The Cookie & AI Banner is coming to the EU

Get ready for Cookie-Banner.v2 — aka the “Cookie & AI Banner.” Every app and website in Europe will display the notification: “this site uses cookies and AI.” And a purple magic wand, because these days everything is “AI-powered,” and AI seems to love purple.

The new EU AI Act starts applying transparency rules in August 2026. Chapter IV, Article 50 (“Transparency obligations for providers and deployers of certain AI systems”) requires explicit disclosure in several cases: users must be informed when they interact with AI systems; AI-generated content must be marked as artificial; and deepfakes or certain AI-generated public-interest texts must be disclosed as AI-generated or manipulated. 

Which is funny, because AI is already mainstream: 30–40% of people already use generative AI tools.

So, all websites and apps will simply modify the cookie banner to mention AI.

And, the new Cookie & AI banner will be exactly as useless, irrelevant, and ignored by everyone, as the current one.

Religion is anachronistic. Shared myths are essential to darwinistic success

Religion is anachronistic.

It is astonishing that they still exist in our age of information, logic, and science.

Well, superstitions are not necessarily (reverse) correlated to advance in science - physics, mathematics, chemistry, or biology. But they should have been correlated to advances in thinking and logic.

I expected modern men to reject religion by using simple logic. Scientific skepticism, the Socratic method, 3,000 years old tools. What is new is not the methods themselves, but the quantity (to speak in Hegelian terms). 

I.e., 2500 years ago, only 1 in 100,000 people learned proof, evidence, syllogism, inference.

The change over the last 200 years, however, has been dramatic - not only qualitatively, but quantitatively. Literacy and access to knowledge reached phenomenal levels: 95% of the population can read and watch videos about these topics, about Plato, evolution, the scientific method. And yet, despite exposure to evidence and logic, people still believe that the Earth was created by an imaginary being in six days. And then He rested, got sleepy, and forgot about the dinosaurs.

That is why I am shocked. A thousand years ago, fine - nobody had heard of Plato, nobody knew how to read, nobody went to school. So people muttered (sic) religious sermons, because that was all they heard from the local priest — semi-illiterate himself.

But I would have expected that today, with so much information available, 90% of the population would have some kind of intellectual revelation. To say: “Wait, this is nonsense: gods, creationism, miracles, hell, purgatory, sin, saints.”

But that didn’t happen. It is a fascinating social phenomenon. The overwhelming majority still believes in imaginary friends, gods, saints, miracles, relics, creationism.

The phenomenon is phenomenal (sic). It shows that social bonds, and the importance of myths in social construction, overwhelmingly outweigh logic or science in terms of their importance for evolutionary, Darwinian success.

Communities that believe in shared superstitions and myths achieve greater evolutionary success. From a sociological perspective, that is an extraordinary conclusion.

(AI) Technology doesn't democratize efficiency. It benefits early adopters

Technology doesn't democratize things. Initially, it benefits early adopters. Those with the resources and education to adopt and adapt fast. 

The new tech buzzword is: AI agents make everybody more efficient.

Yes, it does. But not equally.

It's a good punchline and buzzword, saying that technology democratizes things - information, knowledge, education, transportation, resources, communication, or, with contemporary AI agents: work efficiency.

But this is rarely true.

I don't remember any technological innovation who really democratized things - at least at first. 

Technology tends to benefit first the rich and the educated - those who already have the capacity to invest, absorb and adapt faster. 

Yes, technology trickles down, eventually. But not immediately. 

It was the same with automobiles - first adopters were rich people; later beneficiaries were industrialists who sold (Ford Model T) affordable cars to the working class. 

Same with writing, printing, books, and newspapers: for hundreds of years, the beneficiaries were still the upper and middle classes, who were already literate, or had the resources to educate their children. For hundreds of years after Gutenberg, the majority of the population remained illiterate and didn't really benefit. Intergenerational mobility was significantly lower at the time, when education was a luxury, and most children had to start working VERY early in factories or agriculture. 

Same with the internet and email: first few years, it was reserved for universities, researchers, top tech entrepreneurs, academia, financial magnates - not everybody. 

So no, AI is not for everybody, it doesn't democratize first, and it doesn't benefit everybody equally. We have to move and adapt fast.

New relevant study (from Marius Comper): 

https://www.ft.com/content/0873e3cb-cb02-4b47-941f-14da74149670?fbclid=IwdGRjcARa7tVjbGNrBFruyGV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHtvpmg9E9NL4vg8-W7XJcFqyz5I2YLwqWuTkFra4mwAO2yOhKZZzgCDBPoPh_aem_WAnPyG78hQSzOTJtuOIDVw

See also discussion 

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18YjsXCRPB/

Elitocracy is more unstable then democracy. Don't restrict voting based on literacy

Although it sounds fancy (elitist), elitocracy is much more unstable than democracy, as a form of government. 

The main reasons for which we support democracy: 

• more equitable distribution of wealth, privileges and justice; 
• more stable on the long term (less prone to atrocities or war).

But a lot of intellectuals believe that elites would make a better government, and would take better decisions.

Some elitists believe that government should be formed directly from elites (usually intellectual elites). 

Some moderates believe that only elites should have the right to vote. 

Some even more moderates want minimum thresholds for voter rights, e.g. literacy tests.

I should note, there are studies that show that intelligent people are not necessarily better leaders. A good leader has a mix of social skills (EQ), IQ, network, and even compassion.

But the bigger problem is that all forms of elitocracy are easier to abuse.

Elitocracy tends to turn into oligarchy (which almost always then becomes a dictatorship). 

Because the question is: who decides who has the right to vote? 

And this question becomes: how do we make sure "our people" have the right to vote? 

Where “our people” means our relatives, our children, our friends, those with the same background, who live on our street, went to the same schools, work with us, invest in the same companies, our investors, suppliers and clients.

And then, it's a simple recipe to allow only "our people"  to vote: you use your initial political majority to pass favorable laws (for large groups), and apply exceptions (for small groups).

And your majority becomes stronger and stronger, and you eliminate more and more voters from participating.

In the past, they used voter registration based on property ownership. This sounds obsolete, so we'll just skip it.

But a significant number of smart people want to implement voter registration by literacy. Which might sound reasonable, right? 

Well, first of all, you just excluded poor and isolated communities from voting. Which in democracies is typically considered discrimination. 

Then, you need to apply exceptions. So you apply criteria such as proof of birth, or proof of residence, and at the same time, you make it much more difficult for certain categories to register, or obtain papers. 

And then, you apply even stronger exceptions. So you can implement grandfather laws.

So, although it sounds fancy (elitist), elitocracy is much more unstable than democracy. 

It tends to be abused, becomes oligarchy, and then autocracy.

Belief in God is nothing like belief in science

Many believers think that believing in a god or a divine force is the same as believing in a scientific theory.

Obviously, this is a fallacy - a clever but misleading play on words. Belief in a scientific theory has absolutely nothing to do with belief in a deity. In fact, even using the word “belief” in a scientific context is inaccurate.

I suspect this is a way for some believers to logically justify their faith - by playing with language and framing things in a way that equates science with belief.

On the opposite extreme, equally unfounded, are those who claim they can prove the existence of a god or the supernatural.

Personally, I find these attempts - both to equate faith with science and to “prove” faith - unnecessary. Believers should embrace the reality that their faith has nothing to do with science, that it isn’t proven, and that it doesn’t need to be.

After all, it’s easy to “believe” when you have proof. At that point, it’s no longer belief - you simply know. The real challenge is to have faith without guarantees or evidence.

And perhaps that’s exactly what believers should take pride in.

Notes

1. In science, the word "belief" is rarely suitable. We prefer hypothesis, model, "we propose".

2. We all know that science is not absolute. Scepticism is built-in. There is no absolute scientific truth. All scientific theories are evolving. Some theories are proven simply wrong. Some evolve into better theories.

The concept of falsifiability is worth mentioning. Religious or supernatural belief is not falsifiable.

3. Science produces provisional, evidence-based truths.

Some theories are extremely stable. Some not.

4. So here's the interesting question, it's the meta: what is truth in science?

The theory that I particularly love is utilitarian/pragmatic. It is very suitable in engineering, and in social sciences (management, sociology), but also applicable in all sciences.

"A theory is true if it works."

5. Mathematics is probably the weirdest science, btw. It is at the same time very practical, and also very abstract, both in language and concepts. It is full of paradoxes - it even negates itself (it proves that it cannot be complete, it is limited by design - Gödel's incompleteness theorems). 

And mathematics also works: we use it exceptionally well to cook food, to build houses, generate fake photos, discuss on Facebook, and to put people on the moon. 

7. So no, we don't "believe" in science, or scientific theories. We build it, we discover it, we invent it, we demonstrate and prove it, we challenge and evolve it, we apply it in practice.

8. No matter what theory of science we use, the idea that we "believe" in a scientific theory is, in principle, inappropriate.