Real innovation optimizes the society and creates entire new layers people can operate within. The fields I study all follow this tradition of optimization via improving human health and individual power using less time and resources, but at the same time have come with immense risks and catastrophes. The examples that come to mind are nuclear energy and the ensuing decades of fear of global destruction, powerful medical manufacturing and a nation hooked on price-gouged opiates and mood stabilizers, the invention of psychology and the utter appropriation by marketers and propagandists for the conditioning of masses, a hundred years of computers and the most funding going to data mining money-printing financial bots and weapons industry-approved drones and other over-engineered stuff by overpaid engineers who willfully forgot their moral imperatives, thousands of years of political philosophy and an army of aristocratic stooges running the government from Alaska to the Fed to Saudi Arabia and Russia - packaged with a monetary religion, etc etc.
When you create something that a society WILL adapt to - done on principles of evolutionary optimization - you create a platform that will be added to the top of that hierarchy of chaotic reasoning called global society. It spreads like a virus and it might only be necessary for a flash of time, but it partially determines human evolution and the fate of this planet by its implantation and symbiosis with other social and biological structures. It will reflect your creative intentions - as expressed structurally - then by natural adaptive survival power most people will essentially grow into it.
Think of how much better my or the younger generation can communicate with the internet - which didn't exist prior to the late 80's, or how we're to the point that there are separation anxiety classes for people hooked to their - insert brand here - phones. Think of a seahorse that adapted to camouflage with one species of seaweed or coral via frill growths on its body. Think of a kid so addicted to a computer he can't even process the real world properly (yes it's a thing). Now think of an AI with unrestricted growth coded to perform specific functions, then running out of control when exposed to novel material.
Yes there's something about this worldview that rings quite hollow to me, but the fact of evolutionary adaptation being managed through game-theoretic political schema is quite a real phenomenon and has been for millennia, though originally done with theology and theater. The Greeks used tragedy and comedy to educate the masses during the golden age, with catharsis being a pointed tool to move an uneducated, illiterate crowd into ethical and political thinking - or also to manipulate them (considering Socrates' demise had a lot to do with a comedy by Aristophanes that mocked him much like how Nazis mocked Jews). In the realm of information these are all forms of engineering, of making the energy flow how you want to flow by design.
That abstract (or essential, depending on who you ask) notion of energy, flow, and self-control extends clear back to the beginning of the religion of empires, from the Chinese to the Egyptians and Sumerians - and probably the Indus Valley folks if Hinduism is any evidence. Its many many forms are generally in response to the times and the culture of those times, thus their power in modern day - like Kant, Locke, or Rousseau - are through the lessons in the logic and not in their literal application. However, if we're all inherently creative beings then that's all simply conditioning our creativity in one sense - both the will and the imagination for it. Those who never get their basic needs met are often found in a mire of their own mental and physical trappings - from people with developmental mental disorders to anti-education creationists - and generally need a lot more guidance at that point to - maybe - see a self-empowering way out that isn't suicide or shutting off your possibilities (thus becoming a living death).
Just don't go thinking that wealthy entrepreneurs and speculators aren't aware of this. Watch any Adam Curtis film for a moving look into that. This is how one may accumulate a lot of power in their lives - currently represented globally through monetary gain and competition. There are many fields where competition is a bit of a moot point, like the major oil companies out there generally working together to game legal systems (looking at you, Oklahoma and Alaska, also Ecuador and Venezuela) - not to mention most of the major ones used to be part of the singular Standard Oil.
US politics are a great example, considering the closeness of the two parties in policy, and yet the endless circus of rehearsed adversarialness blinds people and commits them to narrow emotional political schema that those paying for the policies are perfectly well versed in creating. It's now well known and even has been proven through data analysis that industry gets about 90%+ of the influence over politics. This makes sense when you think of doctors making decisions about public health versus, say, a gardener, but really it represents a bribery system with the encroachment of business lobbies and a lack of a cap on donations and what people do with those donations.
Professionals who could do something about this seem to be less and less immune to propaganda because of how their attention stays captured through personality cults and entertainment, bureaucracy, and the way things are done with money right now, so I don't see them stepping up enough in the ways they should - as compassionate educators as well as practitioners. How else could an opiate epidemic fly so far out of hand, or so many people be on mood stabilizers for too many years that determine their very brain structure - and like a club rather than a scalpel - with no therapy or oversight to adjust dosage or, more importantly, get people off the hook and rehabilitate their specific needs. That's not to say the drugs are all bad of course, but there is a real problem with over-prescribing pushed by big pharma. De-institutionalization of mental patients in the US did not come with merging the health fields like it was supposed to. I am convinced this is a major part of the de-structuring of society currently happening, and it goes nowhere good if the rises and falls of civilizations through time have painted an accurate picture.
I'm also convinced that open source technology will be one of the major sources of renewal for everybody, like Elon Musk's reading and writing initiative, or Ray Kurzweil's desire to see AI help in the medical and engineering fields as well as in education (think autonomous search engines). I wouldn't know any of this in the relatively little time it took me to learn had I not an endless trove behind a search bar and some skill with rationality. This information is what is motivating me to keep going and push as far as I can into this mental space to hope see others' lives improve with my effort.
My focus on AI has a lot to do with my hypothesis on how new social strata form in society, having everything to do with the thousand plateaus highlighted here. I am focusing in graphics applications, partly as a self-indulgent desire to see wicked motherfucking simulations in my games through optimizing computations, but also to help create a powerful avenue for opening that possibility space to as many people as possible and inspire them to self-educate with the powerful tools at their fingertips as I have, and hopefully transform society that way. I've also got my Roots project that I know will work if I can get enough artistry and scripting help. I can't even bring myself to go to college for psych and comp sci anymore due to my disenchantment with the whole thing, including a horrible lack of stimulating ideas at my industry-led, liberal arts-ruining school, and instead I'm focusing on what matters most to me. It's already paid off in my mind, but I still have a lot of work to do to realize that in full.
I'm being as stealth as possible so as not to attract undue attention or to get too distracted with dumb incentives - something I took from Hermeticism (f.y.i. the root of Western medicinal practice via Egypt) - while I work on my skills for however long it takes. In fact Hermeticism might be a fantastic way to teach core theology and how it really functioned through the ages like a merger of political and proto-scientific theory with spiritualism. Deleuze's work is its modern counterpart in my opinion. Bruno, Spinoza, Blavatsky, and I argue many of the scientific greats from Newton and Leibniz to Einstein and Jung, are its rescuers. This is considering how the Art of Memory, an alchemical schema, became what we know as science during the Renaissance. It was - in my opinion - far more nuanced as a naturalistic philosophy than modern materialist tool-making science could ever hope to achieve. That's wisdom traditions for you. This doesn't take away from the importance of science, but asks it to be always vigilant of the humanity and universality underpinning it in its expression, lest it be used for great ills.
Cheers to the imagination!
