Thank you. We need to stop thinking of growth as a reasonable metric for wellbeing or relevance of products. When a new product is introduced, certainly, looking how the market reacts is interesting. But many years down the line, things should stabilise. Does your (metaphorical) baker round the corner grow yoy? And yet, somehow their bread is still good, and they have no problem surviving, except when a company with far too much capital just bulldozes in, for example by selling under local market prices.
The solution to a problem is never to ignore it, lock it away, out of sight where it will just fester. The people who produce bullshit (maybe for a living, maybe as a hobby) don't just disappear.
Aggressive filtering of what people see in their feeds is not a solution. What do all those able to discern bullshit from factual content have in common? Exercise for the reader as I don't have a definitive answer. A proper education can be thrown away or ignored when convenient; some people just seem to have a good nose for bs. I dunno.
What civilization are you talking about? The US, western Europe, capitalism, formally educated people? Who is 'they'? There's enough people who just want to watch the world burn, and they're very much part of society, paying taxes and going to clubs and shopping malls. For instance, all those highly capable developers and mathematicians on adtech payrolls. How is one supposed to concentrate on separating the wheat from the chaff when things engineered to distract and capture attention do exactly that?
You should check out what happened less than a century ago. Among other things, it started this whole digital conundrum.
It's naive to think that concentrating so much power over so many people in the hands of so few people can go any sort of well. What happens when the regulators, or the ones charged of overseeing them, want in on the fun? What if they're coerced, which suddenly is trivial to do?
Progress comes from individuals, as such, individuals should be empowered by great tools to make the most of their data. Wanting corporations to solve all the problems is another case of pushing off personal responsibility.
I recently read Biodiversos by Stefano Mancuso and Carlo Petrini, the founder of the slow food movement. It's basically a discussion between the two where they lay out the big problems with our production and consumption of food.
For instance, concentrating on making single kinds as productive as possible instead of cultivating variety is extremely dangerous, as shown by this event. The great Irish famine is maybe the most striking example. Humanity does exactly that with wheat, cows, almost everything. The very basis of most of the globe's food comes from a handful of species. In my mind, this is one of the great ticking bombs of our close future.
Fascinating how the analysis gets wrong what becomes possible or doesn't (online shopping,...), but hits the nail on the head concerning the psychological and social aspects.
> The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
> Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?
> While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
Zurek and his colleague Jess Riedel have been able to calculate how fast and extensive this proliferation of quantum copies is for a few simple situations, such as a dust speck in a vacuum flooded by sunlight. They find that, after being illuminated for just one microsecond, a grain of dust a micrometre across will have its location imprinted about 100 million times in the scattered photons.
It’s because of this multiple imprinting that such objects seem to have objective, classical-like properties at all. Ten observers, say, can separately measure the position of a dust grain and all agree that it’s in the same location. Each observation consumes a different replica of the grain in the reflected photons. In this view, we can assign an objective position to the speck not because it truly ‘has’ such a position (whatever that means), but because its position state can imprint many indistinguishable replicas in the environment. What we take as obvious common sense turns out to have secure yet far-from-obvious underpinning in quantum theory.
There’s a seemingly bizarre corollary to this picture. When we measure a property of a system by probing its replica in the environment, we destroy that replica. Might we then potentially use up all the copies by repeated measurement, so that the state can’t any longer be observed? Yes we can: too much measurement will ultimately make the state seem to vanish.
What Quantum Darwinism tell us is that, fundamentally, the issue is not really about whether probing physically disturbs what is probed (although that can happen). It is the gathering of information that alters the picture. Through decoherence, the Universe retains selected highlights of the quantum world, and those highlights have exactly the features that we have learnt to expect from the classical world. We come along and sweep up that information – and in the process we destroy it, one copy at a time.