Better than blogs, not academic, but not for anyone with an IQ under 80.
Ugly people are probably not evil, but I’ve met enough people to suspect ugliness and moral failure occasionally share a bathroom. Before the professional victims have a panic attack, relax. I am obviously joking. Mostly. I’m not talking about people who lost the genetic lottery and ended up looking like they were assembled like Mr Potato Head in a collaboration between Stevie Wonder, Helen Keller, and Andrea Bocelli. Most of us are fairly average-looking.
South Africans are preparing for another election season, which means the country is once again drowning in slogans, promises, outrage and manufactured certainty. Every party insists it has the answer, and every manifesto reads like a glossy brochure nobody will read about a future nobody fully believes in. Every politician suddenly rediscovers potholes, unemployment and corruption a few months before asking for votes.
The internet promised humanity infinite knowledge. Instead, it often feels like we accidentally built an industrial-scale landfill for attention, entertainment and distraction. Artificial intelligence has accelerated this problem dramatically, and for the worse. Every day now, millions of images, videos, essays, songs, presentations, advertisements and opinions are generated instantly by people who previously lacked either the ability, patience or imagination to create them. Social media feeds are filling with synthetic motivation, synthetic beauty, synthetic expertise and synthetic emotion
The next global order may emerge quietly, through negotiation, trade and technology rather than tanks rolling across borders. For decades, most of us have understood geopolitics through inherited twentieth-century frameworks: capitalism versus communism, democracy versus authoritarianism, Left versus Right, East versus West. The mainstream media still packages international affairs this way because conflict is easy to market and ideological storytelling is emotionally satisfying.
Artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, represents something far more important than just another technological convenience. We are watching the emergence of a system that can instantly compare arguments against logic, history, mathematics, probability, precedent and internal consistency at a scale no human being can match unaided.