Who and what you are, your personality, your style, your thoughts... That’s all about to change. For one thing you are already a product on “free to use” social media. You don’t really own things you think you own (We're looking at you, Steam!) Even your intellectual property is up for grabs now in ways you can’t see coming. Hollywood actors are selling the rights to their digital likenesses, and meanwhile, others are stealing such rights via technological loopholes. All media exists, according to Drew, to draw you towards the advertisements… And your deepfake could be used to do just that to others. Some of these fakes are good enough to fool yourself even.

Join Allan and Drew as they interview Sam Rad, a premier futurist and humanist, who freely admits that there is now an inherent tension between those two philosophies.

The conversations about the governance, ethics, and security of all this new media and technology are woefully behind the curve.

Many members of the TikTok generation has a 4-second attention span and require multiple simultaneous input streams at any given time to feel satisfied. Is this a deliberate attack on the Western human nervous system? Cyberattacks are certainly killing people already, why not go straight for their brains?

Are the peasants coming with pitchforks and torches to destroy Frankenstein’s newest monster? How about the striking dockworkers? The terrorists destroying 5G towers? Do peasants with pitchforks ever win? Ned (mistakenly called “Jason” by Allan) Ludd and the Luddites failed in a big way to stop technology from replacing their jobs in the late 1700s (mistakenly referred to as the having happened in the Victorian era by Allan)

This show is peppered with others such historical and cultural references such as the cultures and economies in Second Life, Picasso’s mass production of his own paintings, Rousseau’s evolving concepts of property, Mary Shelly and her Frankenstein’s monster, Hegel’s model of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis”, the Butlerian Jihad from the “Dune” series, and William Gibson’s maxim that, “The street finds its uses for things”.

We’re not even coping with all of this, and now we have the AI conversation thrust upon us as well… Your content is training data, and can be mimicked with uncanny accuracy as well.

Check out Sam’s book, “Radical Next” and her docuseries “Illicit Economies of the Shadowverse” to learn more about the positives and negatives of all of these trends in humanity.

Good luck out there. Stay safe. Who you are and what you own is irretrievably altered at this point. Cybersecurity is really just “security” now. But hopefully all this mess will create the next cultural and creative Renaissance.

Y'all be safe now...

Van Til Group #8 — The Christian Philosophy of Knowledge