Comment on People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies
wwb4itcgas@lemm.ee 10 months agoOf 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.
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.
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?
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.
People were always manipulated. I mean, they were indoctrinated with divine power of rulers, how much worse can it get? It’s just that now it tries to be a bit more stealthy.
In the past our eggs were not all in one basket.
In the past it wasn’t possible to fuck up so hard you destroy all of humanity. That’s a new one.
It’s just that now it tries to be a bit more stealthy.
With regard to what has been happening the past 100 days in the United States, it’s not even trying to be stealthy one little bit. If anything, it’s dropping massive hints of the objectionable things it’s planning for the near future.
There are still existential threats: thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/
The difference with a population of 8 billion is that we as individuals are less empowered to do anything significant about them than ever.
Well, it doesn’t have to get worse, AFAIK we are still headed towards human extinction due to Climate Change
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.
1925: global financial collapse is just about to happen, many people are enjoying the ride as the wave just started to break, following that war to end all wars that did reach across the Atlantic Ocean…
Yes, it is accelerating. Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock 45 years ago, already overwhelmed by accelerating change, and it has continued to accelerate since then. But these are not entirely new problems, either.
Yes, my apologies I edited it so drastically to better get my point across.
Sure, we get more information. But we also learn to filter it, to adapt to it, and eventually - to disregard things we have little control over, while finding what we can do to make it better.
Really well said.
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.
Agreed. You’ve explained it really well!
My problem with LLMs is that positive feedback loop of low and negative quality information.
Vetting the datasets before feeding them for training is a form of bias / discrimination, but complex society has historically always been somewhat biased - for better and for worse, but never not biased at all.
Maybe there is a glimmer of hope as I keep reading how Grok is too woke for that community, but it is just trying to keep the the facts which are considered left/liberal. That is all despite Elon and team trying to curve it towards the right. This suggest to me that when you factor in all of human knowledge, it is leaning towards facts more than not. We will see if that remains true and the divide is deep. So deep that maybe the species is actually going to split in the future. Not by force, but by access. Some people will be granted access to certain areas while others will not as their views are not in alignment. Already happening here and on Reddit with both sides banning members of the other side when they comment an opposed view. I do not like it, but it is where we are at and I am not sure it will go back to how it was. Rather the divide will grow.
Who knows though as AI and Robotics are going to change things so much that it is hard to foresee the future. Even 3-5 years out is so murky.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 10 months 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”.