Paulo Reis’s Reviews > New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future > Status Update

Watching endlessly streaming videos, scrolling through walls of status updates and tweets, it’s futile to attempt to discern between what’s algorithmically generated nonsense or carefully crafted fake news for generating ad dollars; ... what’s deliberate misinformation or well-meaning fact check...
nobody wanted the new dark age –but we built it anyway, and now we are going to have to live in it.

Fan Hui, another seasoned Go player who had been the first professional to lose to the machine six months earlier, said of it: ‘It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move.’ And he added, ‘So beautiful.’26 In the history of the 2,500-year-old game, nobody had ever played like this. AlphaGo went on to win the game, and the series.

Computation, at every scale, is a cognitive hack, offloading both the decision process and the responsibility onto the machine. As life accelerates, the machine steps in to handle more and more cognitive tasks, reinforcing its authority ... Computation replaces conscious thought. We think more and more like the machine, or we do not think at all.

Computation, at every scale, is a cognitive hack, offloading both the decision process and the responsibility onto the machine. As life accelerates, the machine steps in to handle more and more cognitive tasks, reinforcing its authority ... Computation replaces conscious thought. We think more and more like the machine, or we do not think at all.