The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Human Mind Was Lobotomised Long Before AI How Media, Politics, and Commerce Broke Our Cognitive Abilities Dr. Mathew Maavak As generative artificial intelligence permeates every facet of modern life, a pervasive cultural anxiety has taken root, driven by the fear that AI is dumbing down the human mind. As a regular user of these tools, I find them profoundly helpful and largely disagree with this popular assertion. In fact, I have been pondering this phenomenon for years, and when I finally articulated it, AI speedily generated the peer-reviewed data which confirmed my suspicions. It must be stated right from the onset that there is indeed one undeniable downside to mass digitisation and AI usage, and it lies in the realm of mnemonic retention. When we continuously outsource our memory and recall to machines, our internal cognitive archives inevitably atrophy. Today, there are adults who have difficulty remembering their own car licence plates, much less the telephone numbers...

 Although this essay discusses politics in France, the observations and analyses can be applied to most Western nations. Useful Shadows. Maybe creating the “Extreme Right”was a bad idea. Aurelien I don’t know what ideas Festival of Humanity would conjure up in the mind of the average Anglo-Saxon. Happy-clappy guitars, perhaps, peace and love? Desmond Tutu and Ursula von der Leyen? In fact, it’s all to do with a newspaper. L’Humanité was founded by the great French Socialist Jean Jaurès, and was the Party’s official newspaper until 1920, when after the Congress of Tours, the departing Communist faction took it with them. From then until reality dictated otherwise in 1994, it was the official newspaper of the PCF, and since then, it’s clung on as an all-purpose leftist publication. A tradition for almost a hundred years, is the annual Festival, largely based around music, taking advantage of the fact that popular French musicians have often had leftist sympathies. I haven’t been the...

  Are You Ready for the “Rogue AI” Psy-Op? Kit Knightly The AIs are breaking free, that’s the story. It started two weeks ago, when OpenAI reported one of their “agents” had escaped its testing area and got loose on the internet to launch an “unprecedented cyber attack” . This was clearly meant to be scarier than the public response indicated, because a few days later OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was on the Invest like the Best podcast , asking why it didn’t cause more panic: “I’ve been a little surprised that more people don’t feel it so viscerally” In one of the most hilariously obvious propaganda manoeuvres of the year, just the day after Altman said that, CNN headlined: The OpenAI lab leak was more extensive than we thought “That thing you weren’t scared of? Well it was even SCARIER than we said it was! Are you scared now?” We weren’t. But the lack of public panic didn’t stop another AI going rogue a few days later, Anthropic’s Claude model this time. And then OpenAI reporting two fu...