The Theory That Explains Why Everyone Went Crazy
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2024
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Does it feel to you like society has gone crazy? Well, you're not alone. There's a general view that all around the world, in the realms of politics, culture, business, and so forth, a lot of people are losing their minds. So if this is true, what's the reason for it? On this episode we speak with Dan Davies, the author of the new book The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - And How The World Lost Its Mind. Dan talks about the field of study known as cybernetics, and the inevitable outcomes of systems that grow more and more complex. This complexity -- which describes many things in the modern world, and leads to what Dan calls "accountability sinks," or entities that basically exist just to be blamed for things that have gone wrong. Dan walks us through how these emerged in the modern world, where things are headed, and how the trend could theoretically be reversed.
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| 1:25.0 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Allowice. |
| 1:28.0 | Tracy, you know, there's a lot of like concerns about AI, |
| 1:32.6 | AI, obviously these days. |
| 1:34.4 | And anyone who's like reasonably intelligent |
| 1:37.3 | can like list tons, like maybe like it's gonna go rogue |
| 1:40.3 | and be smarter than us or maybe whatever but I still think like what or maybe |
| 1:44.7 | there's just going to be this like flood of disinformation and deep fakes or maybe |
| 1:49.6 | it's going to put all journalists out of business which is certainly plausible. |
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