“Knowledge itself is power. France is bacon.”
2,200 years ago, Qin Shi Huang proclaimed himself the emperor of China. It’s first emperor. He’s also known for building the “Great Wall” but is seldom remembered for the fact he ordered the burning of all the books in the realm. It was his attempt to reset history so that everything would begin with his reign and him alone. There were to be no competitors.
It wasn’t to be a one off. Since Qin Shi Huang many others, both tyrants and do-good democrats have tried to control knowledge and thus history, the past. It’s simply an attempt to win every argument - this wish to be the sole source of all that knows. Tin gods, if I may suggest such.
Although popular history suggests the Library of Alexandria was burned by accident, as fire spread - we can be sure JC, Julius Cesar was happy - all roads needed to go through Rome.
Other examples abound of both destroying existing knowledge and reseting clocks to year 0 nd/or controlling knowledge through bans, burnings, instruments of fear and torture and even pure entertainment (a form of forgetting). All in the attempt to control who knows what or who might even want to know anything.
“All knowledge starts with calling things by their right name.” (It’s truth bound).
- Confucius
One thinks of the mighty made of concrete and steel Soviets shredding books in underground dwellings, away from sight. Or there is Mao and his cadres with their cultural revolution. And of course, we’ve had countless Nazi styled book burnings - either literal burnings on public streets or the slow burying of libraries and banning of original works of free thought. The list of religious, political or just fanatical erasure of public knowledge is immense and well documented.
But alas as sweet Hanta knew, it is always in vain because …
“ … real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.”― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Quiet A Solitude.
Thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Now, I say all this by way of introducing my thesis, so forgive the prelude and my indulgence. At least I didn’t take you down a Borgesian aleph, library of babel rabbit hole. My thesis is the following;
The digitalization of our lives, reality, bit by byte … the slow turning of all discourse and “knowing” into a prompt and binary piece of theatre IS an attempt to control knowledge, gain power and become the first emperor. Here we go again.
The Google Books project was a first modern attempt to digitally capture the world’s knowledge. Many say it failed because of court challenges to its abuse of copyright. But that was only a delay. It fertilized the soil for the LLMs (large language models) we see today. Grass for future harvesting - 25, some say 50 million books. And now with its 175 million volumes, the Library of Congress is in on the game - making everything digital so it may be controlled.
As I said, knowledge is power. Oh - Francis Bacon said that - ChatGPT got it wrong!
Maybe you see where I’m going, where I’m taking you. Let me continue.
The technophiles building businesses will tell you from the bottom of their wee wee hearts, that they are collecting the store of the world’s knowledge so that they can empower us all. We’ll all be kings and at the click of a button, know everything, access everything. Remember, “All The Answers” just a few decades ago, during the hopeful youth of the WWW? Remember when they told us the internet would be free, this access would be for the public. Hell, even remember Sam Altman saying just two point five years ago, the same thing! For the sake of humanity! Free, free, free for all.
Yeah - swampland anyone?
And what do you think the new ability is that matters? - Sam Altman: I mean, the like kind of dumb version of this would be figuring out what questions to ask will be more important than figuring out the answer. - Sam Altman. On The Future of AI and Humanity.
Knowledge is power and what we are seeing with generative “Ai” (and I use the term AI reluctantly - for it is not but alas, conventional usage rules), what we are witnessing and even partaking in, is an attempt to gatekeep knowledge.
First the world wide web is to be broken. And it damn well almost is. Everything is broken. Old links, the Internet Archive is being suffocated, the collective knowledge born on the internet is being erased as we speak. AND NOBODY IS SAYING ANYTHING ABOUT IT.
Many much more astute commentators on Ai than myself, lament the hype that the circus owners give to generative Ai. They decry and say it is a house of cards, there is no “there, there” and it will fall in on itself. You can’t keep spending 9 billion to make 4 billion (the current cash burn of OpenAI).
What they don’t get is that those investing in AI aren’t investing in a short term business or even a traditional business. Rather, they are investing in “knowledge capture”. It’s a long term game, like what Google did with search. Get everyone addicted and then restrict, charge, CAPTURE. So get ready my friends, for what is coming - especially given the world we live in, this gilded age of non-regulation and money makes right.
Large sums of venture capital are being invested in AI not because people see a product that others will pay for. No. Rather, they see knowledge being captured and eventually, everyone will have to (by way of training or having no other option) use generative AI. A play at pay to play.
And the scary part is it just might happen. OpenAI has scraped the whole internet, digitized it and fed it to its algorithms, trained them to produce knowledge theatre, what I call “the illusion of completeness”.
Of course, it is all non-sense and full of errors. But that doesn’t matter. So long as it can represent authority, con and b.s. and make others believe it is “the real thing”. And then, once it is embedded everywhere, they can burn the rest of the books.
But that is for another post.
Beware. This is the business model. This is what is happening and what we are letting happen. Everything else is a distraction.
And the power will come once you do hold the pitcher of knowledge. People will be thirsty and you can serve them your own kind of liquid, whatever will suit your purposes. Make money. Control the rebellious. Get others to think like you want. It’s serious Kabuki theatre, my friends.
I’ve described the process. No longer is it about Orwellian newspeak and police control. Now it is about a gateway, an oasis that only feeds you the water it wants you to drink. And the sad part about it all?
You’ll love it. Why?
Well, knowledge, like the world we live in and the people we live among, is complex. But most prefer it to be simple.
And AI will make it so.
“All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a share past”― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph
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