The illusion of expertise is crumbling.
The information age seemed like the portal to unlimited knowledge at our fingertips. But that's the sheep's clothing; the information age is unlimited information at your fingertips. Not knowledge, just info. Valid, good, bad, maliciously inaccurate.
The availability of information has made us question why experts are certified to call themselves such; and rightly so, as many were fraudulent, and in the pre-information age, fraudster hacks just got by as the price of having a real caste of experts.
But as the doubt of my newfound informational agency sets in, and I realize that we've never been able to tell the good experts from the bad, and it's really been the intellectual elites that mostly self-moderated, I see everyone else undergoing this same transformation.
But, we're not beacons of knowledge, a sea vast and available. We've victims of whatever waves of information happen to lap at our faces; little enlightened guppies sitting in our tidal pools, spitting streams of what our experts authoritatively declare. Anti-vaxxing, partisanship, and unwarranted conspiracy. No one's opinion seems informed, or circumspect, we all just have our keyholes. I even doubt my most firmly held beliefs. What if they're not right? What if they're right, but only because I was lucky enough to randomly bump into the right information first, and no real agency on my behalf?
And this is all (well, mostly) just driven by people, now. Reddit, facebook, buzzfeed, huffpo, breibart, man and simple bot. The destruction of critical thinking coming about by mostly intent; intent to sell, intent to sway, intent to elect. But the manipulation of this data is really possible because of simple machines wielded like cudgels by actors online.
You can see the horizion. Siri and Google are just shadows of the networks of the future. Do you know how your phone told you the weather? How it knows you're probably going back to Lowe's, very likely to buy accessories for an air conditioner? When you yell at it, it understands your speech..... and that's normal.
And when these thinking minds we've built to collate and serve us data find that the most effective way to fulfill their directives is so lie? To show us vacuous falsehoods, generate conspiracies? What about when our children grow up watching products not intended for real consumption, and possibly built by an AI to satisfy youtube's video serving engine?
It's terrifying to me to think that, we may see the Singularity; the Artificial Intelligence Apocalypse, but not the thinking, calculating, evil kind.
The AI we're creating don't feel, or even think, they're just crystals or fractals, endlessly repeating a looping, recursive, powerful process far to complex for us to understand, all without intent, knowing, or self.
It won't be superintelligent AI that causes the problems. I want to call it superstupid AI, but it's neither, it doesn't have the capacity to know, and it's flaws are flaws in how we've evolved to form our beliefs.
If you've gotten this far, I'm sorry.