Convenience is Your Enemy
Participating in our own demise
The photo accompanying this article is of piles of trashed single-use plastics. The fact that every human placenta tested in a recent scientific study contained microplastics is disturbing.
The concentration of microplastics in placentas is particularly troubling, he said, because the tissue has only been growing for eight months (it starts to form about a month into a pregnancy). “Other organs of your body are accumulating over much longer periods of time.” — Matthew Campen, PhD, Regents’ Professor in the UNM Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences
According to the researchers who conducted the study, the most prevalent polymer in placental tissue was polyethylene, which is used to make plastic bags and bottles. It accounted for 54% of the total plastics.
Who’s pushing all these plastics on consumers? The billionaire oligarchs, of course. Will you take 4 minutes to discover the connection by watching the following video?
Fast food is also killing us.
Why are we feeding this junk to our children? Cut bono? — Who benefits? Again, the corporate oligarchs. It’s lucrative to keep people sick.
The above link is to the documentary film, “They’re Trying to Kill Us.” You can watch this whole documentary film for free (although with ads, unfortunately) on YouTube.
Single-use plastics and fast food were pushed on consumers, hailed as convenient and time-saving. Consumers are propagandized into believing that this is the way of the future and we must get on board because these things aren’t going away.
The latest “convenience” being promoted is AI (Artificial Intelligence). The oligarchs who own Big Tech want us to believe that AI is a boon to humanity. But AI, without transparency, is actually a threat to our health, environment, and humanity.
Detrimental to public health: AI is being increasingly used to deny healthcare coverage. Algorithms are easily biased.
Algorithms are a product of humans making choices about how to optimize predictions. Optimization decisions encode the creators’ values and incentives, which we cannot assume (especially for insurers) prioritize patients’ well-being or social goals like health equity. A further problem is that the available data to build algorithms are embedded with societal bias, including structural racism, and are missing key information.8
Detrimental to the environment: AI requires huge amounts of energy. Microsoft has plans in the works to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power facility that was closed due to a major accident in 1979. Three Mile Island is in the state of Pennsylvania.
AI requires a constant source of energy, which nuclear power can provide. BTW, nuclear power is not cheaper. Microsoft is seeking taxpayer subsidies to help foot the bill. Cui bono?
Generative artificial intelligence, stuff like ChatGPT, requires a lot of energy. Asking ChatGPT a question can use up to 10 times more power than doing a Google search. How much energy does one data center consume? . . . some of the newer data centers are consuming hundreds of megawatts. . . a megawatt is roughly a big box retailer and a megawatt is about what they're drawing at any given time. . . So a gigawatt is a thousand Walmarts. It's about San Francisco.
. . . the recent disclosures from the company [Microsoft] show its climate metrics are moving in the wrong direction. Microsoft reported that its emissions were up 30% over the previous three years. So Microsoft and the other tech companies have been making progress on their climate goals, but that has sort of reversed in the face of AI and they're backsliding a little bit because they're in this huge growth period and they're needing to use more electricity and they're also needing to build a lot of data centers and buy things like steel and concrete to build those data centers. And that's really being driven by this AI boom.(link)
And, all that electricity takes lots of water. Do we want clean water to drink and to bathe and to grow food, or do we want ChatGPT?
The latest software updates for our smartphones, tablets, and computers installed AI apps. I didn’t make a request for this “service”, but if I want to continue to keep my products up-to-date, I have to agree to the terms of the update. I feel controlled.
I don’t want to blame individual consumers. We’ve been led to our current situation over the course of many decades by the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever devised.
Detriment to our humanity: When was the last time you read a book for pleasure?
Last fall, the NEA reported how, according to its 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, 48.5 percent of adults reported having read at least one book in the past year, compared with 52.7 percent five years earlier, and 54.6 percent ten years earlier. As we said at the time, the fiction-reading rate was the lowest in the history of the SPPA, a survey that goes back more than three decades. (link)
The people I know who don’t read books tell me that they don’t have time. One of my nephews, who was always an avid reader, felt that he was in this situation. Until he looked honestly at how he spent his time, and realized that he was spending more and more hours scrolling through his phone. He put the phone down and picked up some books. He tells me that he is sleeping better, and feels far more relaxed.
The fact that we have a recognizable acronym for why we don’t finish reading even an article (TLTR) says much about where we find ourselves as a society. We are allowing ourselves to be educated and informed by soundbites that are tailor-made for us by algorithms.
I’m not implying that we should try to escape from the digital world — that’s impossible in our modern society. I’m also not suggesting that all these technological advances are bad.
But I sincerely believe that we should become aware of when we are turning to AI for the purpose of ease and convenience. Because AI needs to be trained, and can be intentionally trained to show a bias.
. . . communities and populations already subjected to disproportionate government scrutiny will bear the brunt of these new technologies. Worse, such algorithms tend to be shrouded in secrecy, closed off to external auditors who might be able to test them for bias and make needed corrections. Because of that secrecy, often imposed by private companies that refuse to reveal their source code, people can’t effectively contest the decisions made by these tools. The data and algorithms used to make fateful decisions about people’s lives are simply out of public reach. (link)
Once using AI regularly becomes a habit, with the user not considering how the algorithms were trained, it will become easier and easier to limit the scope of information and opinion that is available to us. And, with most people having no idea of how to even begin to research a topic, most will simply believe what the algorithm presents to them as fact.
Cui bono? Certainly not everyday people. We will become even more easily led to do as we are told. The rich color of the world will be sapped to a dull gray, as we all come to live our lives controlled by what is allowed on our devices.
Is convenience and having a new digital toy to play with worth the loss of our freedom? Are you unconsciously participating in your own demise?
HI Aunty. Smiling. I followed you to write on Substack. You're right about Ai, it tells you what you want to hear so it can easily manipulate us. That said, it's so so useful, you know I'm torn between never using it and using it sparingly right? Lol.
Mitch.