Ai aliens ~ Entering an Orwellian Social Imagination....

1984 has come and gone, right? Wrong, and yes... it came but it has stayed so it seems.

When the novel, Nineteen eighty-four, was written in 1949 by English author George Orwell, it was written as and understood as a dystopian futuristic scenario to be read for dark pleasure. It surely was not uplifting but it was enlightening but it should have been. 

The novel is set in Airstrip One, formerly Great Britain, a province of the superstate Oceania which is a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation. Oceania's residents are dictated by a political regime euphemistically named English Socialism (shortened to "Ingsoc" in Newspeak, the government's invented language). The superstate is under the control of the privileged, elite Inner Party. The Inner Party persecutes individualism and independent thinking known as "thoughtcrimes" and is enforced by the "Thought Police".

Yes, thought police (Ai aliens housed in quantum super computers) who use telescreens as Orwell termed them but today we could well imagine cell phones or laptops or tablets as such telescreens and arn't they?? The main theme of 1984 is the control of individuals and information in society by the state. Isn't that the agenda for today??

Interestingly, Orwell was not the first to imagine such a state using some kind of telescreen. Many say that Orwell read Zymatin and copied from his novel - We. I have read both and see many similarities. It's also possible that the idea of a television screen that transmits as well as receives might be present in this quote from Catch That Rabbit, a 1944 story by Isaac Asimov: "I'm going to install a visiplate right over my desk... Then I'm going to focus it at whatever part of the mine is being worked, and I'm going to watch." And, another earlier use can be found in a 1938 short story by writer A.J. Burks in which we find this quote: Floods, fires, hold-ups, sports events—nothing escaped the all-seeing powers of the telescreens.

The only thing that is exactly the same in those novels above with their dystopian futures is that they all had man running the show. Today, we will have Ai aliens... that's different, right? Depends on how you look at it. What is the same, is the desire for total control over individuals. It was foreseen and written about in those novels and though fictional, the non fictional man runs into trouble the same way  and it always starts with the ruling elites.