Not all of us, and that’s the problem with compassion.
Comment on People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies
wwb4itcgas@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Our species really isn’t smart enough to live, is it?
MangoCats@feddit.it 5 weeks ago
Buffalox@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Faulty wiring.
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
For some yes unfortunately but we all choose our path.
wwb4itcgas@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Of course, that has always been true. What concerns me now is the proportion of useful to useless people. Most societies are - while cybernetically complex - rather resilient. Network effects and self-organization can route around and compensate for a lot of damage, but there comes a point where having a few brilliant minds in the midst of a bunch of atavistic confused panicking knuckle-draggers just isn’t going to be enough to avoid cascading failure. I’m seeing a lot of positive feedback loops emerging, and I don’t like it.
As they say about collapsing systems: First slowly, then suddenly very, very quickly.
Allero@lemmy.today 5 weeks ago
I’d argue this has been this way since the dawn of time.
Maybe the technology has just highlighted it for some of us, but I do not believe we have more dumbheads than a year, or 10 years, or 100 years prior.
Think of the “end of history” and how it was prophecized millennia ago.
wwb4itcgas@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Almost certainly not, no. Evolution may work faster than once thought, but not that fast. The problem is that societal, and in particular, technological development is now vastly outstripping our ability to adapt. It’s not that people are getting dumber per se - it’s that they’re having to deal with vastly more stuff. All. The. Time. For example, consider the world as it was a scant century ago - virtually nothing in evolutionary terms. A person did not have to cope with what was going on on the other side of the planet, and probably wouldn’t even know for months if ever. Now? If an earthquake hits Paraguay, you’ll be aware in minutes.
And you’ll be expected to care.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I mean, Mesopotamian scriptures likely didn’t foresee having a bunch of dumb fucks around who can be easily manipulated by the gas and oil lobby, and that shit will actually end humanity.
MangoCats@feddit.it 5 weeks ago
There have been a couple of big discontinuities in the last 4500 years, and the next big discontinuity has the distinction of being the first in which mankind has the capacity to cause a mass extinction event.
Life will carry on, some humans will likely survive, but in what kind of state? For how long before they reach the technological level of being able to leave the planet again?
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
Really well said.
wwb4itcgas@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Thank you. I appreciate you saying so.
The thing about LLMs in particular is that - when used like this - they constitute one such grave positive feedback loop. I have no principal problem with machine learning. It can be a great tool to illuminate otherwise completely opaque relationships in large scientific datasets for example, but a polynomial binary space partitioning of a hyper-dimensional phase space is just a statistical knowledge model. It does not have opinions. All it can do is to codify what appears to be the consensus of the input it’s given. Even assuming - which may well be to generous - that the input is truly unbiased, at best all it’ll tell you is what a bunch of morons think is the truth. At worst, it’ll just tell you what you expect to hear. It’s what everybody else is already saying, after all.
And when what people think is the truth and what they want to hear are both nuts, this kind of LLM-echo chamber suddenly becomes unfathomably dangerous.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
What does any of this have to do with network effects? Network effects are the effects that lead to everyone using the same tech or product just because others are using it too. That might be useful with something like a system of measurement but in our modern technology society that actually causes a lot of harm because it turns systems into quasi-monopolies just because “everyone else is using it”.