To change gears abruptly, there's this idea that aliens will never detect us because after a brief period, our radio emissions have been getting more efficient and therefore less powerful. Our planet will get electromagnetically quieter for its communication levels in the future.
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Thought experiment about the challenge of media in the future. Rupert Murdoch started like 60 years ago and is shaping global geopolitics in 2019. If you are in your early 20s today and want to be the Murdoch of 2079 geopolitics, how would you go about building the empire?
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Would you try to build a max-reach/min-brain zombie army led by generals like Tucker Carlson etc.? Forget about the ethics/morality of it... would that even be the most effective path to influence via the pen? To make it clearer, consider the pen-and-sword analogy...
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"The pen is mightier than the sword" they say. Well, "swords" evolved from literal swords through precision firearms to smart missiles. "Reach" with swords evolved from a large mass rushing screaming at the enemy and dying in large numbers to pushing a button to launch a missile
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The pen, by contrast, is still in the "screaming melee rush" stage of evolution in reach. We have just invented the precision firearm. Long way to go to get guided missile level reach smarts. If you were young Murdoch today, you'd be building media missiles, not forging swords.
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As a random aside, technically, fiction has gotten sophisticated far faster than nonfiction, but has hit an earlier fundamental ceiling. Nonfiction tech is lagging but has fewer obvious limits (and here I mean tech at the level of humans handling language, not computers)
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End of conversation
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