Time is running out

The television as we know it today was invented in 1923 by John Logie Baird, his invention iterated and combined elements of existing technology and augmented them with novel elements. After a series of demonstrations and refinements to the technology, growing public adoption, and regulatory disputes, The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was established - the exact date varies depending on where you begin counting, technically the organisation was founded in 1922 as a company rather than a corporation and covered other forms of broadcasting namely radio, but it eventually became a public body in 1927, the first public television broadcaster, now the oldest in the world.

Fast forward 98 years and we are approaching the centennial of the BBC, there are only a few thousand people still alive in the UK today who are older than the BBC - this is important to note because time is running out.

One of the things I find fascinating about history, is just how far apart events in the past actually occurred. When you think about the historicity of Jesus for example, regardless of your religious belief, the actual man who lived and died as far as historical records can be relied upon, lived roughly 2000 years ago. That time period feels like the distant past, "ancient times" some would say, but when you put it in context of the wider world and the things that existed, the Great Pyramid was already thousands of years old, in fact the life of Jesus as a man occurred closer to modern day than the construction of the pyramids did to his own time.

When we think of the distant past we have a tendency to compress time down into a shorter period, perhaps because in the last 100 years our technology has advanced at an unprecedented rate and we expect history to have moved at a similar pace in the distant past because we have been conditioned to accept that as normal. The reality is that progress has been slow, and whilst we may think modern times are an exception, they probably won't be for much longer.

Thousands of years ago, it had already been thousands of years since the pyramids had been built, and evidence exists to show that archaeologists of the time were stumped as to how their ancestors were able to achieve such precision. The living memory of their construction was long dead, and the conclusions they had to draw were based on their scientific endeavour. That loss of insight is not unique to the pyramids, it happens repeatedly throughout history and the reason is because we claim progress in the name of all mankind that few achieve - "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" - except that quote is nothing more than propaganda.

It's not an achievement for all mankind if it's not something that all mankind can replicate. The knowledge, the ingenuity, the resources, and the determination needed to achieve these feats ultimately dies with the people who achieved them, unless those who come after them also achieve the same feats, which rarely happens. Megastructures like the Pyramids stand few and far between because they weren't achievements that many others of their day could achieve, in fact some of those structures took several lifetimes to create, with construction beginning in one Pharaoh's reign and not completing until another.

When we think of Philosophy, or Mathematics as examples, both fields that have 'Classical' eras defined in and around the 6th century BC, there are great thinkers from that time period that advanced human understanding of their fields but even today many of the concepts they described aren't understood by the general populace. There are those who specialise in these fields who benefit from the legacy of their work and we do receive a dividend as a society from their advancement but that dividend depends upon the continued understanding of their work and that requires knowledge, ingenuity, resources, and determination - something which humanity is running out of, thanks in a great part to Ronald Reagan, but the guilt does not rest with him alone.

Reagan's era as President [1981 to 1989] saw the commoditisation of almost every part of our lives. The problem with commoditisation is that whenever you turn something into a commodity, that thing loses part of its utility. When housing was turned into a commodity, the utility of using housing for habitation was partly lost and overtaken by those who use it for investment, to the extreme that led to the housing crisis we now endure both here in the UK and across the world. The US normalised this quite quickly, but the rest of the world put up a token resistance at first, but again our own political leaders eventually kowtowed to Reagan, Thatcher commoditised housing in the UK and today very few can afford to buy a home without a mountain of debt, and a worrying number can't even afford to rent a home because of the supply constraint that caused.

Perhaps the most insidious commoditisation in the last 40 years however has been the commoditisation of Education. This again applies to many countries not just the US and the UK although they both highlight the problem with students in the former graduating owing on average $29,300 [£22,000] and the latter $65,000 [£48,470] emphasising the financial penalty of commoditisation. Even countries where Education is truly free don't escape the effects of commoditisation however, free education amounts to a state subsidy but it is still subject to the same supply and demand metrics of market forces.

Graduates compete not just with graduates but with non-graduate applicants for jobs, and those who have experience in their fields. The real problem however is the impact on the learning process that commoditisation of Education has caused; today most Education systems are structured to test retention not comprehension. You are tested on whether you can retain information long enough to regurgitate it and pass an exam, you're not tested on whether you actually comprehend what you are being assessed on.

This was something I first realised in High School and that realisation shaped my attitude to Education profoundly. Every year we would finish for Summer break in the first week of June, you would only have to come in on days when you had exams so depending on your timetable you could end up finishing as early as the 6th or 7th of June. The school year didn't commence until the first week of September, so you had 3 months away from school in effect.

I realised retention vs comprehension was a problem when I returned from Summer break and started a new year with more complex progression in subjects like mathematics that built upon your prior understanding, and that's when the reality of the limitation of your understanding is exposed.

I wasn't alone, September each year in every subject ended up being a glorified revision session that lasted a month retracing what we had already covered. What I took away from this whole experience was the understanding that any student on average if given an exam they had already passed a few months later without warning wouldn't be able to pass that exam - which leads to the natural question, did you even understand it to begin with?

You can dismiss some waning ability with the "use it or lose it" excuse that most knowledge attained needs a practical application to be retained and if none exists you're more likely to forget it in time. The trouble with using that excuse is that it acknowledges the less practical application you have for knowledge the higher the rate of loss becomes and if you apply that to society as a whole you can quite easily see why the world is "in decline" right now globally - we don't apply what we learn anymore, because we have no reason to.

When Education was commoditised, the objective to achieve was fuelled by the competitive advantage which is ultimately a con. Any commodity that has a potentially infinite supply is ultimately worthless, you need a commodity to be restricted in supply for it to hold any value over time. If you could create gold as easily as growing a plant in your garden its value would collapse - look up Tulip Mania for a real world instance of that happening. There is no actual competitive advantage achieved through Education if you pursue it for its value as a commodity, its true value lies in understanding and that has been lost.

If you look at the last 40 years our transition to a digital society has made everything we do subject to Enshittification which to put it bluntly is the degradation of value provided by any platform or service that results from its success. Enshittification is not just something that is happening in our digital lives it's something that has been happening in society for the last 4 decades and is now accelerating thanks to AI.

There was once a veil of illusion that people in their jobs were competent, but in the last 10 years in particular, the weight of the mismanagement of our society has grown to the point where it can't be ignored, politicians' ineptitude has been laid bare for all the world to see and it is no longer a "one side did this" or the fault of "them" that you can attribute it to, but something that is now endemic in society as a whole. We don't want to admit we are bad at our jobs because we don't want to lose them but we've all dealt with companies and people in them and walked away thinking "How did they ever get that job!?" astounded by their incompetence.

We live in a society where we use Education as a determinant of ability, a system that is inherently biased towards those with higher wealth and status. The Education system we have globally still encourages people to learn, the problem with the system is that you don't have to, and you haven't needed to for some time. There has been an increase in students using ChatGPT and other tools to pass their courses, some schools have used systems designed to detect AI content to try and prevent this from happening but this filtration is not borne of a concerted effort, it's borne of protection because those institutions don't want to stop their students cheating they just want them to stop making it obvious.

I went to University and graduated 16 years ago next month, AI was still quite limited at the time. Students did not use it to cheat because it wasn't an application easily accessible for them. The amount of students I know who paid others to write their dissertations however is higher than I am willing to admit. I had offers myself to do others work for them, one student offered me $350 (£180 back then) to do their Java coursework for them - I declined. My University like many others used a piece of software called JPlag which was a plagiarism detection software, the fact we had the same coursework would inevitably show up in the software.

There were ways around this with care and attention taken, more than I was willing to commit for the reward it wasn't worth the risk - but like I said, my attitude to Education had already shifted to one of adamance that I wanted to actually understand what I was learning. I was willing to outright fail modules if I didn't understand them, it's also worth noting as I have probably mentioned in other posts that by the midpoint of the first year of my 3 year degree I was mentally checked out, I had already realised the degree was not going to help me get into the games industry and that for the most part my education was pretty much irrelevant, studios wanted portfolios of work and experience in the industry they didn't care what a piece of paper said you could do, they wanted to see it and in hindsight I completely understand why, because it's a practical industry and if you can't actually do the job you are irrelevant.

I had a conversation with a friend recently on the cult of personality that surrounds LinkedIn as a platform but one point that came up was that I knew people who were head hunted through the platform and got their current jobs through it, my friend remarked that they must have a pretty impressive resume to which I replied that it's not uncommon the higher up you go in large organisations for jobs to find you rather than the other way around. These people have the C-Suite as their ultimate goals in their careers and I have no doubt they will all reach that level at some point, some already have. Again the reason head hunting is common at that level is because they need proven track records rather than a convincing piece of paper that argues a case for you as a candidate.

Head hunters base their approach on the performance of the company you work for, and the responsibilities of the position you hold within it - it's not hard to figure out with large organisations who actually drives change within them if you know how to network - but this highlights that old axiom "It's not what you know, it's who you know" because their performance alone does not determine their success it's who is aware of their performance that determines it.

You end up with a two-tier society where one set of rules exists for those below a certain level and another set exists for those above it. Below the bar your success is determined by how convincing you can be that you are competent, actual competence is irrelevant. Above the bar your success is determined by others awareness of your competence. The fault in society is who we think should be below and who we think should be above that bar. For the longest time those in power were thought to be above it but the last 40 years, and the last 10 years especially have proven they're not, so the question becomes "Who is?" and unfortunately that's not an easy question to answer.

You can brush conspiracy theories to one side for now, they offer very little to this thought experiment not least of all because any shadow organisation if it were to exist would be subject to the same behavioural model as the rest of society - people are the problem, not the system. It is people who conform to the system and shape it through their behaviour, it is a living breathing entity comprised of living breathing entities.

When you apply Enshittification to our technology in general, Television began as a communications medium that informed, entertained, connected, and to some extent educated society more widely. Each of those functions have fallen away, the entertainment value of TV has fallen with younger generations increasingly likely not to watch it at all with Gen Z, now aged 13-28 for instance, less than half watch TV in a given week. The informative value of TV has also declined, less documentaries are made, "reality" TV rose to dominance which doesn't actually show reality, and the advent of 24 hour News channels turned the news into a form of entertainment driven by ratings rather than utility.

As technology progresses and we embrace abstraction in our lives, the idea that we don't need to know how something works we need only know how to use it, our understanding diminishes. You don't need to know how a plane stays in the air, or how to fly one to be able to use it, you just need to know how to buy a ticket, board it, sit down for a few hours and then get off at your destination. The problem with this arrangement is that it only works if someone understands it, that level of understanding has to be on par or has to exceed the people who you replace. We live in a society that has been fundamentally reshaped to remove that dependency though, and the deficiency that arises as a result is now becoming self evident.

You work a job for 40 years and know everything about it, for your level of service to be maintained after you're gone you need to ensure the person who replaces you is as knowledgeable or surpasses you - immediately you can see the problem, people don't want to train anyone new to a level of competence that surpasses their own, and an increasing number are working past retirement which inevitably leads some to quite literally work until the day they die but in doing so their knowledge dies with them. You rely entirely upon the education system and the experience they gained on the job to produce an "heir" that is competent, except the digitisation of our lives and the abstraction of our roles and our technology leads those who don't actively need that level of understanding to never seek it.

Brain Drain is a concept often applied to migrants, when the educated populace of one country leaves it to find better opportunities elsewhere but it's also becoming apparent that we're being subjected to Brain Drain as a society through death. Knowledge and understanding needs to be preserved before death takes away the opportunity for us to gain those from the people who currently hold them.

AI is accelerating the need to preserve understanding, not because of an increased risk of death but because it is encouraging abstraction, "You won't have a calculator with you everywhere you go" is something we were once told in school and some openly mock now that we do since we always have a smart phone with us, but I know a remarkable number of people who despite having that device in their hand everywhere they go still can't answer simple Maths problems and even if they are allowed to use AI LLMs to find the answer, if it actually manages to get the answer right which they're still surprisingly bad at, the person who copies and pastes the answer still can't explain the answer - that's a problem because those models consume data generated by humans, and if you lose the human understanding, those models succumb to decay.

If one of those models did manage to reach a level of super intelligence on a generalised basis, we would transition from democracy to idiocracy within a few generations at most, it wouldn't take a dystopian all out war to make that happen all it would take is the encouragement of dependency to gradually integrate AI into every part of our lives until we reached the point where there's no need for us to think about anything complex, we would regress as a society, and arguably we have been already for the past 40 years. Open a history book and read about the events of any European country for the last 1,000 years and you can plot a course in reverse through that book and follow the events that are unfurling globally right now. Time is running out, because it's ticking backwards now.