Latest news with #Idiocracy
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
As we race headlong into our glorious AI-powered future, are we on the road to Idiocracy?
As we race headlong into our glorious AI-powered future, a long-forgotten flick from the naughties is gaining cult status by posing a simple question: are we on the road to Idiocracy? In the tradition of Bill and Ted, Idiocracy, a 2006 American sci-fi comedy, depicts an average guy transported 500 years into the future to find he is the smartest man on earth. A wrestler is president, people worship 'the profit' and the world's biggest corporation is a sports drink company whose market strategy has taken humanity to the brink of collapse. Idiocracy is not a flawless film; it's jarring class eugenics and casual sexism seem more dated than its 20 years would suggest. But what it does brilliantly is challenge the assumption that the human race is on an uncontested journey to higher consciousness. This is a timely counterpoint to the zeitgeist about the self-evident benefits of machine learning built by large tech companies under the conceit of 'artificial intelligence'. Already we are seeing academic studies suggesting that Large Language Models are linked to cognitive decline, with a recent MIT study finding lower brain engagement among students using GPTs in writing essays. We've also seen AI chatbots accused of inducing vulnerable people to suicide and cheery predictions about the hollowing out of entry level knowledge economy jobs which loom as our next inter-generational betrayal. The question is whether these dumb outcomes are features or bugs of our emerging information ecosystem. Evidence is mounting it is the former. Exhibit A is OpenAI's Economic Blueprint for Australia, an embarrassing document seeking rapid government adaptation, investment and minimalist regulation for 'the most significant economic and strategic opportunity of our time' You could drive a truck through the holes in OpenAI's analysis: $115bn in predicted productivity improvements based on crude calculations of hours saved at work, with no trade-off for the costs of the jobs already being destroyed. To realise this promised dividend OpenAI says the government would need to lean into resource-sucking datacentres, socialising the costs of energy and water, steamrolling communities and putting new pressures on the grid and fast-tracking development at the cost of the energy transition. As our creativity is being stolen and repurposed, trading off our collective empathy for automated culture, OpenAI wants us to 'streamline and update copyright law', with industry groups already pushing hard for a general right to mine our data. But these self-serving policy asks are not the worst of the OpenAI blueprint; it is the very fact that this massive corporation purports to set our future agenda at all, defining rather than responding to our collective needs. This design principle could represent the inflection point between a smart future and an impending Idiocracy. It is true this technology carries amazing power to synthesise information and challenge higher order thinking in new and profound ways. OpenAI is right to describe the technology as 'like electricity' something that can illuminate the night sky. But would you get a power company to set the rules for electrical safety? The truth is OpenAI is nether open or intelligent: it's a play to dominate a new technology on commercial terms for its material benefit, using their copious venture capital as a shield against competitors and a sword against government to create a policy environment to suit them. We are witnessing the next phase of their corporate history. ChatGPT is a compelling shop front, but what if it is intellectual heroin? It tricks us to feel smarter, more seen and even loved, while actually providing the opposite by convincing us to commoditise our collective intelligence. Short of returning to a genuine not-for-profit mission, OpenAI can never be a good faith partner. Theirs is an operating model to be resisted but that relies on us having the time, the understanding and, yes, the leadership to do this intelligently. In the latest episode of my podcast Burning Platforms one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence, Prof Toby Walsh, differentiates between the richness of distributed intelligence and the homogeneity of the concentrated intelligence that chatbots serve up. High quality data is earned not stolen property; it is used mindfully to address problems humans identify, not commoditised to fill some market niche. While the tech broligarchs battle for world domination, maybe the smart money should be on the design and value of small data models, designed for purpose not for producing mainstream slop and brain rot, that chew up less energy and eradicate fewer jobs. Because of the power of the tech sector, all of whom have well-paid and well-positioned Canberra lobbyists, we also need to resist. Since shouting out the Luddites in my last column I've been delighted to discover there are people already doing this. Ben Zhao, a University of Chicago computer scientist has developed programs like Glaze which protects private photos being harvested to train facial recognition technology and Nightshade, a filter for artists that tricks AI into seeing a cat as a dog, like putting ink in a bag of stolen bank cheques. And Cloudfare, one of the dominant cybersecurity companies, has announced it will ban AI web crawlers from scraping content from their sites without paying compensation to the owner of those sites. As Cloudfare CEO, Matthew Prince, says: 'I go to war every single day with the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably Americans, the Israelis, all of them who are trying to hack into our customer sites. And you're telling me, I can't stop some nerd with a C-corporation in Palo Alto?' In the battle for our future intelligence, we need to deploy all the grey matter at our disposal: workers' intelligence, cultural intelligence, collective intelligence and the power of technologists in the face of the artifice. Spoiler: in the movie the sports drink company, 'Brawndo' extends its market dominance in electrolytes by expanding into agriculture, poisoning the land in pursuit of 'The Profit'. Open AI's Blueprint for Australia would be a similar triumph of Idiocracy. Peter Lewis is the executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company that undertook research for Labor in the 2025 election and conducts qualitative research for Guardian Australia. He is also the host of Per Capita's Burning Platforms podcast
Buzz Feed
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
Donald Trump Wants To Host UFC Fight At The White House
Donald Trump revealed his plan to honor America's 250th birthday next year with a UFC fight on the grounds of the White House, and he's so serious. "So every one of our national parks, battlefields and historic sites are going to have special events in honor of America 250. And I even think we're going to have a UFC fight," Trump said. "Does anybody watch UFC?" "We're going to have a UFC fight — think of this — on the grounds of the White House," Trump said on July 3 at the Des Moines, Iowa State Fairgrounds. "We got a lot of land there." Trump's visit to the fairgrounds was more or less a celebration of Congress passing the "big, beautiful bill," a legislation predicted to add an estimated $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. However, the primary focus of the president's remarks wasn't policy, or even politics; it was throwing a yearlong "big, beautiful" celebration for America's birthday in 2026. "We're going to have a UFC fight, championship fight, full fight, like 20, 25,000 people and we're going to do that as part of 250 also," he added. "We're going to have some incredible events. Some professional events, some amateur events, but the UFC fight's going to be a big deal, too." According to NBC News, a spokesperson for UFC confirmed the event will happen, although further details have not been Leavitt said the president was "dead serious" about the plans, per Associated Press. It's no secret that Trump is buddy-buddy with UFC President Dana White, who's appeared at several campaign rallies and took the stage at Trump's election night victory party. His remarks have gone viral, and people have mocked and criticized what this means for the United States to have our 47th president touting a mixed martial arts sporting event on the White House lawn. Here's what people are saying: One person said, "this shit is like a really bad SNL skit that's run too long." Another person said, "this country is an embarrassment. we just increased national debt by trillions now the White House is sponsored by UFC." Someone else didn't hold back claiming they'ree "turning the White House into a redneck amusement park. Next they'll construct a NASCAR circuit around MAGAWORLD!" Lots of people made the obvious comparison to Mike Judge's 2006 movie Idiocracy, which featured an outlandish plot that seemed implausible to critics until recent events. Other folks are saying UFC fights at the White House are giving Gladiator fights from the Roman Empire. And finally, people are throwing out ridiculous suggestions of who should be on the fight card for the 2026 bout.
Gulf Insider
21-03-2025
- Science
- Gulf Insider
Idiocracy Looms As Study Finds TikTok Rots Youth Minds
The intelligence test was invented 121 years ago. While IQ scores have historically risen alongside technological advancements, recent years have seen a slowdown—if not a reversal—in intelligence. The rise of smartphones, tablets, and social media may be to blame, and more recently, the phenomenon of the 'TikTok brain' among teenagers suggests peak cognition has arrived. A new report from the Financial Times cites a test used to measure the IQs of 15-year-olds, conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). This test evaluates students' performance in reading, mathematics, and science literacy. The latest data suggests that IQs peaked in the early 2010s. Peak cognition fears come nearly two decades after the debut of the satirical sci-fi comedy Idiocracy, which depicted a dystopian future where humanity becomes profoundly dumbed down by the 2500s. FT's chief data reporter, John Burn-Murdoch , said the timing of this data marks an 'inflection point' and is 'noteworthy' because it coincides with 'our changing relationship with information,' which is now primarily online. NEW 🧵: Is human intelligence starting to decline?Recent results from major international tests show that the average person's capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid should we make of this? — John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 14, 2025 Declining math and literacy skills are likely the result of a shift away from text-based learning toward visual media. Additionally, there is a broader erosion in the capacity for mental focus, which could be attributed to 'TikTok brain rot'—with youth spending countless hours each week mindlessly swiping into oblivion. It's clear that digital technologies have impacted attention span, memory, and self-regulation negatively. A surge in the share of 15-year-olds who reported difficulties in PISA tests coincides with big changes in how information is processed, shifting drastically away from reading to visual content over the two decades. Peak cognition fears suggest achieving full Idiocracy may happen at a much more accelerated timeline. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence could surpass human IQs by the next decade… 'I think today's systems, they're very passive, but there's still a lot of things they can't do. But I think over the next five to 10 years, a lot of those capabilities will start coming to the fore and we'll start moving towards what we call artificial general intelligence,' Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said at a briefing on Monday. TikTok and other digital technologies that offer instant gratification through swiping left, right, up, or down appear to have made society even dumber.
