Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury reads as very up-to-date

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I had a Croatian translation of Fahrenheit 451, and I remember being captivated by the text. It was my most annotated book, but then I lent it to someone and never saw it again. Some time later, I bought the Simon & Schuster edition, which I have read and re-read many times since.

It was criticized for being too pretentious. A world where they burn all the books and never look at the moon? Impossible! What a silly idea!

“Frightening in its implications… Mr Bradbury’s account of this insane world, which bears many alarming resemblances to our own, is fascinating.”

– The new york TIMES on ray bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

They must have thought it would never come to that. Don’t know how they thought so – we are literally building a world like that. Everything we have done so far has led to this. No conspiracy theories, no dystopian science-fiction-movie-style alien invasion set to destroy us.

We’re interested in global warming if we can make a blockbuster movie out of it. Such a thrill from such a scenario! What would we do if we were ever in that situation? Luckily, we would never know.

Well…

In 1953, the ideas that Bradbury presented in his book must have sounded like futuristic, dystopian nonsense. It sounded like just another fiction to us, too, decades later. Maybe we were all reading it with a hubris that it would never come to this. I always secretly dreaded it, but I thought I wasn’t living in that future. I never will be.

Well…

AI data centers, after having taken our water, are now destroying books. I remember my grandma asking me if I’m afraid of AI taking my job, and I said no. AI could never understand the innate aspects of language. That is impossible to generate. Maybe I should’ve been afraid. Not because an artificial tool could do a job better than me, but because humans turn tools into weapons.

What do you think happens when AI data centers create a monopoly over all this destroyed information? They’re targeting rare and old books first.

“It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.”

Ray Bradbury

They’re keeping it under wraps, or trying to, at least. I think we have been in a slumber long enough. What would need to happen for us to react? Our action-and-reaction is out of balance. Nothing moves us anymore. We take any news with the same level of apathy. Everything is all the same for us.

And it’s not like this is all new and a sudden development. Scientists have been trying to warn us for years. Books, movies, and art play such a massive role in putting this information out there, trying to paint the picture. We just don’t know how to process information. And now they have artificial intelligence to do it for us. Manipulating the information to their liking.

We burn the world down with bombs, drain the water to feed data centers, and destroy our culture, history, and archives. I think that to future species, those that come after us, we would present a bigger mystery than dinosaurs present to us. We are actively destroying every trace of us.