As time goes by, a fundamentally harmless invention is taking hold, and its danger does not so much lie in what it actually does—after all, it is nothing more than a statistical language model—but rather in what people believe it does, or might one day do. In other words, there exists a kind of hype surrounding its supposed dangerousness. But that is not what I intend to discuss.
These days, the internet feels like an archipelago of holy wars, so much so that the very first thing you do, when you interact with someone, is try to figure out which particular crusade they are enlisted in, just so you can avoid the “triggering” moment – that precise instant when the fellow loses his grip and the holy war slips out. At which point you get the inevitable: “I just couldn’t help myself, sorry.”
When something happens a second time, you’re no longer allowed to call it an accident. At school they told us that through two points you can always draw a straight line; in geopolitics, when you hit the same wall twice, you are looking at a pattern, not bad luck. We have now had two – and arguably more than two – episodes where superpowers got bogged down by a form of resistance built on cheap, almost trivial technologies. And the pattern is always the same: the countermeasures needed to neutralise those “low‑end” tools rapidly become so expensive, and so complex, that they start to undermine the very idea of being a superpower in the first place.
If, during the Enlightenment, you had told people that one day the sum of all human knowledge would be available to everyone, Diderot, d’Alembert and Voltaire would have positively purred with satisfaction. For men like them, the very idea of knowledge being instantly accessible to anyone curious enough to seek it was not just progress, it was progress in its pure, abstract, almost religious form.
Yesterday was a strange day, because I stumbled across an odd discussion on the Fediverse. It started with a Dutch person criticizing the history of the Netherlands, claiming that Dutch kitchens are small because the Dutch used to be barbarians who cooked on the floor.
Lavorando a un progetto legato alla sovranità europea, sto cominciando a capire in che modo la UE si stia muovendo su questo fronte. E la direzione, in linea di massima, mi piace; ma solo fino a un certo punto. Prima di poter articolare una critica comprensibile, però, è necessario introdurre una distinzione fondamentale, che di solito viene completamente ignorata: quella tra innovazione e modernizzazione.