Work

Earlier this year I worked with Dr. Carmen Simon at Rexi Media to create a memorable SlideShare presentation of my latest book. Did Dr. Simon's double-doctorate and fancy brain science make any difference to the outcome?

Today I learned that out of millions of presentations on the SlideShare site, our work was picked as a Best of 2014.

Given that my book was not a best-seller or even close, one has to assume my sparkling content was not the reason for the achievement. Science wins again.

To be fair, the other millions of creators are probably still operating at the "People like blue" level of design. While no one was paying attention, the job of designing moved from art to science.

Ever wonder why Apple consistently does great design and others can't seem to figure it out? My assumption is that Apple is using science and other companies are using art. I once worked in the Human Interface test lab at Pacific Bell and saw how powerful science is when applied to design. And science has learned a lot since those days.

— And now I talk about robots again —

I have a Dilbert series in the pipeline in which robots learn cognitive science simply by reading the Internet. All of the science is there. Robots thus informed could control human decisions without us being the wiser.

In other words, robots will never need a bloody coup to take control of Earth. All they need to do is read the Internet where we humans have painstakingly documented the science that will allow robots to manipulate our emotions and thus our choices without our knowledge.

My guess is that most of you think this cognitive science stuff is only influencing group averages and isn't much of a factor in your own daily decisions. But I will tell you that if you have a background in hypnosis and you have wallowed in this cognitive science stuff as I have for both work and fun, you see it as a far more powerful force, and possibly the only important trend for the future.

Someday robots will fix most of humanity's problems in the areas of energy, food, water, medicine and even climate change. They might even make war obsolete. But in the process of solving these problems the robots will acquire cognitive science knowledge that will effectively give them control of any democratic country because they can control the majority opinion through cognitive manipulation.

And even more interesting is the question of whether humans will someday prefer machine-based government over human control. I don't want some human telling me how to live my life based on his belief in magic. But I don't get angry at my ATM for only giving me the amount of money that I have in my own account. The machines will follow agreed rules and be predictable. I want a machine overlord, not some corrupt, drunken, horny, tired human that had a bad childhood.

But that's just me.

Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     
Author of this book 
Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily
Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

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