One of the things that we notice about the news cycle, which has become a feature of our society is the extent to which it defines the public interest in defiance of perspective. As we move forward towards a Banksian Mind Singularity, we should keep in mind this ratio.
The Hype Ratio is the extent to which the public is alerted to something in which it has relatively stake or say. I now think of the Hype Ratio as some function of the inability of smart questions to be answered readily. There are many factors to consider but I want to focus on the fraction which has to do with the non-integration of information pathways which is a function of the profitability of mass media. But let's look to the future and see how it should be and how I think that the smartest information technologists are thinking about it.
I invoke both Ray Kurzweil and Iain Banks when I talk about Banksian Mind Singularity. Kurzweil is famous for a number of things, but lately his prediction is that there will come a point in time in the future that non-human intelligence will outweigh human intelligence. He's right of course, except what he doesn't understand is that human culture won't give a damn. We'll still be watching Michael Jackson videos in 200 years even though there will have been invented ninja-bots that can outdance Jackson. The point is that when cars run faster than horses, we may no longer care about horses. But even though horses have always outrun humans, we still care about the fastest human runner. And just as we care about the fastest kids who can do math in their heads or drummers who are much slower than drum machines, we will still care about Bernie Madoff when the math told us not to invest in him. Bottom line is we will always be able to ignore non-human intelligence even if the whole of it is smarter than the whole of humankind. And it will not necessarily be at our peril. The value of human life is not subject to optimization, and this is the error that so many make. We still don't understand, the lot of us, how ecology of the earth works. Our relation to the other species of the world is about as tenuous as the commerce secretary's relation to job creation. It ain't cause and effect and we have no idea how the system actually works, but we take his word for it.
Iain Banks, in his Culture novels, describes a galaxy full of advanced civilizations of many different species. In this galaxy are great mechanical intelligences which have evolved under a law that protects all sentience. The greatest of these minds are deployed to attend to the functions of navigating warships - essentially all humanity and its governing body has outsourced the business of war to battling AIs. But as part of that same advance technology are smaller units which mind over planetary systems and their economies. They are all interconnected as peers and any individual human has access to just about everything they could possibly want to know, immediately.
It is important to consider Banks' vision primarily because he asserts something that is fundamental and inalterable. Human freedom, no matter what it desires, is always constrained by the laws of physics. From physics come economics. Understand as well that in Banks' speculative future, energy technologies are mastered, therefor the economies are vast, and significantly beyond human scale problems.
A Banksian Mind can thus be like an ultimate butler. It answers all of our questions in as great a detail as we are capable of absorbing. But we still have our free will to ignore it - still we keep them around as servants - all of our professional advisors wrapped into one, towards our ideal of human perfection. The Banksian Minds will be our guidance counselors, our dentists, our tax accountants, our bodyguards and our Jeeves. The important thing to note about the Banksian Mind is that in its sentience, it is co-dependent on humanity, and it is this co-dependence and the recognition of individuality that throws something of a wrench into one of Kurzweil's notions about Singularity, which is that we would merge with our sentient creations symbiotically and thereby change what it means to be human.
So what does instantaneous access to all information give us? In the Bansksian Mind Singularity, the Hype Ratio drops asymptotically to zero. Everything you want to know, you can know with accuracy and certainty. The difference and the distance between you and your goal is reduced to two dimensions instead of three. Ignorance is not part of the equation, rather it is primarily a matter of distance and time, or more properly speaking, energy and time.
Now, let's go back to the contemporary reality of the news cycle and its dysfunctions. I can be influenced to consider the implications of a great number of irrelevant matters. The first reason for this is that the mediasphere can be thought of as expository. The fundamental characteristic of its operation is that it finds out things that it thinks that people want to know and then translates that information, according to its editorial priorities, into a product for daily consumption. And the invention of CNN and the 24 hour news cycle has made it into a product for constant consumption. The internet on the other hand, is a medium which has been gradually infused with an extraordinarily broad and deep data set (more than just 'news') and in the way it functions like the MSM, it is enabled by search engines, but primarily though queries. That is to say it is not pushed, it is pulled. Furthermore, it can be researched.
The extent to which the accuracy and certainty of any news item can be guaranteed is in inverse proportion to its complexity and volatility. This makes for some strange dilemmas facing editorial boards of the news cycle. On the one hand, the accuracy and certainty of a train wreck's body count or the death of a hooker, or the cuteness of a baby can be readily ascertained by contemporary news organizations. The pertinent information can be gathered and processed at low cost and the impact on an audience of consumers can be nearly guaranteed. However the accuracy and certainty of any comment about the sentiment of investors on Wall Street as indicated by the DJIA is greatly dubious. Nevertheless, you are apt to hear on June 25 that the Dow closing up 190 points was due to X. We accept that diet of misinformation based on any number of rationalizations, but there's also the factual reason that we don't necessarily understand enough about the issue being reported to know any better.
We know that we are buying news. And over time as alternative ways of getting high quality information become available, we will pay less and less for that news.
I predict that the same thing will happen in education.
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