We live in a world that is expecting profound changes. Our past transformations, such as the 1917 revolution, were initiated by social protests - people brought about changes in the social order because the old system underestimated them. They sought a happier future. Perestroika also aimed at controlling the future, but already from above. Moreover, at the top, almost the same people remained, which is why it was perestroika, not revolution.
Control of the future is no less important than control of the present, where the state has achieved the greatest success, and control of the past, which is dealt with by education, literature, and art, which bring us the necessary picture of an “artificial” reality, when we are no longer able to verify whether all this really happened.
Comrade Stalin understood this well, all the time engaged in repressive control over society, which untied his hands, since alternative interpretations were not allowed. Putin, although in a milder form, is now busy with the same thing - building and improving his repressive system, which will allow him to sit out until the end. He is building the same model: he started with "enemies of the people" in the form of "foreign agents", and now he is generally starting to punish for the wrong search on the Internet. That is, he is practically introducing Internet police. New times require new control.
The revolution that is happening now with artificial intelligence will lead to the general disuse of people. They will cease to be the main intellectual force, artificial intelligence will take away their jobs: from journalists to doctors. Fear of the future is not a very good sign.
Russian writer Alexey Krol writes on his Facebook page , quoting Mo Gavdat: “Unlike previous technological revolutions, which mainly concerned manual labor, the new wave of automation, he says, will hit educated professionals and middle-class people who form the backbone of the modern economy. The Egyptian-born techie, who became a millionaire by the age of 29, believes that the large-scale displacement of workers will lead to dangerous levels of economic inequality. Without proper regulation, AI will increase the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of technology owners, and millions of people will find themselves deprived of a place in the new economy.”
Mo Gawdat also allegedly seriously disparages future people and the opportunity to work : “We will never be forced to wake up every morning and dedicate 20 hours a day to work. We are not created for this. We have defined our purpose as work. This is a capitalist lie . ”
It's strange, but we've dreamed of not going to work all our lives, and now we're afraid of the onset of this period. It will be very difficult for society and the state to control the words and behavior of unemployed people. Propaganda will have to reach unprecedented heights to ensure the absence of social upheavals resulting from people sitting idle at home. By the way, the police will too. A person who is not burdened by social conventions and prohibitions is always dangerous to others. He falls out of the imposed mass behavior.
Krol also emphasizes an important point: “The main question arises: what professions will remain? The answer is known - creative ones. Because AI is not capable of creating anything. It is an efficient compiler that does not cope well with uncertainty. Therefore, when we read the news that the new model has surpassed everyone in mathematics, we do not see normal benchmarks for fiction texts. And as a person deeply immersed in this, I understand: normal publishers are not worried at all. Since the advent of GPT - it will be three years in October - there has been no step forward in the creative sphere. In creating content - video, for example - AI is already doing special effects, some fragments. Operators are becoming unnecessary. But from the point of view of dramaturgy - nothing has changed. There are no more talented scripts, books.”
Time is flying too fast now. For this reason, new wars and new earthquakes are coming, which will change both life and society. And we are always poorly prepared for new changes. The USSR was seriously lagging behind, trying to preserve the old methods of governance. It was both repression and literature-art-cinema, which in a strange way united both the interests of the creators and the interests of the state. People wanted happiness and fun, which cinema gave them as a substitute for life.
Stalin loved cinema, probably seeing it as the main propagandist, since cinema combines the necessary information and entertainment. There is an example when he asked to write down the lyrics of a song from the screen. Today, the same pair of "information + entertainment" is created by social networks, controlled as if by algorithms, but they are configured by people who increase the emotionality of such streams.
Previously, they fought against the wrong ideas with various options for repressive policies. There is a letter from Lenin to Dzerzhinsky , dated May 19, 1922. There are the following words: “They are all clear counter-revolutionaries, accomplices of the Entente, an organization of its servants and spies and corrupters of student youth. It is necessary to set the matter in such a way that these “military spies” are caught - and caught constantly and systematically and sent abroad. I ask you to show this secretly, without multiplying it, to the members of the Politburo, with a return to you and me, and to inform me of their responses and your conclusion.” So, Stalin really went further along the Leninist path.
At the same time, already in the post-Stalin era, even Lavrenty Beria, when he was the head of the country for three months, came up with a plan of reforms, that is, plans for restructuring, which reduced the level of struggle. Beria tried to implement all this in the three months between Stalin's death and his own arrest. The unrealized restructuring contained the following theses:
- “It is advisable to review personnel policy and nominate local cadres, not Russian employees, to leading party and departmental bodies. In addition, it is necessary to review the language issue. Administrative work in the republics should be conducted in local languages and, perhaps, even switch to them in educational institutions. It was recommended that party staff who do not speak local languages be returned to the RSFSR. Beria also insisted on a ban on the appointment of second secretaries of republican communist parties from representatives of non-titular nationalities. The first swallow was Ukraine. Beria’s old associate Pavlo Meshyk was appointed head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and personally demonstrated a “new course” in Kyiv by starting to hold meetings in Ukrainian. More to come: Beria dismissed the leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Leonid Melnikov, replacing him with Oleksiy Kirichenko.”
- "The symbol of the end of the Cold War was the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the GDR and the subsequent unification of Germany. However, it could have happened almost four decades earlier. Beria seriously considered cutting off economic aid to the GDR and starting negotiations with Western countries on the unification of the two Germanys. Provided that its neutral status was guaranteed and substantial monetary compensation for the needs of the national economy."
- "However, it is worth noting that the idea of uniting the two Germanys into a single neutral state originally belonged to Stalin himself. A year before his death, the Secretary General put forward a corresponding initiative, which was called the "Stalin note". So in this case, Beria really showed himself more as the heir to the late head of state. With the only difference being that Stalin generally encouraged the forced construction of socialism, while Beria was an opponent of such a pace."
The new future is especially important for the media, since it is believed that artificial intelligence will replace those who work. But this will not affect the creative professions, which still lag behind people. They are poorly amenable to algorithmization. And journalism is also a creative profession, since it creates something that did not exist before. Of course, this is not a writing profession, where everything must always be new, but it is still creative.
The future always seems better, otherwise we wouldn't strive for it. True, it may turn out not to be so later, but it will be too late. Now we are in a difficult situation, because there is a war, but a positive future is always on the horizon, but we move towards it anyway.