It’s not hard to see… unless you’re intentionally blind.
This is why Artificial Intelligence is so dangerous.
“Trotter and Le Bon concluded that the group mind does not think in the strict sense of the word. In place of thoughts, it has impulses, habits, and emotions. In making up its mind, it’s first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader.” Ed Bernays, Propaganda. (1)
“But when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences.” ibid Bernays. (2)
There’s no think in group think.
It’s funny when I talk to Europeans about US football. It’s not the game they don’t like. In fact, they usually enjoy the game. They just don’t understand how anyone can sit through the commercials.
If you ask an American, they say they don’t watch the commercials. Seriously? Then where do the companies get the $$$ to run the commercials?
People often think of group think as political.
I can assure you it isn’t. Ed Bernays made a killing understanding exactly how people react to information. Obesity, heart disease, murder, almost every social malady can be traced to commercials, movies and TV shows people fantasize they don’t see.
The world is too complex for 85% of the people.
In fact, 85% is the number many psychologists have used to describe human intelligence. And sadly, even though 15% CAN understand the world, a very small percentage actually do.
Understanding is a complex idea. In its simplest form to understand is to know, but biologically, it’s more complex. For example, you may know (Through learning and experimentation) which type of mushroom is edible. Physically, the body knows in a non-intellectual sense by rejecting poisonous mushrooms.
But everyone in the group doesn’t need to eat poison mushrooms to the lesson to spread. Only one influencer has to.
As Maya Perry explains, in her article “Everyone’s Existential Crisis”, most knowledge is second or third hand and spread by influencers. (3) This was Bernays secret superpower. Control the influencers and you control the world.
Bernays first campaign was to link smoking to freedom. The tobacco companies wanted to tap into women as a new market. In the 60’s most women didn’t smoke. The “you’ve come a long way baby,” campaign killed millions of women, but hey, what’s death when you can make bank? (The link between abortion to freedom is the same gig.)
He created influencers by getting (bribing) popular people to endorse cigarette smoking. This included politicians, Hollywood starlets, civil rights leaders, and doctors. The key to cigarettes was that they cost next to nothing to manufacture. Tobacco is basically a weed. It can grow almost anywhere. This left enormous amount of profit to be spent on bribes.
But it’s more insidious than you might imagine.
Who did Bernays think women wanted freedom from? Men, of course notably their husbands. “I hate my husband so I’m going to kill myself?” Does this make sense? Of course not! Memes rarely make sense. This is their “beauty.”
The power of Tom Bombadil
Tom Bombadil is a character in Tolkien’s classic “Lord of the Rings.” LOTR is a fantasy, but it’s also a thread of interwoven mythologies. In fact. Tolkien was well aware he was creating a mythology and like Tennyson, wrote deliberately.
Tolkien described Hobbits as people who were obsessed with genealogy and “Liked to have books filled with things they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.” (4) In other words, aside from Bilbo and Frodo, they were stupid.
In fact, in Tolkien’s world, soldiers were typically illiterate. The soldiers of Gondor recited poetry. In Tolkien’s world, intelligence resided in the Elves, the Wizards and the chosen few. Their history and memories came in the form of songs.
Bombadil’s power was in his songs, a series of silly verses that he seemingly made up as he sang them. Bombadil was above the world. Nothing affected him in the outside, not even the ring of power. Why?
Because Bombadil wrote his own songs.
Moving past Bombadil.
In the past, poems and songs were how knowledge was passed through the generations. One might say we have a poetry instinct. Another form of communication was prose, which is poetry without rhyme or timing. Consider Longfellow’s “Evangeline.”
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight…
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
This prose told the story of the genocide of the Acadians by the British from Canada.
Consider today’s “poetry.”
“Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.”
From “Still I Rise, by Maya Angelou
Do you see the difference? Most poems today are memes brought to music. They are simple nonsense, but they connect in the same way Longfellow’s prose connects. In fact, you can say anything in a song and get rich.
Consider this.
Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby
Edgy and dull and cut a six-inch valley
Through the middle of my skull.
At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet
And a freight train running through the middle of my head
Only you can cool my desire
From “I’m on Fire,” by Bruce Springsteen.
Aside from questioning the age group the author is referencing, and the song reeks of pedophilia, this poem is absurd. Again, you can say anything in a song because it’s the music that drives it. It’s the same yabba-dabba-doo we get from tent preachers but make no mistake. It’s very powerful and it creates millionaires. (Especially among tent preachers.
People don’t write their own songs.
Just as everybody doesn’t have to taste test mushrooms to see what’s safe, not everybody is a Bombadil. In fact, in Tolkien’s world, Bombadil was the only one. People not only avoid writing their own songs, but they also spend their lives trying to find songs they relate to.
What will happen when AI writes its own songs?
It’s not hard to imagine. Just look at how purchasing decisions are made. When someone is buying a Gucci handbag, are they buying quality? No, they’re buying Gucci. People have no sense of value or price, so they buy what influencers tell them to buy. Even though 60,000 people die every year from opioids that were described by doctors who knew they were both ineffective and addictive, people still trust doctors.
More to the point though, people don’t write their own songs because they don’t trust themselves. They need influencers. This was the beauty of watching Donald Trump, the most gifted self-promote of his generation. While the world obsesses over whether they love or hate Trump, few people if any study what he did.
Trump created so much angst among his detractors that if one didn’t display hatred of Trump, you were considered a supporter. Trump was the modern Tom Bombadil. He wrote all his own songs. Trump did things no other politician would or could do, like his Nuremberg like rallies and his appearances at cage fights and WWF.
In other words, Trump knew exactly where the population was and how to connect with them. In fact, both parties are aware that their bases are a collection of morons, which is why the largest group of voters by a HUGE margin are Registered Independents and non-voters. (27% Democrat, 32% Republican, 43% fuck both of you.)
AI knows this better than any human could.
In the real world, AI acts like a universal weed killer. It’s already being used extensively in companies to grade and rank people. The biggest fear among anthropologists and psychologists is that AI data will conform to the IQ studies of people like Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the authors of the book “The Bell Curve.”
Most of the common applications people use like ChatGPT and Twitters GROK basically give simple summaries of readily available data. This will help high schoolers write papers but beyond that, I see little value.
Where I see enormous value is with companies that have their own proprietary databases. These companies have already tailored their data to very specific needs.
Futurists believe that AI will discard its creators and take on its own life.
For me, the real fear is that it won’t. My real fear is that people will use it, like they use everything else in their non evolved brains to abuse each other. It will be used in things like weapons systems, sex dolls and food commercials.
In In Bernays case, it was selling cigarettes. He linked his cigarettes to freedom, an emotional hot point. Since then, His method was used to sell everything from junk food to drugs.
In fact, the abortion movement is almost identical to the cigarette movement. Abortion is a meme driven attempt to subvert biology by linking it to freedom. No one wants to be told what to do, especially highly emotional pregnant women. To understand how this acts as a virtual off switch, one must look at the biology of birth.
But I won’t and my guess is 99% of you won’t either.
In fact, I have never in my life heard anybody in an abortion debate talk about what goes on in a woman’s mind or body when she’s pregnant. They talk about freedom, responsibility, social and economic costs, but few people talk about the biology of birthing. The abortion movement is a political movement.
Segue. What are you thinking right now?
Are you thinking about abortion? I’m writing about AI.
No one knows where AI will lead.
In systems engineering, predictions can be very dangerous.
(1) Propaganda, by Edward Bernays, IG Publishing, NY.
(2) ibid Bernays.
(3) Everyone’s Existential Crisis, Palladium Magazine. December 29, 2023.
(4) Tolkien, JRR. Lord of the Rings. “Concerning Hobbits.” Page 7.
