The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'oil painting of a ufo over a picnic.'
I'm a strong proponent of technological advancement. On the topic of the day, I don't think AI training should be paused. I think it should be accelerated. Emerging technology stretches the limits of thinking and perception. It can even help us see colors in a new way, as with the lightest paint in the world and the world's blackest black.
Despite being surrounded by an increasing variety of amazing technologies, everything is becoming more bland and lifeless every year. From whole cities to the buildings in those cities to the apartments in those buildings to the cars parked outside, there's less variety in our world than ever before, with nearly all artifacts of modern existence converging on a painfully average aesthetic. An aesthetic carefully engineered to reduce costs for companies and to please well-to-do hipsters.
Perhaps this is the inevitable result of Jean Baudrillard's precession of simulacra. A meaningless world made from copies of copies long after the original and authentic has been lost. I'm not sure it's that simple, but sometimes it feels like it is.
When I was a kid, my school class attended something called Festival of Nations. The event brought many cultures together to share their traditions from booths at a convention center. I loved learning about the different people and their ways. Yet I also found the Festival of Nations disturbing, because the format totally tripped me out.
Here were peoples that by and large had lived in harmony with the natural world, on lands that had been providing for them for countless generations, until they'd been displaced by conquerors. Now they were occupying a convention center, each group in an identical booth, displaying their artifacts as if the environmental context of each artifact was unimportant. I remember seeing this and feeling like it wasn't so different from what I might've seen in a vast alien spaceship making an effort to preserve earthling culture after raiding the planet.
David Jacobs has been researching UFOs for 50 years, with a particular focus on abductees. He's convinced that extraterrestrials are colonizing Earth. Here's a quote from his website about it:
In my research (described in Walking Among Us) abductees have, for many years, indicated to me that aliens and hybrids plan a possible integration or colonization of human society. I have come to agree with them. I arrived at this extreme view cautiously after spending over fifty years studying the subject – the last forty of which I spent concentrating almost exclusively on abductions. ... I think that the problem of the 21st century will be the problem of the alien presence. This, above all, will define and drive human society and activity. I reported that abductees felt that the aliens will begin their integration program into the society within the next forty years. We now know that this has commenced. The only question that remains is when, exactly, the presaged Change will be announced–when our Anthropocene will suddenly and irrevocably end.
I sort of doubt that extraterrestrials are already among us, living on our planet and influencing events, though I use this idea as a theme in my science fiction. At the same time, I can't say for sure that there aren't any extraterrestrials on Earth. And I can't dismiss the mountain of evidence showing that there are things flying around and we don't know what they are.
Is the blanding of everything part of an extraterrestrial agenda? Are Ets trying to make our society easier for them to negotiate by making everything the same? Perhaps, but I fear this trend is all too human. Aggregate consumer preference data feeds into corporate choices which translate into a bland marketplace. There's an identifiable, globe-trotting class of people driving the trend, but it largely seems to have arisen organically.
It is fun to speculate on what an ET agenda might consist of. To look around at the world and ask why some entity might have influenced events to bring this world about. I'd love it if physical creatures stepped off of flying saucers one day and told us that they were behind the whole thing. That seems unlikely, but it would clear a few things up.
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