?
Question 4: Your child is doing homework using the school’s recommended AI software bundle; when suddenly you hear the Assistant call your son “a worthless lump of human excrement”; who at the school board do you expect to listen to your concern?
Scientists don’t develop products based upon its first application uses its theory of operation to become a weapon of war; however, in the rush to develop AI technology the oligarchs of the technological universe have yet to get past utilizing their creations as tools only capable of doing three things: reading your mind by noting your preferences in performing tasks on your computer (Q1, or Q5 in the suggestive extreme), flattering you so that you do not change usage habits (Q3), analyzing your lifestyle (Q2), or simply reporting your behavioural traits to data “miners” while also postulating reasons as to why your behaviour manifests itself in such fashion, and “overloads”, thus creating its own mental breakdown (Q4).
“Trust” has NEVER become part of a technologically orientated company’s mission statement. IBM’s original PC processor couldn’t even divide by 5, and still creates “penny rounding” errors in poorly written accounting software. Spreadsheets don’t even calculate using standard mathematical laws. Therefore, WHY are our governments so eager to foist bias-driven technology upon students just to create a learning “standard”?
Techno-nerds believe themselves to be intellectual gods in this New World, when in actuality all that they provide are more tools potentially capable of creating social havoc and discord, security of wealth by exploiting the weakness of the learning process we as teachers have been trying to strengthen, only to be suffocated by the efforts of government to constrain knowledge that in the end can see reason in supporting diversity, equity and inclusion as both reason to seek better avenues for learning and the breaking down of barriers that isolate our world from its population rejoicing in their equal footing.
It’s therefore too bad that Scott Moe keeps us in the dark as to the future of creating an educational standard protocol; however who knows – maybe he got bored and tuned out a long time ago.
