“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

I’ve been reading this book, as well as Sagan’s excellent novel, Contact, and am once again so impressed by his writing. Like Arthur C. Clarke or Frederick Hoyle, he might’ve had a long career as a novelist, had he been so inclined.

This particular quote above, from The Demon Haunted World, reminded me a lot of all the op-eds and articles that have been appearing lately, purporting to explain AI and the proliferation of chatbots. These pieces are often written by non-experts, and then parroted back by technocrats with even less understanding of science. Yet people confidently speak of ‘the algorithm’ as if somehow that means they understand it. Sagan was correct, I think, and we are in trouble. Most of us don’t know how any of this technology really works, yet we are chartering a path to allow it to control so much of our lives.