Twitteretter

Last night I rewatched ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, the great Stanley Kubrick movie. Have you seen it? If you have not, you definitely should. It is a movie from a time when movies were different and did not all follow the same rhythm and formula. That can make it a bit hard going, but it is incredibly beautiful and interesting. It plays with many concepts which would warrant their own Twitteretters. Alien gifted human intelligence, rogue AI, space and hyperspace travelling. The last 15 minutes are mind bending, light speed travelling, time travelling, uncertainty principle… What I also find very interesting is seeing the technologies they expected to have by 2001, and the ones they completely missed. The most noticeable of these are internet and mobile devices. Humanity can colonize the moon and travel to Jupiter with a conscious AI on board, but video calling happens from an over teched phone booth paid for with a phone card. I wonder what future technologies will completely blindside us...

It is fair to say that experts have had a hard XXI century. Vilified for their failures during the 2008 recession, attacked by populist politicians peddling magic potions to remedy society’s ills and ignored by the general public. Being an expert is tough. If your advice fails to predict a crisis, this is obvious to everyone. If it succeeds, the opposite is not true, nobody sees the alternative World that would have resulted from the lack of expert warning. In most cases, experts work quietly, serving society or their masters, getting it right, which is the norm. Errors stand out as they are infrequent and therefore weigh more in the public consciousness. Nowadays, to add to confusion, pundits get given the same podium and asked the same questions even though they have no expertise or qualification to answer them. The public often confuses both. We expect experts to be perfect, unfailing, which is unreasonable, whilst we forgive pundits and populist politicians, as a society, everythin...