Low Background Information
2024/03/21
Say you want to build a Geiger counter, or some similar, sensitive scientific instrument. Maybe, it's for a laboratory or a space probe, something where you want close to zero interference from other particles or radiation. Ideally for such uses you would need to use low background steel. Steel is produced using oxygen and our oxygen since WW2 has been contaminated with higher than normal levels of background radiation thanks to years of nuclear weapons testing.
It’s remarkable to think that everything we interact with, the air we breathe, the food we eat, the metals we touch, even our skin and bones, are all impregnated with radiation from nuclear explosions detonated decades before most of us were even born. Divers delve to the bottom of the sea, scavenging through the carcasses of ancient warships for pre-atomic steel. Steel unsullied by the years of nuclear experimentation we've subjected our planet to. Something no one gave any thought to beforehand suddenly became a massive concern. 100% of materials produced before the tests had normal levels of radiation and then very quickly, none of them did.
We’re living through a similar historical pivot point. Instead nukes, it’s large language models. "AI". Even if these models had not proliferated throughout every aspect of society and culture, their very existence throws into question anything you read, see or hear online and probably even things offline too. All "content" is potentially contaminated and things will doubtless get worse as time and availability of these tools goes on and the feedback loops get tighter.
This isn’t necessarily an unmixed curse or blessing. We still have a treasure trove of pre-LLM content, information wreckage or sunken warships, if you will, artifacts of what came before this strange time in which we live. Bizarrely Homer's Iliad and Homer Simpson both have something completely unique that nothing written right now can infallibly claim. They were human generated. Just like pre-nuclear steel, they could be no other. We have to be intrepid hunters, trawling for uncontaminated materials wherever they can be found. Maybe one day we’ll be able to reverse engineer this contamination to work out what was actually real, but for now we have to be even more discerning, maybe even outright discriminatory about what we read, or watch, or listen to. Maybe even giving ourselves a "knowledge cut off" of sorts so that our own instruments, the ones we rely on day to day to make decisions about what the Greeks would call the Good, the True and the Beautiful, are only using "low background information".
Happy hunting!
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