From Crises of the Republic, Hannah Arendt, 1972 Harcourt Brace & Company, no longer in business as such and thus reprinted without permission:
p.178: “...In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form…
From Crises of the Republic, Hannah Arendt, 1972 Harcourt Brace & Company, no longer in business as such and thus reprinted without permission:
p.178: “...In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant…”
p.180 “:...Kohout added that what the world today stands in greatest need of may well be ‘a new example’ if ‘the next thousand years are not to become an era of supercivilized monkeys’ – or even worse, of ‘man turned into a chicken or a rat,’ ruled over by an ‘elite’ that derives its power ‘from the wise counsels of… intellectual aides’ who actually believe that men in think tanks are thinkers and that computers can think: ‘the counsels may turn out to be incredibly insidious and, instead of pursuing human objectives, may pursue completely abstract problems that had been transformed in an unforeseen manner in the artificial brain.’”
p.182: “ … And just when centralization, under the impact of bigness, turned out to be counterproductive in its own terms, this country, founded, according to the federal principle, on the division of powers and powerful so long as this division was respected, threw itself headlong, to the unanimous applause of all ‘progressive’ forces, into the new, for America, experiment of centralized administration – the federal government overpowering state powers and executive power eroding congressional powers. It is as though this most successful European colony wished to share the fate of the mother countries in their decline, repeating in great haste the very errors the framers of the Constitution had set out to correct and to eliminate.”
As an aside here - Epoch TV televised today's hearing on Artificial Intelligence. Among other suggestions were a new Tech Bureaucracy to monitor AI matters. That was followed with a recommendation it should be a part of a World Wide Tech/AI oversight operation. Both the open source and industry representatives noted the need for Government rules (responsibility - someone to blame?). The group lauded themselves on their mutual agreement to work together on the issues. What could possibly go wrong?
And of course we could trust whatever we were being spoon fed by the government and the news from those formally known as journalists. The evolution of AI is indeed a game changer. As if it wasn't hard enough already to determine what was true or false. Now, we can't even believe our eyes and ears. Might be time to unplug. Read books with real paper. Write letters and mail in an envelope. But are we already too far down the road of convenience? Maybe the old Amish have been right all along...
From Crises of the Republic, Hannah Arendt, 1972 Harcourt Brace & Company, no longer in business as such and thus reprinted without permission:
p.178: “...In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant…”
p.180 “:...Kohout added that what the world today stands in greatest need of may well be ‘a new example’ if ‘the next thousand years are not to become an era of supercivilized monkeys’ – or even worse, of ‘man turned into a chicken or a rat,’ ruled over by an ‘elite’ that derives its power ‘from the wise counsels of… intellectual aides’ who actually believe that men in think tanks are thinkers and that computers can think: ‘the counsels may turn out to be incredibly insidious and, instead of pursuing human objectives, may pursue completely abstract problems that had been transformed in an unforeseen manner in the artificial brain.’”
p.182: “ … And just when centralization, under the impact of bigness, turned out to be counterproductive in its own terms, this country, founded, according to the federal principle, on the division of powers and powerful so long as this division was respected, threw itself headlong, to the unanimous applause of all ‘progressive’ forces, into the new, for America, experiment of centralized administration – the federal government overpowering state powers and executive power eroding congressional powers. It is as though this most successful European colony wished to share the fate of the mother countries in their decline, repeating in great haste the very errors the framers of the Constitution had set out to correct and to eliminate.”
As an aside here - Epoch TV televised today's hearing on Artificial Intelligence. Among other suggestions were a new Tech Bureaucracy to monitor AI matters. That was followed with a recommendation it should be a part of a World Wide Tech/AI oversight operation. Both the open source and industry representatives noted the need for Government rules (responsibility - someone to blame?). The group lauded themselves on their mutual agreement to work together on the issues. What could possibly go wrong?
And of course we could trust whatever we were being spoon fed by the government and the news from those formally known as journalists. The evolution of AI is indeed a game changer. As if it wasn't hard enough already to determine what was true or false. Now, we can't even believe our eyes and ears. Might be time to unplug. Read books with real paper. Write letters and mail in an envelope. But are we already too far down the road of convenience? Maybe the old Amish have been right all along...