Welcome to the Poppy Field

At the dawn of digitization in 1995, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard observed, “Words move quicker than meaning.”

Now with the advent of AI, words, images, and video are created quicker than their meaning.

What happens to us when all of this information is created and proliferated faster than anyone can really make sense of it?

There will be only one thing left to automate: meaning. The last task of the computer is to give our lives meaning.

Here’s Nicholas Carr:

[my three books] examine how we came to apply industrial ideals and measurements — efficiency, productivity, speed, profit — to the most essential and defining of human pursuits. [One] looks at the application of those ideals and measurements to thinking; [another], to doing; and [the third], to communicating. The way computer systems have abetted the encroachment of the industrial ethos into the most intimate facets of human life strikes me as one of the most important stories of our time.