Can YOU see it?
This is why you shouldn't trust generative AI, in one photo.
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In 1983, an 80-year-old Navy admiral held up a piece of wire and proved that almost every engineer in the room had been lying to their bosses about the speed of their own computers.
Grace Hopper cut the wire to 11.8 inches โ the maximum distance light can travel in one nanosecond. Anyone who quoted a chip speed in nanoseconds without knowing that number didn't actually understand what they were selling.
The wire wasn't a teaching prop. It was a public test. Generals and executives had been nodding along to "nanosecond" for years without being able to picture one โ she made the invisible unit something you could hold, and something you could be caught not understanding in front of a room.
42 years later, computers run in picoseconds, a distance a thousand times shorter than what she was cutting, and nobody hands out the proof on live TV anymore.
Forget Plato's Cave
The learned helplessness experiment bothers me more.
In 1967, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier ran experiments where dogs were exposed to shocks they could not control. Nothing they did stopped what was happening.
Later, the dogs were put into a situation where they actually could escape. They just had to cross a small barrier. They didn't.
They had already learned that trying was pointless. The door was basically open and they still stayed there. Some pretty ugly implications for humans.
Keep someone in a system long enough where working harder changes nothing. Complaining changes nothing and following the rules changes nothing. Trying again changes nothing.
Eventually they might stop trying. Then one day an opportunity appears and everyone looking from the outside says, โWhy don't they just do something?โ
They already did.
A hundred times.
People don't rebel when conditions get bad. Not always.
People will shut down and withdraw. They distract themselves and accept shit they once would have fought against. They have learned that fighting changes nothing.
Who has to convince people that the cage is good? You don't.
You need to convince them the door doesn't open.
Eventually you can unlock it and they will never even check.
Back in 2003, a German film crew filming in the Gobi Desert captured an incredibly moving moment: after a tough two-day birth, a mother camel rejected her newborn. A nomadic family then performed the ancient Hoos singing ritual passed down for generations. Once the song ended, the camel shed tears and finally accepted her baby. This powerful scene became one of the most memorable parts of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Story of the Weeping Camel.