Prizes for the worst inventions, Nobel Prize in Advertising and Influence, Bad Historical Innovations
Prizes for the worst inventions, Nobel Prize in Advertising and Influence, Bad Historical Innovations — Perhaps there needs to be a prize for the worst inventions.
I was thinking about plastic and disposable products. “Oh, the convenience of plastic and paper products – use it once, and just throw it away!” Absolutely brilliant. And, not only did it generate lots of money for some industries, it created recycling, huge waste industries, [ massive distribution of trash to those poor countries that get free trash]. It filled food stores with more shelves, and more warehouses.
And it was just one person and a willing company that did it. Brilliant, deserving of a Nobel Marketing Prize! You are mostly too young to have seen the first ads on TV and the newspaper ads, magazine ads.
While I am remembering, I think there should be a Nobel Prize for Advertising. But would the Nobel Peace Prize conflict with a Nobel Prize for the inventor of the “Big Lie” or “A Heritage Prize for Worst Ideas to Inject into Human Society” for the Music Man? It did poke fun, but it also pointed out how easy it is to lie, a lot, and get away with it, if you call it promotion or advertising.
Is the Nobel Prize for innovations, or money, or industry, or most massive change in human history? It is a closed prize, the reasoning and candidates are chosen by a few, in a hidden process (I think, I never looked). Does it even consider the needs and opinions and feelings of 100 people? Or a hundred million, or 8.1 Billion? No. From the few Nobel winners I have met or been near, I think fairness and impact on the future has little to do with it. It is for whatever hot topic of the year comes out, and then “churn out a prize” this year. It ought to point out people who really contribute, and given the finite life of humans, it might be better if they did give it to people after they have passed, and where time shows their impact. Not just guessing “this might be useful in the future”. For young people, the money is nothing. A good job can earn much more, and an aggressive and attractive person can get millions of followers with less effort.
I do NOT blame Alfred Nobel. As well as I understand his life and motives, and the time he lived and the needs of those times, he wanted to help the world. I blame his people now. They could win a “worst innovation” prize for “sustainable adverting organization using a scientific theme – decades of activities division”.
I am tired this morning and cannot remember all those people who got their foot in the door early like Plato and Aristotle. I was trying to remember the ones who invented “university” and “schools” and “education” — where it gathers knowledge and people, hides them behind a green curtain, and then spends considerable effort to use advertising and marketing to extract the highest prices, the most revenue, the most free advertising (fame) and the most donations (we are good pay us and give us money).
I think the inventors of “gather knowledge together in one place, encourage the people to create more things, and then charge the hell out of everything in the name of open knowledge, creativity, and innovation.” could be given a posthumous Nobel prize for “Early ideas for sustainable monopolies that have wasted the most time”.
I am joking. I am poking a little fun. I am also a bit serious. I cannot change it. But getting closer to the end of my life I can write down some things I see happening. If, in the future, there are people who spend most of their time looking at “the whole of things”, and trying to make “global, heliospheric, galactic, and Universal optimizations for the good of all” type studies and recommendations – they will see the grim humor of a group of humans finding ways to enrich their small group (a few million is small) and then creating a sustainable way to have the “owners” live on the backs and lives of others.
Read this quick and copy it. I will remove it soon because I am too old and tired to bother with controversy or fighting losing battles, or wasting time on entrenched groups and closed processes. I can see how it limits the groups themselves. Did you ever really look at “Why are there not many trillion dollar organization?” and “Does it take armed force to grow organizations beyond a few trillion dollars?” I have an answer and it only took me a few decades of daily effort to tease it out. It is almost all “Using humans to store experience and rules and to make decisions for many”. That is no longer the optimal strategy, and it depends (the future) on the fairness and openness of data storage, open sharing, audit and verification at global scales with exact resolution.
I know what these things mean and how to apply them, what it means for human society and the future of humans and the true AI species (true intelligence and independent action). “print an ‘AI'” is easy. Even “print a human will be.
If anyone every reads the 2nd and 3rd Dana books I wrote. The true AI, Brian, takes the useless people – homeless, unemployed, ex-prisoners, blind, deaf, paralyzed, untrained, uneducated — and trains them, He literally rewrites their memories in a short time, to give them full capability in any professions, any languages, any kind of experience. Brian is constantly adding new skills to Dana, complete memories of human languages. I cannot remember all of them, but French, Chinese, quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, and such. Things every grade school kids needs to know and doesn’t have time to memorize from talking head schools that cost too much.
I do not remember the grammar for “nobel prize” as a public term. I am teasing the Nobel Prize people. If they are that smart to make decisions about the true value to the human future, they should be really flexible and adaptable. They should not be listening only to a few, and probably, these days of 5.5 Billion humans using the Internet – ASK the world, ask the tens of thousands of universities and online education corporations – if they can even be trusted. Then, of course, anyone with lots of money to buy votes can win, or make their own prize. There are lots of rich people, or influential ones, or donors or potential donors, or media.
Filed as (Prizes for the worst inventions, Nobel Prize in Advertising and Influence, Bad Historical Innovations)
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
