Oddbean new post about | logout
 Artificial Intelligence? First, we need to conquer natural stupidity!

The current western governments - regardless of their labeling - are all socialist/communist oriented. How can you recognize this:
- Freedom of speech is restricted; laws enabling censorship are passed
In collaboration with the government-controlled press, a "polarization schema" is built, in which politically dissenting individuals are branded as anti-democrats, fascists, or even Nazis in Germany to create social pressure that prevents them from joining the opposition. Additionally, the fear created leads to accepting drastic measures because "the alternative would be worse"
- Expenses explode but are not used for maintaining or improving infrastructure
The administration/bureaucracy is expanded
Schools (even kindergartens in Canada) are misused as indoctrination centers to spread genderism and socialist/communist ideology instead of general education
Taxes are increased
Energy costs are increased by political decisions
Immigrations are enabled/promoted to obtain new voters dependent on social benefits
Wars are supported because the enormous expenses and resulting mandatory tax increases bring more people into dependence on social services, thus suppressing resistance
Extreme minorities are portrayed as normal; even unhealthy sexual preferences like pedophilia are trivialized and normalized as "diverse" - sometimes governments overdo it, as shown by France's example with the Olympic opening

In America, the "Democrats" are neither liberal nor democratic (how else could they simply decide their candidate against the member vote?). In Canada, the "Liberals" are not liberal, as evidenced by their violent approach to Covid critics (who were actually right) around the world. In Europe, most established parties have agreed on a censorship law (dubiously called the Digital Service Act). All governments allow mass immigration, expand bureaucracy, and let energy costs explode due to poor decisions.
Trump, elected with a broad majority of Republicans as a candidate, is accused of being anti-democratic. The German AfD is ostracized as a "Nazi" party, even though between 10 and 20 million Germans support their government-critical politics.
As long as almost half the citizens in these countries don't recognize this, it's more important to tackle natural stupidity through enlightenment than to create artificial intelligence, because I wouldn't want AI and KI to be programmed by moral free communists.