Informatics in the 21st century

Informatics in the 21st century

On my temple's desacred remnants
On the shoulders of forgotten giants,

Unaware of the lethal height

Intellectual infants boast and fight

For their grab of Power and Glory.

I'm tired of secondary shame
Come on, Darwin, end this game.
Hollow fans, obedient teachers,
Shallow critics, puppet masters,
They all deserve it. Sorry, not sorry.

Anymore.

References
Vannevar Bush As We May Think (1945)
Douglas Engelbart Augmenting Human Intellect https://lnkd.in/dsEEzZVs (1962)
Joseph Weizenbaum Computers and society (1985)
Neil Postman Talk at Apple (1993)
Ted Nelson Computers for Cynics (2013)

The predicted result: Idiocracy (2006)

I don't know if science can survive this

 

My comment...

I am afraid that the title is obsolete: science is already dead and for this very reason, we are already in an Idiocracy: a social system lead by idiots, according to the original definition of the word: smart people without ideals, following their personal desires and greed (ref: Neil Postman). 

Here is an example.

A today globally known scientist wrote an article about a meaningless question and warned that without an objective and globally accepted terminology, mankind will make fool of itself. 70 years later, another person with zero formal education on the field gets a Nobel prize for his efforts to make fooling ourselves a trillion dollar global business of improving fake results and oblations to an 'emerging god'. A.k.a. superstition - in my vocabulary, the direct opposite of science. 

You may have guessed it right: the real scientist was Alan Turing, the question was 'can machines think?', impostor is Geoffrey Hinton, 'a psychologist disguising himself a computer scientist who won the Nobel in physics'. For his research in neural nets, derailing the whole field of informatics by overriding the definition of learning with adaptation. 

This fulfils the original predictions, one of them from JCR Licklider, another psychologist but with a degree in physics as well, a true 'godfather of AI'. 

„... the "system" of man's development and use of knowledge is regenerative. If a strong effort is made to improve that system, then the early results will facilitate subsequent phases of the effort, and so on, progressively, in an exponential crescendo. On the other hand, if intellectual processes and their technological bases are neglected, then goals that could have been achieved will remain remote, and proponents of their achievement will find it difficult to disprove charges of irresponsibility and autism.”

Libraries of the Future, 1964