AIs will be dumb because we are dumb

I had found a quote from a play called “Radio Golf” by August Wilson, but it was missing a word.

The quote is from Woke Imperialism by Chris Hedges (SubStack),

“You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got . A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know he’s a Negro. He thinks he’s a white man.”

You see where the word is missing? “Negros got .”

So I copied part of the quote,

“You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style.”

…and threw it into DuckDuckGo,

…which yielded the following results.

Search Results from DuckDuckGo

These results are, of course, complete garbage that have little to do with 80% of the quote. Notably, not a single one could point me in the direction of the play I was looking for.

Just for fun, I searched for only part of the quote, the provocative line “Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation.” This line is delivered sarcastically in the context of the play, of course, but since online society doesn’t accept sarcasm or irony as a legitimate form of expression, it will most likely also not find this text, either.

Nor did it find anything related to the literal interpretation of the text. Although there has to be an absolute wealth of racist garbage out there that chirpily expands on that topic sentence, none of it will be returned by a search engine.

A search on “radio golf august wilson” finally yielded some results that weren’t completely out in left field. If you get to the Wikipedia entry for it, you’ll learn that it’s not at-all obscure: it won several Tonys in 2007.

The content to which we have access is severely restricted already. There is no such thing as a free Internet. China restricts different things than we do, but it’s absolutely not the case that they censor and we do not.

I don’t think we have to worry about AIs getting too smart because we’re very busy making ourselves stupid. We can’t even use our incredible technology to find texts from award-winning plays because those plays use what we now consider to be forbidden language. The AIs are swimming in the same stupid seas—they will never be able to be better than what we feed them.