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With AI, fixating on apocalyptic scenarios ignores real-world problems involving the actually already existing AI. We have proven methods to address disruptive technology, but for anyone who opposes them, apocalyptic fantasies can be a useful distraction. My latest, in @liberalcurrents.com:

Joseph Tshibanga wrote that digital technology was more than just a means of distraction and could serve as a lever for leadership, influence, and transformation. He called for using phones to inspire, share visions, and have a positive impact on society. #Numérique #Leadership #Inspiration (translated)

The author said Meta had permanently removed their Facebook and Instagram accounts after what they described as mass-reporting campaigns by Israeli bots. They also claimed Israeli soldiers continued posting war crimes on the platforms and said the removal would leave them with fewer distractions and more time to pursue those they called criminals. #Meta #SocialMedia #WarCrimes #IL

A survey by the Vias Institute reveals that 10% of cyclists and 20% of electric scooter users check their messages while riding, highlighting a mistaken perception of safety despite acknowledging the dangers associated with this practice. #SécuritéRoutière #Cyclisme #Distraction_Peril (translated)

François Cherix deemed it absurd to invoke a lack of resources to justify the destruction of those that already existed. He lamented that young people confuse riots with entertainment and argued that the idealization of political radicalism had erased the notion of responsibility. #politique #responsabilité #radicalité (translated)

🔴 Frédéric Vasseur a déclaré au micro de la BBC Sport que la « recherche d’emploi » de Christian Horner était une distraction pour Ferrari 🤔 💬 « Nous ne travaillons pas dans une sérénité parfaite. Pour moi déjà, mais aussi pour toute l'équipe. Que 50 % des questions des médias portent sur ce sujet, c'est une situation un peu frustrante. Nous nous battons pour la deuxième place du championnat et, au final, on ne parle que de cette situation. Mais c'est comme ça, je n'y peux rien. Monsieur Horner cherche du travail ? Tout le monde le sait. Que puis-je y faire ? Je vais simplement faire de mon mieux pour motiver l'équipe, la pousser à se concentrer sur ce qui est le mieux aujourd'hui. » Le média britannique a par la suite demandé au team principal de la Scuderia s'il envisageait de travailler avec Christian Horner, ce à quoi il a répondu : 💬 « Pour ça, il faudrait poser la question à mon assistante. » Une réponse qui fait référence au contexte du départ du Britannique de chez Red Bull, où il avait été accusé de harcèlement sexuel et de comportement dominateur envers une employée. (🗞️ @BBCSport / #F1 / #BahrainGP) #F1 #Ferrari #ChristianHorner

🚨🚨🚨🚨 FABRIZIO ROMANO DÉVOILE LE VRAI MESSAGE DE DECO SUR JULIÁN ÁLVAREZ : CE N’EST PROBABLEMENT PAS FINI 🥶 🗣️ @FabrizioRomano : « Je voulais aussi ajouter quelque chose concernant les joueurs et la situation de Julián Álvarez. Deco, le directeur du FC Barcelone, s’est exprimé au Portugal ces derniers jours. Il a voulu clarifier la situation de Julián Álvarez, et je pense que c’était absolument important qu’il le fasse. Il avait déjà expliqué le processus dans une interview il y a une dizaine de jours en Espagne : l’offre, la stratégie du Barça, le refus de l’Atlético… Deco avait tout expliqué. Mais dans cette nouvelle interview, Deco a déclaré que l’histoire de Julián Álvarez appartient au passé. Le message est fort, parce qu’il veut évidemment dire que Barcelone est absolument satisfait de l’effectif actuel. Et c’est une réalité. Le Barça considère Gabriel Jesus comme une excellente recrue, en termes de qualités et de compétences. Le club estime également que Raphinha en numéro 9 réalise un début de saison incroyable et est convaincu que cela peut durer toute la saison. Barcelone est donc très satisfait de son effectif et de la stratégie mise en place. Quand Deco dit que Julián Álvarez appartient au passé, cela signifie en quelque sorte : on a passé tout l’été, mai, juin, juillet, août, à parler de Julián Álvarez. Maintenant, stop. Concentrons-nous sur cette saison, sur ces joueurs et sur cet effectif. Barcelone estime avoir construit une équipe de très, très haut niveau et ne veut plus de distraction autour de cette histoire. C’est pour cela que Deco dit que c’est du passé. Cela ne signifie pas que Barcelone a complètement oublié Julián Álvarez ou qu’il a totalement rayé son nom de ses plans. Ce n’est pas le cas. Deco dit simplement : concentrons-nous sur la saison, pour le Barça, pour l’Atlético et pour Julián. C’est d’ailleurs le message que Koke avait déjà donné il y a quelques semaines : laissez Julián jouer au football, arrêtez avec cette histoire. C’est donc le message envoyé par Deco. Le Barça est très satisfait de son effectif actuel et veut désormais se concentrer sur cette saison, avec Raphinha en numéro 9 et Gabriel Jesus. C’est ainsi que Barcelone clôt cette histoire pour 2026. Ce qui se passera dans un futur proche, en 2027, on le verra. Mais pour l’instant, le message de Deco est clair : tout le monde doit se concentrer sur cet effectif et sur cette saison. » https://t.co/wlM7tW7hyX #FCBarcelona #JuliánÁlvarez #Deco

Government must back Sinn Féin’s proposal to scrap Carbon Tax from home heating oil. Workers, families and businesses are struggling. It’s time to end the distraction and guff. It’s time to put workers and families first and get costs down. https://t.co/EehRjyKfIc #CarbonTax #WorkersFirst #FamiliesFirst #IE

Den stigende dumpeprocent i læsning blandt danske folkeskoleelever, som nu har nået rekordhøje niveauer med 11,4% i afgangsprøven, vækker alvorlig bekymring hos skolelederformanden Dorte Andreas, der peger på digitale distractioner som en medvirkende årsag. #læsekompetencer #folkeskolen #uddannelse

It’s a distraction. Hungary is facing down an ungodly energy crisis. @magyarpeterMP is not sure he can get carve-outs from DC on continued Russian energy imports. The country is facing down shortages so he’s picking a fake fight with the Ukrainians. It won’t keep oil flowing. 🇭🇺 #Hungary #EnergyCrisis #Ukraine #HU #UA

Reading scores plummet as ‘digital distraction’ harms students https://t.co/3uE2V588QG "Crollo dei punteggi di lettura: la “distrazione digitale” danneggia gli studenti. Uno studio dimostra che l'ampia diffusione dell'IA e dei social media ha fatto arretrare il rendimento https://t.co/5UsawvKsA3 #DigitalDistraction #ReadingScores #StudentPerformance #IT

Reading scores plummet as ‘digital distraction’ harms students https://t.co/9pYElKGnFN via @ft #aiemergency is not just about safety/control and AGI... it's everywhere https://t.co/O4Bu5FJDUQ #DigitalDistraction #EducationCrisis #ReadingScores #Therearenospecificcountriesmentionedinthetweet.

On 27 September, Swiss citizens will vote on the ballot initiative “Safeguard Swiss neutrality”. Superficially, its promise can sound appealing: peace, sovereignty, and permanent armed neutrality. But most of that is a distraction… https://t.co/ygj8MQW2eX #SwissNeutrality #Vote2023 #PoliticalDebate #CH

Le communiqué de Kawhi Leonard, qui confirme son retour à Toronto : « L’intégrité et le respect pour ce sport sont au cœur de qui je suis. J’assume l’entière responsabilité des erreurs de jugement commises par des personnes de mon entourage proche et je regrette la distraction que cette situation a causée aux supporters et à ma famille. J’ai signé mon contrat avec les Clippers ainsi que les accords en question en toute bonne foi, pleinement déterminé à remplir mes obligations et sans avoir connaissance de la moindre intention de la part de qui que ce soit de contourner le salary cap. Depuis 15 ans, ma priorité a toujours été de tout donner à ma famille, au basket et à ceux avec qui je partage le parquet. Alors que je retourne à Toronto, je me concentre sur ce que je peux contrôler, sur la nécessité de tourner la page et d’aller de l’avant en faisant table rase du passé. » #KawhiLeonard #Toronto #Basketball

Why Weak Societies Choose Tyranny The pinnacle of tyranny would be a system that allows politicians, elites, and bureaucrats to control a population without force or coercion because the people love their servitude. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, an eerily relatable dystopian novel, with this idea at the forefront. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, there is no overt oppression. The state does not have to stamp on human faces with its jackboots or erect an inescapable surveillance state. Rather, the people of Brave New World happily chain themselves with meaningless pleasure and distractions. The authorities do not rule through terror and rage, the central elements of 1984, but instead give the people everything they ever wanted. A pharmaceutical called Soma becomes the opiate of the masses. Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, likens it to Christianity without tears. While religion requires years of moral training, Soma allows citizens to achieve peace simply by swallowing tablets. It is the perfect escape from reality, a holiday from the facts. Lenina, the female counterpart to the protagonist Bernard, cannot comprehend why he refuses Soma, preferring discomfort to something that can remove it. When Bernard states, “I’d rather be myself, myself and nasty, not somebody else, however jolly,” Lenina sees this as a sort of pathology and repeatedly encourages him to take the wonder drug. Bernard explains, “I want to know what passion is.” He understands that there is more to life than merely being content, craving genuine experience, including suffering and intensity, rather than being emotionally regulated by the World State. Lenina’s bewilderment stems from her conditioning to regard unhappiness as a technical problem, encapsulated in the society’s common saying that “a gram is better than a damn.” The people of Brave New World are not captives but satisfied customers. Children are produced by the scientific state, relieving people of the responsibility of parenthood. This grants them the ability to engage in promiscuity, where everyone belongs to everyone else, while filling their free time with cheap entertainment and endless sporting events—what would be referred to as slop today. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell saw totalitarianism through the lens of fear, while Huxley saw it through pleasure. There was no need to ban a book in Brave New Worldbecause there was no one who wanted to read one. An abundance of low-quality information rendered censorship unnecessary because no one could hear the truth through all the noise. Huxley threw shade at civil libertarians who passionately opposed tyranny because they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. Humanity in its rawest form is portrayed by John the Savage, an outsider free from the World State’s conditioning. Upon coming face-to-face with this spiritually neutered society, he completely rejects it: “I don’t want comfort, I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” Huxley’s dystopia is not imposed on an unwilling population but instead requested by a hollow one. Which leads us to the question: How do people become so weak that they get on their knees and beg for totalitarianism? Good times make bad times possible. Once a certain level of luxury and safety is achieved, people start to resemble the hobbits from the Shire. They are so far removed from evil that they forget it even exists and become defenseless in the face of it. Andrew Lobaczewski, who studied the psychology of totalitarianism from inside Poland’s communist takeover, wrote: “During good times, people progressively lose sight of the need for profound reflection. They lose the capacity to differentiate human nature, and emotion begins to dominate intellect. Once a critical mass starts operating on the pleasure principle, any excess mental effort seems like pointless labor.” Lobaczewski warned that it is not as simple as some people losing the ability to think rationally. It is worse, because those people then shame anyone capable of doing so. A clever, liberal, and merry individual is a good sport. A more far-sighted person predicting dire results becomes a wet blanket, a killjoy. The ability to have uncomfortable conversations without emotion taking over is, in Lobaczewski’s view, an indicator of whether a society’s future will be good or bad. It is easier to think about pleasant things. This leads people to eliminate any data or facts that cause them discomfort. That becomes a habit and eventually a custom accepted by society at large. Once the general populace accepts that inconvenient truths should be left unsaid, it becomes incapable of reaching correct conclusions. After all, how could you ever describe a picture that you refuse to look at? “Catastrophe waits in the wings of the communities that lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism,” Lobaczewski wrote. “It is on the other side of this weakening of thought that the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale until they give rise to bad times.” It is precisely man’s dreams of happiness that can lead to chaos and suffering. This hedonistic view of happiness contains the seeds of misery, feeding the eternal cycle whereby good times give birth to bad times. Friedrich Nietzsche viewed socialism as demanding comfort for the greatest number of people possible. To question whether it is good for the masses to live in comfort has become a form of heresy. This reveals the spiritual atrophy that so many suffer from. Considering only the weak believe comfort to be a virtue, it is what Carl Jung would describe as the infantile dream state of mass dependency: the desire to gently slip back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care. Except this lack of friction has consequences. The perfect state destroys the soil in which great intellect grows. Genius, struggle, passion, strength, and wisdom are required to build a safe and abundant society. Yet once a certain level of comfort is achieved, it can destroy the very virtues required to obtain it. Nietzsche observed that it is the warmest heart that aims to alleviate suffering and hardship but fails to realize that it thereby wills the destruction of its own foundation. Comfort breeds mediocrity, which is then called good. Small people want one thing above all: that no one hurt them. We have taken this pathology to such a degree that we now obsess over hurt feelings and call this virtue. Pleasure, in its proper place, is a byproduct of meaningful goals, not a goal in itself. Aristotle saw that pleasure and comfort distort perception and proper judgment. While they do not cause us to misjudge something like geometry or mathematics, they can destroy our ability to decide what is worth pursuing and, therefore, what to do. Consider The Odyssey. Homer depicts Odysseus’ men on the island of the Lotus-Eaters, where they taste the fruit and lose all desire to go home. Much like Huxley’s Brave New World, they are not imprisoned. Rather, they simply stop wanting anything more. Odysseus has to drag his men back to the ships while they weep to stay. This is what comfort can do to men. It empties them of purpose. We intuitively understand this but fail to apply it to our own lives. We must make the same choice as Odysseus when he refuses Calypso’s offer of endless comfort and immortality. He knows she is more beautiful than his wife Penelope waiting at home. He knows that he and Penelope will grow old and die, a fate he could avoid by staying with Calypso. No one who reads these stories wishes he had stayed. We want him to choose the hard way home because if he took the offer, he would stop being admirable. Yet staying is exactly what our modern society asks of us. We are told that the island is the good life. But what happens to the man who caves to this temptation? In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagines a risk-averse society taken to its logical endpoint. The elimination of all struggle produces a man so diminished that he fails to possess even self-contempt or higher aspiration. Safety and sameness become the highest goals, creating “no shepherd in one herd.” Anyone who seeks to be anything more than normal becomes an aberration to be dealt with. Or, as Nietzsche puts it, they have “made the wolf a dog in man himself, man’s best domestic animal.”

The Pinnacle of Tyranny The pinnacle of tyranny would allow politicians, elites, and bureaucrats to control a population without force or coercion—because the people love their servitude. Aldous Huxley’s *Brave New World* explores this idea through an eerily relatable dystopian society. Unlike Orwell’s *1984*, Huxley’s world contains no obvious oppression. The state does not need to “stamp on a human face—forever.” Instead, citizens willingly chain themselves to pleasure and distraction. Authorities do not rule through terror, but by giving people everything they think they want. Soma, a government-approved drug, becomes the opiate of the masses. Mustafa Mond, the World Controller, compares it to Christianity without the suffering. By swallowing a few tablets, citizens can escape reality—a temporary holiday from the facts. Lenina cannot understand why Bernard refuses Soma, preferring discomfort to something that can remove it. When Bernard says, “I’d rather be myself, myself and nasty, not somebody else, however jolly,” Lenina views his desire for authenticity as a kind of illness. Bernard wants to experience passion and recognizes that life involves more than contentment. He craves genuine experience, including suffering and intensity, rather than emotional regulation by the World State. Lenina’s confusion results from her conditioning, which teaches her to view unhappiness as a technical problem. This belief is captured by the saying, “A gram is better than a dam.” The citizens of *Brave New World* are not captives but satisfied customers. Children are produced by the state, relieving people of the responsibilities of parenthood. Their free time is filled with promiscuity, cheap entertainment, and endless sporting events—what might be called “slop” today. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell saw totalitarianism through fear, while Huxley imagined a society where oppression would be unnecessary because people would willingly surrender themselves to pleasure. There would be no need to ban books, because no one would want to read them. An abundance of low-quality information would make censorship unnecessary; the truth would be drowned out by noise. Huxley warned that people’s “almost infinite appetite for distractions” could make tyranny not only possible, but welcome.

Vinicius Jr avant Virginia : • Pas de chirurgie esthétique • pas de pubs de paris sportifs • Pas de séances de fitness dans sa maison transformées en casting de groupies • Pas autant de distractions autour de lui • Une vie beaucoup plus cadrée, avec le football au centre On peut parler de hasard, mais depuis qu’il a rencontré cette femme, son niveau et sa concentration semblent avoir changé aussi. #ViniciusJr #Football #Concentration

🚨🚨 La FIFA a publié un communiqué affirmant qu'il existe un "UN EFFORT CONCERTÉ ET CONTINU POUR NUIRE LA FIFA ET SON PRÉSIDENT. 😤 𝗟𝗘 𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗤𝗨𝗘́ 👇 « Dans l'esprit des récentes déclarations de la CONMEBOL et de la CAF, ainsi que des discussions avec les associations membres et confédérations de la FIFA du monde entier, la FIFA ne soutiendra, ne facilitera ni ne tolérera aucun processus concernant l'élection du président de la FIFA qui serait incompatible avec les statuts de la FIFA, les procédures démocratiques et le cadre de gouvernance établi. Le président de la FIFA a été élu démocratiquement par les associations membres de la FIFA. Il est de plus en plus évident qu'il existe un effort concerté et continu de certains pour saper la FIFA et son président. Ceux qui ne bénéficient pas du soutien des associations membres de la FIFA ne devraient pas chercher à obtenir par des allégations, des insinuations ou de la désinformation ce qu'ils ne peuvent obtenir par les processus démocratiques établis de la FIFA. Les récents reportages ont inclus des affirmations non étayées et des allégations manifestement fausses concernant la FIFA et son président. Les spéculations et insinuations ne devraient pas être présentées comme des faits, et la répétition ne rend pas une allégation vraie. Le président de la FIFA a consacré plus de 30 ans de sa vie professionnelle au football européen et mondial, contribuant à des changements significatifs dans le jeu et, en particulier, à l'élargissement de l'accès, des ressources et des opportunités dans le football mondial. Le changement défie inévitablement les intérêts établis, mais le désaccord avec ce changement ne peut justifier les efforts pour saper le mandat démocratique du président de la FIFA ou l'institution qu'il a été élu pour diriger. La FIFA accueille favorablement un examen légitime. Mais l'examen n'est pas une licence pour déformer les faits, amplifier des allégations non étayées ou fabriquer des distractions destinées à saper les progrès. Lorsque les reportages sont inexacts ou trompeurs, la FIFA les contestera directement et vigoureusement. La responsabilité de la FIFA est envers ses 211 associations membres et envers le football dans le monde entier. Nous ne nous laisserons pas distraire ou détourner de notre objectif de renforcer l'organisation, de servir nos associations membres et de poursuivre le travail visant à rendre le football véritablement mondial. À travers le président de la FIFA et l'administration de la FIFA, notre attention reste fermement concentrée sur cette mission, et nous sommes plus déterminés que jamais à la réaliser. » via @JacobsBen #FIFA #Football #Gouvernance

Neymar, once on par with football legends like Messi and Ronaldo, has lost control over his career due to injuries, wild partying, and personal controversies, leading to a decline from his former stature as he navigates life beyond football with increasing distractions and a lack of structure. #Neymar #Voetbal #Blessures