Education, Spoofs, & Reality

We’ve been going through some interesting variations concerning education. And it looks as though we are rapidly heading for another variation.

Once upon a time one learned to copy. A child would copy what its parents did, because that was how you managed a satisfactory life. Never mind that most parents aren’t very good at living, at least in the distant past, so long as you learned how to survive, that would get you through.

Then along came a bunch of thinkers, and they changed the world, and eventually, but only very gradually, education became split into two branches; the thinkers and experimenters, and those who copied what the thinkers passed down. Towards the end of the Middle Ages that became the classic grammar school education, which thrived, under different names, across Europe.

In the beginnings of the modern era things changed again and education moved sharply away from the thinking model, and became a matter of learning to use tools. In the UK that even became a half-hearted form of education taken up by what were called technical schools, or secondary modern schools.

With the rise of the internet education changed yet again, and from here onwards we have suffered the rise of the great ignorance. The basic position in education when I was briefly involved in the teaching world could, and indeed was, summed up with a couple of acronyms: YOYO FOMO, which translated as You’re On Your Own, so Fuck Off and Find Out.

This led to students trawling the internet and memorising what they found, whether it made sense or not. And that quickly morphed into something else. Who needs the information? All you really need are the skills required for finding out, so FOMO became the way forward because you’re never alone with an internet connection.

That form of education is now becoming highly suspect, and indeed dangerous. Let me explain.

Let me put it this way. I have no doubt you have come across all kinds of material on the web which is sometimes characterised as click-bait. The title and sub titles lead one to assume one thing when the content is often very different.

That is relatively easy to spot, and if it isn’t, then it pays to check the comments before getting into watching the video, because you will often see that smarter people have already spotted that something is wrong.

But this type of thing is becoming more and more difficult to spot. As time goes, by avatars are becoming smarter and more realistic. And it isn’t just that it is getting more and more difficult to spot whether one is watching the real thing or a fraud, one has to wonder whether entire topics haven’t been completely taken over, or even initially manufactured by someone who is having fun creating a spoof.

This is not new. Way back, nearly a hundred years ago, a famous journalist did rather well inventing all kinds of news. I guess the most famous spoof was the radio program sent out across the US airwaves announcing the arrival of a possé of little green men from outer space.

With that in mind I have to wonder what is going on with the articles on 3I Atlas. Is this all a spoof, or is any of it genuine, and if so how much?

Once these questions start to proliferate one has to ask, what the heck is real and what isn’t? What can we rely on? Anything? I guess one can rely on the fact that one’s car exists because it’s sitting out there on the drive, and if you need to do the shopping, you just have to get into it and drive off to the shops. And presumably the shops are real. But how far out do you go before doubt sets in?

In fact, that first example is subject to some kind of reality test, though what kind of test, I dont know. Your neighbour is likely to totter by, grin, and suggest that we are all living in a hologram.

This is meant to be a serious question: how do you tell?

We have to believe in something or life becomes pointless. Have we reached the stage where truth is a choice rather than a fact to be relied on?

I’m a typical gemini. I believe in both attitudes. I have one foot in what I still call the real world, and another foot in the hologram world exhibited by Youtube. I tend to slide between the two quite comfortably, but I am still asking to which world AI Atlas belongs? I am sure you can come up with a lot more dodgy truths.