The thing about evil that most people don't appreciate is how INTENSELY evil things can get, and the bottomless depths of pain they will explore. I'm talking about computer programmers mostly. I feel about computer programmers the way Billy Graham felt about Satan or L. Ron Hubbard felt about psychiatrists and maybe Xenu. Only worse, because computer programmers really exist in this world.
Also, they are far more evil. Especially Windows 10 programmers, the world's true devils. I hate them more than Hitler. Windows 10 is slower and less usable than Windows XP, but the adware and spyware are more effective.
Mankind's most permanent problem is what I call Interface Friction. Annoyance will trump sadism over time. People trying to kill each other hate each other less than people being forced to get along. In the following articles many bad examples will be examined.
Human knowledge is maintained by gatekeepers, who tend to turn evil to some extent. The cost of college has doubled in thirty years. The only way to get some medical or legal answers is to follow expensive rituals made worse by corruption.
Could there be easier ways to get knowledge?
The failure of education
Someone has to say it: teachers suck. They're not reading this anyway.
They have failed. They know how to keep order, but haven't invented a new way to transmit knowledge since Euclid. Not one. Nothing has improved since "The Psychopathic School - The Failure of Modern Public Education" (John Taylor Gatto) decades ago.
Scientific illiteracy doesn't seem to be improving. Math class has always been horrible. The only solutions that have been implemented are tax increases, regulations, bureaucracy.
Knowledge remains embedded in arcane skills, traditions, and unwritten experience. It takes centuries of facts arranged in the right order to measure the distance to the nearest quasar.
If dumb computers can instantly solve complex equations, why can't humans understand them? It should be easier to understand math than to do it. This is a forbidden question that infuriates some educators whom are asked it.
The solution might be to start open source projects to explain complex ideas in the simplest ways possible (or simpler). The most concise natural language explanations for each reading level with examples. Anyone could come as close to understanding any concept as their intelligence allowed.
This could include language courses, social skills, art criticism, plot summaries. A meaningful review of Finnegans Wake could be greater than the book itself.
The problem of software (the Malist interpretation)
I can't say this enough, so I will say it another billion times. Computer programs are so hard to use they must be described as intentionally evil.
Users must navigate mystery mazes to perform the simplest tasks. Tyranny is 'Would you like to learn more?' where all the choices are meaningless.
Software has traditionally been made deliberately hard to learn to discourage switching, and make the user more likely to buy upgrades.
Software is also unreliable. Microsoft Word claims the grammar check is complete without checking all the text. Open Source has traditionally cared least of all about usability.
The single untried solution is a single list of all program functions, but the trend is toward increasingly hidden sub-menus and obscure functions that look like apps.
All complex programs should be broken into smaller ones.
The Net
Message boards, comment forms, and blog feedback sections have existed long enough to expose all their flaws. Why should a site control its own comments? The Net could have been an open archive anyone could add to (but not delete) or filter, instead of creator-controlled sites and services.
Someday, someone might have the courage to invent an Antisocial Network, designed to accumulate gossip about everything and everyone, regardless of whether they want to be tracked. This remains unimaginable, another forbidden thought.
Mind technology
Human lives are messy. By 2030 a few individuals will try to create digital mind extensions. Every piece of data in their lives will be tagged and sorted according to importance. Other software will look for connections. Some premature work is being attempted by Google, Kurzweil, Facebook, Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley), and others.
Someday, the extensions may become more important than the brains that created them.
The next step will be to make the Net intelligent: self-improving databases, proactive search engines, life management programs to pay bills and trade stocks. The successor to Wikipedia needs to track individual facts like data atoms. Eventually, the Net might become aware.
The first step, described in the novel "Infinite Thunder", could be:
BOX technology
Total life management software: a permanent interface to keep track of all user activities, interests, and goals. It always knows where the user is and why.
This software would track its user's mental state and alertness, and adjust activities and schedule changes. From time to time they would be prompted to answer personal questions (like opinions about others), and to explain new data.
It would rationalize user interests while harnessing human pattern recognition and judgement skills. The user's brain would become an index, performing high-level tasks the software can't handle.
Such an overarching technology would take a significant fraction of the world economy to develop. It could change society, turning people into improved versions of themselves.
Fams (Forced Affinity Matrix)
In the future, most people may become members of multiple closely linked groups, fulfilling many social and professional needs.
Members will be encouraged to specialize and develop useful skills, and form partnerships with compatible and complementary members and groups.
Read Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
The book that took a quarter century to plan and write.
With more original scientific, sociological, and technical ideas than any science fiction novel ever published.
Original source of the Anonymous meme.
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