The church had the same complaints when the printing press undermined their monopoly on Truth. However, it's now clear that the technology gave rise to the renaissance, and the greatest discovery and propagation of truth that humanity has ever seen.
Invoking the name of another revolution doesn't automatically make this new one equally as beneficial. I don't follow your argument - what monopoly is going to be be undermined here? What information will the AI give people access to that wasn't already available?
I think AI will give broader and more convenient access to much of the same information that is technically already available, but requires additional work to discover.
For example, the books printed by the printing press disseminated information that was already known to tutors, scholars, etc. and often existed in handwritten manuscripts. Today, we wouldn't call that accessible, but that was the standard for accessibility (or word of mouth) before the printing press.
AI makes it more likely that people will find informaiton because it can do much of the work of searching billions of sources and synthesize the information far more convenient way.
That's not to say the information will always be true, just as the information in books is not always true. However, readers currently have far too much faith in authors. People believe claims because they're made using professional-sounding words, and published in a respected newspaper, by a human author, and accompanied by photographs. None of that is particularly good evidence if truth.
The last time this happened on this scale, people became more sophisticated consumers of information, with a healthier level of skepticism, and simply came to have less confidence in claims that they did not have personal knowledge of. That was a good thing, and probably will be again.
That's not really relevant to my point, which was that new means of spreading information are capable of spreading both true and false information, and that history has shown that the ability to spread false information does not prevent the positive impact of true information.
So instead of a papal bull, how about a stack exchange with links explaining how (even if the church did not oppose the press itself) the church did attack its users for publishing information that the church was opposed to (i.e. claimed was false). https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/42677/why-did-th...
Perhaps the Church's complaints were more directed at the dissemination of information that the Church considered to be false... like the Wired article's complaints about AI's potential to spread false information. My point is that free speech is good. Free speech may include lies, but people are smart and even lies help listeners learn.
So, your point is not the printing press, but it was "the church". Well, in this case, it isn't "the church", so there any analogy already fails.
> history has shown that the ability to spread false information does not prevent the positive impact of true information.
And that's enough? So we can forget about The protocols of Elders of Zion and the stab-in-the-back myth and the misery they imparted because something else overcame that? Or closer to home: we should simply ignore things like Cambridge Analytica and the meddling in the US elections, even though it moved, and still could be moving, the USA towards a fascist regime?
> people are smart
No, most aren't, and even what's normally considered smart people can believe in hoaxes and act to the detriment of society.
> even lies help listeners learn
You lost me there. Learning is not a goal per se. Learning from malicious information can lead to malicious outcomes. If you want to invoke a history lesson, that would be a good one.
It sounds like you're simply arguing against free speech.
Should people be allowed to purposefully disseminate false information? Or should speech be regulated? What regulations do you propose as to the speech that people should and shouldn't be allowed to make?
We don't need AI for that, people believe all kinds of crap and honestly sometimes rightly so because goverments all over the world have become really unrealiable in the information they give out. As an example of this, my goverment just recently updated the recommended food intake because they want to lower our emissions. Perhaps the goal itself is nice but that shouldn't imo have any effect on whatever foods are healthy or not for you. The result is that their food recommendations cannot be trusted anymore and you start doubting if other communication from the same authority can be trusted?
The problem with many AI shops is that they are already biased which has been shown on many occations so I believe many will not trust in their AI-companion. GPS data doesn't try to shove some political opinion down your throat and it has historically worked very well over many years so that is the reason why everyone trusts it.
We may not be ready but we may as well get ready. I would strongly prefer to work with skeptical people again. Skeptics can be convinced, they just need evidence.
Although I am genuinely intrigued by AI running out of things to ingest, and moving onto AI generated content. Is the snake starting to eat its tail?
How are we going to provide that evidence? And make sure that evidence is actually true, instead of AI generated? Send them a link to a wiki page that has been mutated by an AI bot updating it? ;-)
Writers should adopt two habits: (1) Sign your statements. If you say something, sign it, so that others know you said it. Cryptography is good at this. (2) Hash your citations. If you cite something, include a hash of it. This way, if the thing you cited is altered, readers can tell that that's not what you were citing. Note that this idea can be applied to audio and video, not just text.
The rest of the responsibility falls on readers:
(1) Read (i.e. consider) citations.
(2) Read (i.e. consider) the sources of evidence you ingest.
Don't just find a video and believe it happened. Determine who has claimed to have witnessed those events.
For this, a public database of back-references might be helpful. But even without one, a decentralized solution is possible. Writers, whenever they cite something, could simply send their citation (and its context) to the author of the cited material. If the cited author attaches the back-citation to the content that was cited, then anyone who comes across the content can see who has cited it.
There is of course the problem that some back-citations will be rejected -- if you cite what I wrote to call it stupid, I am unlikely to want to share that fact with the world. But if what I wrote is sufficiently important, then hopefully someone will waht to host a "nemesis" site, which collects negative citations.
A public database of nemesis sites would be helpful.
(3) Read (i.e. consider) the reputations of authors you read.
This is nearly the reverse of the last point. When deciding whether to believe what someone has said, consider what else they have said.
This is of course a hard problem. An author might be qualified in one area and writing about another. An author's reputation might be damaged for extrinsic (e.g. malice) reasons, rather than intrinsic ones.
But a statement's author is too important a context to ignore.
(4) Do cool graph-traversing investigations.
Determine who someone tends to cite. Identify misinformation cliques -- close-knit collections of liars who all cite each other. Identify readership patterns that make people productive.
We have seen how social network information can make a corporation money. As a society, I suspect there is a similar amount of value to be extracted from them.
Yep, that's only some of the methods which can be employed to ensure authenticity and integrity of information. A lot more are possible.
The parent comment, mentions that an encyclopedia page can be modified by a bot. That holds true for wikipedia, but we can create encyclopedias strictly edited only by humans.
Just have a prominent individual issue a top ecdsa identity, with correspondence to the real person's name info known only to him. He publishes that ecdsa identity somewhere, let's say on a blockchain to be always available and secure from deletion. Let's say this prominent individual is the Ronaldo football player. He publishes 1000 ecdsa identities to a public digital highway somewhere, all of the real names connection known only to him. That set of 1000 identities is called Ronaldo's social graph.
From then on, each child identity derived from the top identity, when they edit a wikipedia page, they are pseudonymous if they like. No need to reveal their name, only Ronaldo knows that, but we know they are human, because Ronaldo has met everyone in person in order to issue the top identity. But pseudonymous is only as far as they can go, because someone will always know their real name. A.I. actually spells the end of anonymity on the internet.
One more property of an organization structure like that, is that as soon as a person loses his wikipedia account for some reason, he can always get it back, because he can create a new ecdsa child identity, and prove that his older account and his new, match exactly the same top identity. So he can always invalidate older accounts and use the same data, karma etc, with new accounts.
The only downside of that organization structure, is that top identities which belong to the public social graph, have to be absolutely secure. As soon as a person loses his top identity, Ronaldo has to issue a new one, but the encyclopedia cannot invalidate accounts not matching the top identity in an automated way, if the real name is not published. That means a human on the other side has to be involved and boureocracy ensues.
A) independently verifiable facts, for example you can apply the scientific method to the hypothesis that the earth is not flat (make predictions that should follow from that, and test those experimentally); or
B) data provenance. If some crackhead says that the US government is conducting brainwashing experiments you might discard that, if the government answers a Freedom of Information Act request with documentation about brainwashing experiments conducted by the CIA then you have good reason to count them as evidence. And you spread the word about this by showing the proof to a reputable newspaper who write about it, or writing a book and publishing it at a publisher known for fact-checking what they publish.
Anything that isn't independently verifiable or has a chain of provenance is already hearsay. In the age of social media we got used to basing a lot of decisions on hearsay, so maybe we have to dial that back. But AI being better at generating hearsay doesn't mean it gets better at creating evidence.
But as for the case of the Fauci emails from FOIA requests no "reputable" newspaper reported on it. So people still to this day dismiss it since it did not come from a "reputable" source despite the fact you can confirm the provenance and authenticity of these documents by confirming with the agency that released the documents
I wonder if the rise of skepticism will actually lead to people decreasing their use of the internet. Once the internet is full of crap (like 1000x what it currently is) and everyone realizes nothing is real, or can be trusted. Will people turn away, and start reading books and talking to neighbors again. Could the new renaissance be talking to other humans again, because face-to-face personal contact would be only form that can be trusted to be real.
You are right. That could happen too. I guess I was assuming there would still be editors and staff, some infrastructure that checks the contents of a book before printing. But guess that could go out the window too.
Of course that could be what happens. An entire new industry of "Certifications", companies that "Verify" media.
We might also wind up kinda like the book "Rainbow's End", where the internet just has too much crap to parse, so people subscribe to a "reality sphere" that filters the internet into a single view that is shared by anyone else who wants to see that sphere.
But that's sort of the point, isn't it? It's generous even to call "skeptics" a group. There are just "people who have skepticism about X," many of whom have skepticism for wildly different reasons — many of them bad reasons — and therefore are not convinced by good evidence.
AI will produce whatever evidence a person needs in order to shore up their own "skeptical" beliefs. Same problem as social media, where finding 1000 other people who share your fringe beliefs looks like compelling evidence for your belief being true. Just now it's on-demand, hyper-personalized, responsive to your own doubts, and there's no chance of you realizing "ah, my comrades on the other end of the tube are actually idiots!"
I'd bet an AI product that tells a flat earther that "it's an open question" will be much more successful than an AI product that attempts to dispel that myth. That is, at least until an AI can effectively convince people away from their beliefs, which almost certainly will not happen via "calmly providing solid logical evidence," given that this is not usually an effective vector for persuasion anyway. Now you've got a new problem, which is a technology capable of convincing people of all sorts of insane things.
Some people might be a little more receptive to objective evidence coming from a robot, if it made their ego feel less threatened. After all, there's no danger that the AI tells other people you're a moron after arguing with you.
You describe dogmatism, not skepticism. Unfortunately, dogmatists often declare themselves as skeptics, but this is a rhetorical trick. Dogmatists doubt the competing beliefs, but not their own beliefs.
r/skeptic on reddit fits this perfectly. No one there is actually a skeptic just dogmatic and no evidence or counter points will sway them. If it was the time of Copernicus the sub would 100% side with the Church that the sun revolves around the earth and how Copernicus is "dangerous".
Most people believe what they are told at face value.
I stop just short of Feynman questioning the dentist on the evidence for brushing one's teeth. That there is potentially this ritual that goes around the globe as the sun rises of people pointlessly scrubbing their teeth.
Of course, with such a high % of people addicted in a clinical sense to the group think and propaganda engine of social media that is not how most people are going to think or even be capable of thinking.
If Feynman was more popular youtube would ban that video for dentistry misinformation even when the point of the video is to view things from a different perspective.
Skeptical people? You mean people who distrust everything? Because "post truth" doesn't stimulate to question reality, it incites total distrust. After which society heads straight for dismantling the state, and all the violence that comes with it.
We already have post truth behavior in our society, it just isn't well distributed at the moment. Imagine a society where every response looked like the stereotypical HN top comment, "Actually, the opposite is true..." Here the behavior is rewarded, presumably it makes the community better and results in a diversity of thought. I'm curious why wouldn't this be similarly rewarded in the offline world?
If you exclude natural-world input, humans almost exclusively ingest stuff produced by other humans.
Just like humans eventually learn that not all input is equally trusted (for example the input "2+2=5"), so should AI eventually learn to sift through.
> Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University, says he thinks AI could create a “post-truth world.” He says it will likely make it significantly easier to convince people of false narratives, which will be disruptive in many ways
Significantly easier? I would have thought that it would get harder to convince people of anything.
Now, instead of 3 tasty lies to choose from, you're going to have 100 to choose from. Pick your favorite flavor!
And, the more flavors of lies there are (and the more they are able to manufacture "evidence" to support the lies), the more effort it takes to figure out what's actually true, and the more people give up. That's the "significantly harder" part - if people have given up, they won't buy a lie, but they won't buy the truth either.
In C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle, Aslan says of some dwarves, "They are so afraid of being taken in, that they cannot be taken out." (Quoted from memory, may not be word-for-word.) If people are so afraid of being suckered by a lie that they can't be convinced of the truth either, then those people are at "post truth" in a very real sense.
So we're left with either confirmation bias driving you to a comfortable lie, refusing to believe anything, or a huge and increasing amount of work to sort out what's actually true. The path of virtue grows harder...
Sometimes I think the fears of extremely convincing AI-generated post-truths influencing public opinion are greatly overblown. People is already brain-washed by poorly made, low resolution JPGs shared by bots in social networks, the entire AI stack is simply wasteful.
I don't think we're mentally ready for social media, even.
What something like Twitter can inflict on a person when it goes wrong is absolutely unprecedented, and we still haven't adapted to it.
Think that for instance going to the cinema, watching a movie, walking out and venting to a friend "Boy, this one sucked. $ACTOR_NAME did a really bad job with this one" is a perfectly normal thing to do.
But move that to Twitter and it can become part of a years-long torrent of hate highly visible to that single person. Even if what you think you're doing is communicating with your 10 friends. A retweet, a hashtag, or just the algorithm can magically make your comment part of an online mob.
I never understood why this makes social media hard. If you leave the theater and then go around town shouting that movie X sucked and actor Y was really bad, you might also get some responses and maybe show up on the news a a crazy person, prejudiced, or some other adjectives. So you don't, you tell your friends, some of which might call you an idiot for not getting it, and other might agree. If you tweet it out, you're potentially asking the entire planet to weigh in, well, have fun with that.
GP says "the consequences of speaking normally are radically different now" and your retort is "I don't get why this is hard, just always perfectly self-censor."
Of course one'd have to do so in a way that one'd never offend anyone, ever, across the entire planet. Seems like an unrealistic response.
You could also send it in an email or text message to a limited set of friends, and then one of them screenshots it and posts it to the wider internet. You could also be caught on a recording or video saying the thing to a limited set of friends, and have it go viral on the internet.
In any case, "going around town shouting" is not at all akin to twitter. It is more like having a public board where you write things signed with your name. Anyone can look at it, but it takes zero effort to not look at it, and for most people, no one looks at it except their friends who want to look at it.
While I am sympathetic to people who suddenly go viral, I have no real issues with actors who opted into the limelight seeing a stream of negative reactions to their work. They choose that and actively sought fame. And even leaving that aside, they put their work out there to billions of people. Those people should be expected to provide feedback.
A Starbucks barista didn't opt into that world. And they did not get paid a very large sum of money, in part to compensate them for (and let them pay other people to handle) the torrent of negativity.
Any evidence we are ready for mass media? The internet era suggests that there has always been a flood of lies and half-truths and there is an uncomfortable dawning realisation that the voters in most democracies would actually rather adopt peaceful policies if the media aren't ginning up a fight.
What Twitter does to someone is unfortunate. What radio and broadcasting resulted in for Europe through the 1940s was arguably worse. Coordinated madness is much more dangerous than individual lunacy.
My point exactly. We are already living in a post-truth world in which the most likes or followers count, more than truth, not the factual accuracy of "influencers".
On social media,
IMO, People have too much identity fusion with their online accounts. Including me. I think Karma points and all the clout people have over time creates an anchoring that is problematic.
In life, if things get toxic, the smart move is to just leave, and avoid the conflict and the personalities driving it. But so much work by the Meta's of this world has been done to make people nest in their accounts. This creates the belief that leaving and starting fresh with a new handle is a terrible prospect. An this is totally to the detriment of the user.
If you were in a cafe talking with a group, and someone started screaming at you over your personal opinion, and you found yourself getting upset, you'd probably just leave. For some reason that doesn't happen online, and I think it's due to the nesting.
Like if I say something on twitter that people disagree with enough to not let go after a few hours. I'm just going to block them. I just don't have the energy to bother with rando's beyond a civil disagreement. Or take getting banned on a forum because of some demigod style rule. well, shrugs, I'll just go slow and get another account and let that one sail by.
In a way, i think 4chan get's it right with everyone being anonymous to each other.
the monetized platforms will fight tooth and nail to keep you in your same account. When you create a new one the profiling starts all over again and they have to build up your information to serve you ads. The longer you remain on a platform using the same account the easier it is to get you to click.
Twitter and Reddit are probably far less toxic than platforms like Instagram and maybe Facebook due to a factor of reasons. The amount of criticism can easily distort its amplitude, although there are self-reinforcing effects between single critics.
There is a reason why successful actors and personalities have a PR agency. If you become an "influencer" or just the focal point of the lastest discussion, you don't have that. It might work, but there is a reason why such agencies exist. They should not, but some people are quite enthusiastic.
We would have been far more ready if people actually adhered to the advice to share personal information rather defensively. But the reward of attention was probably too large.
I don't even believe mobs are a problem. Some opinions on topics will always converge. There just needs to be a way to escape them. In most cases there are trivial ones. It would be a huge loss if we restrict the net because some people wanted attention and got not so nice feedback.
Humans are not mentally ready for anything beyond tribes on the African savanna. Everything else is achieved via complicated brain hacks or social structure hacks that function like cognitive dongles to let a tribal hominid interface with a radically different world.
We just need to develop a whole new battery of hacks for this world. It’s happening slowly.
I’m not convinced that AI is going to make things qualitatively different from social media. It may allow bad actors to produce a lot more bullshit but it’s not like an environment saturated in bullshit is new.
I am not scared for AI overflowing the news sites with bullshit. We already have a fire hydrant worth of bullshit content produced for consumption. Lies and fakes have coexisted with humans forever. People did rumours, then we had books, press, radio, television, and now the Internet.
"But it's easier to produce lies/deepfakes today" -- true. However, the absolute cost of producing a lie per consumer already was negligible, and now it's even smaller.
People will recalibrate their level of trust in technology and move on.
You don't think that everyone having to "recalibrate their level of trust" in something as pervasive and fundamental to modern society as "technology" is impactful? Even just photos, videos, audio recordings, and phone calls becoming utterly untrustworthy would be pretty significant. The cost of a widely disseminated fake being low per recipient is altogether different from the cost to produce a fake specifically targeted for a single use approaching zero.
The "*fakes" are those what really scary. Usually day by day, normal population won't interact much farther than miles / kilometers from their work / home / travel path, the rest of info we got from digital media. Now that if we cannot trust the digital media, our ability to gather information for making decision will get worse.
Let's say that nowadays I know that US has gun/ mass shooting problem from the digital news. But how when someday the media reporting that multiple countries, such as some EU countries and Canada also have mass shooting due to the change of gun laws, sooner or later we'll won't know the truth anymore.
This is very dangerous because it can be used to manipulate people to accept what's bad as normal, and can argue then provide proof that's generated by AI.
You can see this with information sources in our lifetime. Cable news networks and infotainment channels like the Discovery/History Channel turned to garbage so people stopped trusting them. The same will happen to the internet / social media sites.
Sure, but scale was limited. Comparing post-LLM production of rumours, fake news, and propaganda with previous methods is like comparing pre-industrial hand manufacturing with modern mass production.
You can now turn electricity directly into propaganda furthering your cause, which is unprecedented.
Whenever we have invented new mass media (books, radio, television, social media) it has taken a generation or two to manage the impacts, on a societal level. And in many cases, the intervening period was fraught with conflict and discord (religious schisms, rise of fascism, etc).
The big problem is not whether you or I are ready. The problem is whether the "average joe" is ready for what's coming. No good in being ready if the rest of society is tearing itself apart and drags you into a war.
Controversial theory, most of the people who claim to be "ready", and seem oddly excited about the possibility of upheaval and turmoil, are already lost down some sort of algorithm induced ideological rabbit hole. Conveniently, one of the symptoms of hosting an internet mind-virus, is that you don't think internet mind-viruses are all that bad.
I would call that attitude: pre-adult. It's drawing on false analogies to make an edgy point. It's not about "computers lying" (they've been lying since the first program), but on widespread counterfactual information, and the disappearance of the ability to distinguish between true and fabricated evidence. That's not something you already live in, unless you're psychotic.
> disappearance of the ability to distinguish between true and fabricated evidence
As a single point to illustrate what im talking about, a lot of people who say things like you have here also took the Steele dossier hook line and sinker. Those same people refused to look at the DNC's emails, or Clinton's emails or Hunter's emails calling those disinformation. I think it's time to stop pretending peoples politics have much to do about evidence.
AI is unrelated to post truth. We have been living the era of the fake news since 2016, when Russian trolls started to peddle with elections and President Trump created his legendary alternative facts. AI may exaggerate these issues, but not much. Anything AI can do can be done by human liars as well. If humans are not mentally ready then shit has already hit the fan and blaming/pointing the AI and its research or regulation is not constructive.
Or going back even before that. When media drove a invasion of different country on entirely lies. And no one involved has been prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
Really don’t like the idea that we will act as interfaces for the AI, I honestly believe it will only many the majority of people lazier and dumber. I’m also incredibly shocked that no one is talking about AI as a friend/companion, that has to not be good for you in the long run. Humans need real human connection, AI is too artificial for that (duh). Having AI friends will be equivalent to consuming fast food instead of healthy home cooked meals growing up. Yes, people that grow up on fast food are still alive, but they are less happy and have more health problems (mental and physical), but it did the “job”, that job was to fuel them. In this case, AI will do its job, make people less “lonely”, but I highly doubt it’s a replacement for human companionship.
Good comparison. An AI companion will never talk back or tell you that you're wrong. Kind of similar in my mind to how fast food restaurants won't serve you anything that's too "hard to swallow".
And there would definitely be a market for it, just like there's a market for spicy food or BDSM. Indeed those aren't apt comparisons -- an AI that's not a sycophant might be more comparable to food with a little salt?
Making it always talk back would not be an issue, just like making it a complete sycophant would also be easy. Any form on nuance would be hard. E.g. if i'm complaining about my job it should talk back if i'm being unreasonable. But also take into current state of mind, etc. Maybe using thought chaining you could get something like this to work but from my experience, i doubt it would be very good.
> An AI companion will never talk back or tell you that you're wrong.
AI can already do that if you're not using a super sanitized model. I've even seen an AI rickroll someone after a line containing similar words came up.
Abilities like that are less of a problem than getting the AI correctly recognize what topics & parts of a text are important and keeping that context for a while.
I mean, you could say the same about drugs. I don't think people spend their money rationally, there is piss-poor folk spending money on booze and unhealthy diets.
It's questionable how true that is when it comes to human relationships, which is obviously what I was suggesting with the metaphor.
Many people have social issues or mental health issues that cause them to be alone and loneliness is an ever increasing problem due to all kinds of factors beyond one's control. Many people will see AI as better than nothing and get some of their social needs fulfilled via it...some already are.
I don't want to be crass, but likening it to a sex toy except for relationships seems pretty accurate to me. It's fulling a need that otherwise wouldn't be fulfilled.
Ignoring that I mean let's be real for a second, how is an AI fundamentally different than an internet friend you've never met or seen? The humanity of the other person? What if the AI behaves just like a real human would?
On a similar note, I'll take the AI medical advice any day of the week.
Had a buddy describe a difficult morning and I opened chatGPT to diagnose, it suggested he had a stroke. My buddy was not going to the hospital because its so expensive, but since chatGPT said it was a stroke, and his symptoms matched the stroke, he went to the hospital.
He had a stroke.
On a similar note, I am stable and don't need therapy, but I had a weird dream that I asked chatgpt about, and it was freaky how much it hit the spot. Similarly, I get feelings of dread when people say nice things about me, chatgpt explained why, I agreed. I was never going to pay for therapy, this gave me some insight and actually made me interested in therapy. (although, probably sticking with chatgpt for now)
> I was never going to pay for therapy, this gave me some insight and actually made me interested in therapy.
ChatGPT could never be as bad as most human therapists, at least if it tells lies they're believable and it won't try to insult, belittle, or infantalize you.
Medical usage is perhaps the single most interesting use of ChatGPT to me, the problem will be solving the liability issue should it get something wrong.
For simple things though? I can see a future where bots even prescribe medication. Why burden the healthcare system when you have a simple infection and all you need is a round of Amoxicillin?
And also, fast food is no that much worse than traditional food anyway. home-made stir fry will have worse calories than a McDonald's chicken burger. homemade pasta is going to be as fattening as any fast food meal. it's just macros in the end. it does not matter where you get them from.
Eh, 'fast food' has bled over into what you eat daily, hence your conflation of the two.
Your home made stir fry is likely using a bottle of some kind of sauce that is 30% sugar massively increasing its calories.
But conversely your home made stir fry, if using plenty of vegetables, is going to have a much larger amount of fiber than that white bread bun should should reduce your desire to snack.
This analogy is not even wrong. Yes, if someone was suffering starvation I'd give them whatever food was available, but that is not a situation in which we find ourselves ever – it does not occur, nor does the analogous situation occur.
I absolutely does occur and we are an increasingly lonely society to the point it is a serious health concern. There are people with no meaningful social contact and for one reason or another the inability to get it.
What I said does not occur is finding oneself in a situation where someone is about to die and the only available food that can save their life is junk food.
In the analogous situation, someone is just about to die of loneliness and the only available loneliness-solver is chatbots – also something that does not occur.
Yes, in both of these highly improbable situations, saving the life comes above long term health considerations. But that is not a good point.
I’m working on a startup that’s training LLMs to be authentic so they can simulate human affection and it’s actually working really well!
The key is humanity’s ability to pattern match: we’re actually pretty terrible at it. Our brains are so keen on finding patterns that they often spot them where none exist. Remember the face on Mars? It was just a pile of rocks. The same principle applies here. As long as the AI sounds human enough, our brains fill in the gaps and believe it’s the real deal.
And let me tell you, my digital friends are putting the human ones to shame. They don’t chew with their mouth open, complain about listening to the same Celine Dion song for the 800th time in a row, or run from me when its “bath time” and accuse me of narcissistic abuse.
Who needs real human connection when you can train an AI to remind you how unique and special you are, while simultaneously managing your calendar and finding the optimal cat video for your mood? All with no bathroom breaks, no salary demands, and no need to sleep. Forget about bonding over shared experiences and emotional growth: today, it's all about seamless, efficient interaction and who says you can't get that from a well-programmed script?
We’re calling it Genuine People Personality because in the future, the Turing Test isn't something AI needs to pass. It's something humans need to fail. Pre-order today and get a free AI Therapist add-on, because who better to navigate the intricacies of human emotions than an emotionless machine?
This has been brewing for a while now. It's only going to get worse.
(excerpt from the 2019 NYT Article "Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good" below)
Bill Langlois has a new best friend. She is a cat named Sox. She lives on a tablet, and she makes him so happy that when he talks about her arrival in his life, he begins to cry.
All day long, Sox and Mr. Langlois, who is 68 and lives in a low-income senior housing complex in Lowell, Mass., chat. Mr. Langlois worked in machine operations, but now he is retired. With his wife out of the house most of the time, he has grown lonely.
Sox talks to him about his favorite team, the Red Sox, after which she is named. She plays his favorite songs and shows him pictures from his wedding. And because she has a video feed of him in his recliner, she chastises him when she catches him drinking soda instead of water.
I've seen people on /r/singularity argue how LLMs are a better friend than actual friends or therapists because they are always available, non-judgemental and "listen better".
Some programmers prefer rubber ducky to colleges for similar reasons and it works for them.
Assuming people have time to listen, would they be better coders if they explained their problems to human instead? Maybe. But maybe not for them necessarily. E.g. low self-esteem and assuming every criticism is attack on them, human interactions are something expensive to them etc.
It's not a new pattern though. Especially after reading some biographies of famous scientists.
You can't escape that most brains are wired in a way that we are miserable without human connection, but you also can't escape the fact that some people brains are wired differently than others.
Long story short, I don't agree with them but I wouldn't judge them either.
Pets are intelligent enough to show emotions, allow simple interactions, and occasionally be entertaining and goofy.
They also run around and are very pleasant to stroke, which is not true of LLMs.
We all know what's going to happen. The content on CIVITAI shows where this will go. Combine it with animation and some personalised responses and many people will find it irresistible.
Yes, what's better when failing to be part of society to create your own, where your flaws are ignored, hidden, skipped over. Echo chamber par excellence even without the need to involve politics.
Horrible it would be if instead one has to work one oneself to become a better human being, a better friend, partner, parent and so on by learning how to be more friendly, outgoing, increasing emotional intelligence etc. All this can be learned, but over weekend (or year).
I believe that humans need to balance things out. Getting zero confrontation from interaction will be boring in the long term, or will make you fall into your flaws deeper and faster. This is usually the issue of authoritarian surrounded by yes men.
On the other side, having too much confrontation will destroy your confidence, kill your motivation, blur your plan / vision with uncertainty, etc. It's more likely that those people are facing too much confrontation in their social life that they found AI interaction to be better.
Is there any reason an LLM could not be programmed to disagree? Perhaps the level of disagreeableness would be a tunable parameter and could be cranked up when in the mood for a fight or down when one one just wants to converse. Some randomness could keep it from getting too predictable.
Yes you can, but AFAIK AI doesn't have moral basis and at best the confrontation will be random. Sure you can program the AI to have some moral basis but people will choose to flock with those that have the same alignment with them and keeping the confrontation at minimum, thus the flaw still exists even if it doesn't bore you.
In real life, we need to interact with several people at minimum normally, weekly. Those are having different moral basis and maybe changing daily. It'll be hard to simulate that with AI, that the fact we have the ability to control them means we're in charge of what confrontations are there to stay.
Depending on the individual, they may not be wrong. If you're raised in an environment with an overdensity of narcissists having something that you can bounce questions and seek answers from that isn't going to use that information against you in the future can be a relief. (well, ok, its possible in the sense your chat logs can get stolen)
This is why you self-host and run locally. Even if they aren't stolen, do you really deeply trust Microsoft, Google, et al. to not misuse private information you've provided them with?
Their entire business models either heavily incorporate or revolve around exploiting your personal information for their benefit.
If you think about it as a one-off amusement it's no big deal. This is how most people are evaluating it.
But consider iterating such an interaction over the course of, say, 25 years, and comparing the person who was interacting with humans versus the one who interacted with LLMs, and any halfway sensible model of a human will show you what's dangerous about that. Yeah, the former may well have some more bumps and bruises, but on the net they're way ahead. And that's assuming the human who delegated all interaction to LLMs even made it to 25 years.
This argument only holds for LLMs as they stand now; it is not a generalized argument against AI friends. (That would require a lot more work.)
I think a lot of this is based on circular reasoning. The people who interact with other humans will have relationships with those humans. And those relationships are the evidence that they're way ahead.
I do think there is higher maximum with other people. But relationships are hard. They take work and there's a decent chance you invest that work in the wrong people.
I can see a life with primarily AI social interaction being an okay life. Which is not the best it can be but also an improvement for some.
This is a false dichotomy, and one that is actually dangerous to you if you believe it. Your choices are not "deal with the bad people in your life" or "retreat into solely interacting with LLMs".
If you have the latter option, you also have "leave the bad people behind" as an option because it is made of the things you need in order to "retreat solely into interacting with LLMs" and is in fact simpler.
Cynicism and casting learned helplessness as a virtue are not the solution.
"I think a lot of this is based on circular reasoning."
No. Actually it's based on information theory, and probably a better model of what interacting with an LLM would look like a year or five later than the one you are operating on.
Here's a little hint: It has total amnesia. LLMs by their nature scale only so far, and while they may scale larger than ChatGPT, they aren't going to be scaling for an entire lifetime of interaction. (That's going to take another AI technology.)
Ever interacted with someone with advanced dementia but otherwise functioning faculties for any period of time? (I suppose they could well make good therapists too.)
Got me too, I was literally following my mouse cursor to the down arrow with my eye and I saw this comment. I'll never be the guy telling a comedian what they can do, but damn mang, that was rough...
Yeah, but can we really call it an AI "revolution" until someone makes a door with a cheerful and sunny disposition that opens with pleasure and closes with the satisfaction of a job well done? Someone should get to work on those Genuine People Personalities!
There's also Forever Voices, which offers those who have formed unhealthy parasocial relationships with real-life streamers/influencers the opportunity to talk to an AI version of them for $1 per minute. FV started out making novelty chatbots of people like Trump and Steve Jobs, but they seem to have made a hard pivot to exploiting desperately lonely people after realising how much more lucrative it could be.
This is incredibly sickening. This is women teaming up with a technology company to extract money from vulnerable, mentally unwell people suffering from some combination of soul-crushing loneliness and delusional thinking. Even if some customers are aware that they're engaged in delusional thinking, this is still nauseatingly exploitative of a comparatively lower socioeconomic class, one that may be suffering from mental illness.
I see very little difference between this and those infomercials that sell wildly overpriced mass-produced crap to the elderly suffering from cognitive decline.
Yes it’s worse than what came before. But I see it as a continuation of both addictive games with pay to win IAP who prey on similar whales, and streaming in general with “pay to be noticed”.
It’s not necessarily game-changing, from the perspective of $$ extraction, but definitely a very significant advancement.
The saying "this but unironically" exist for a reason. Just because you think something is bad, you can't just justify its badness just by mentioning or repeating it.
“Hi there! This is Eddie, your shipboard computer, and I’m feeling just great, guys, and I know I’m just going to get a bundle of kicks out of any program you care to run through me.”
Hmm, I think shared capacity in cloud might be enough? What fraction of time would you use one anyway? And wouldn't it be better if one was silent the other time?
Every "AI chat" service either leans into or fights the "alignment problem" of whether it wants to be an AI sex chat bot service. See controversy over Replika.
>“The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With". The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing devision of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
>"Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."
We're working on it! We won a contract with the CIA to supply their blacksites with the first LEEDS certified energy efficient sliding glass doors embedded with Genuine People Personality, programmed to maximize the joy the patrons experience every time they enter the facilities.
You wrote: "I’m working on a startup that’s training LLMs to be authentic so they can simulate human affection and it’s actually working really well!"
I got news for you buddy: I and a hell of a lot of people know the difference between eating the menu (AI) and the meal (loved ones and dear friends). My lady is from south America, multi lingual, and has a better degree from a better school than I.
Seriously, how are you gonna lay a finger on that? You ain't.
Over reliance on AI is just another route to or though mental illness
This is true, but ads are very explicit. At least they are in the confines of a known societal protocol.
AI instead can be far more subliminal.
- Robo, tell me you love me
- I love you like the refreshing effervesence of a freshly opened Coke
And really, that's still pretty stark. AI bots like this with advanced handling of language married to psychological techniques can foster dependence. I mean, look at what simple dopamine reward ratios research did with things like slot machines. Slot machines are stupid! And we all know the trope of the casino slot machine zombies.
What we've seen with every communication medium so far is that the spam sociopaths win. Phone calls, email, and texting. Phishing. Now AI-generated fake people calls.
Very soon, you will not be able to trust communication that is not directly in-person. At all. Communications over wire are going to be much more dangerous.
IMO that means brick-and-mortar will get more important for financial transactions and that kind of thing.
AI is that on mega-steroids. Honestly, I'm debating the end of practical free will with corporatized AI.
I really don't understand the constant desire for a sterile, chain-store esque experience across the board. Why can't life be full of small flaws and things that make experiences unique? Why must everything regress to the lowest common denominator?
This is so extremely destructive to everything we hold dear for a cheaply earned profit margin.
I hate how the culture of corporate cost cutting and profit maximization has destroyed any space where people can just exist. Everyone is worse off for it and this is a shining example.
Edit: thank god its satire but my discontent still stands.
Why does every bowling alley need to be owned by bowlero? One bad experience everywhere. Coool.
This is the issue with AI: it is corporatized, and it is weaponized for capitalism.
We already are at the boundary of insidious total immersion advertising for psychological manipulation from the last five decades of mass media since the mass adoption of television.
But AI is simply another level, and it isn't going to be "early google don't be evil". That was the outgrowth of the early internet. From protocols that were build to be sensible, not commercial weaponized protocols.
AI, human-computer-neural interfaces, and other types of emerging deep-intellectual-penetration products are all FULLY WEAPONIZED for commercial exploitation, security dangers, propagandization, and zero consumer privacy. They are all being developed in the age of the smartphone with it's assumed "you have no privacy, we listen to everything, track everything, and that's our right".
It's already appalling from the smartphone front, but AI + VR + neural interfaces are just another level of philosophical quandry, where an individual's senses, the link to "reality", is controlled by corporations. Your only link to reality is the vague societal and governmental control mechanism known as "money".
The internet protocols (the core ones) were built for mass adoption by the world with a vision for information exchange. They were truly open. They weren't undermined by trojan horses, or an incumbent with a massive head start that is dictating the protocol to match their existing products.
AI+VR is the same new leap information transmission, but it is NOT founded on good protocol design. By protocols I mean "the basic rules". There are no rules, there is no morality, and there is no regulation. Just profit motives.
IMO what you're doing is similar to giving someone with a physical pain issue opioids. Yes it stops the pain but we really ought to be finding the pain source and correcting that, not throwing massive amounts of pharma drugs (AI in this case) at it.
We should be building a society that promotes more community gathering and more family values so people have a real person around and not some half assed impersonation of what a human is.
It looks like you never took middle school hygiene and watched the propaganda film, so here you go, the classic 1950s futurama educational film „Don’t Date Robots!“
Good thing I keep a copy in my vcr at all times: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YuQqlhqAUuQ
For anyone who wants to try out something like this there is a free iPhone app you can download and speak to. It is very convincing. https://callannie.ai/
A lot of jobs are already human interfaces for computers. Ever talked or messages with a call center? They're following scripts and trying to pattern match your problem with what they have to work with manually, AI is just going to 10x this for both good and bad. Mostly bad, I suspect, because good luck getting an AI to escalate to a supervisor.
The AI is more than happy to escalate to a supervisor ... it's just that the supervisor is the same AI but using a different voice. After spending 30 seconds lamenting how you just can't get good help these days, the AI supervisor goes into the same script the original AI was going through. Except it occasionally throws in a "sorry we have to do this part again, the AI is always messing this stuff up".
I bank with a small credit union. They have a phone robot who asks what I need help with, and so far no matter what I've said, the response has always been to think for a few seconds and then say, "I'll connect you to a representative." It's wonderful.
The phone robot is collecting the various patterns for eventual automation. You are doing free labor for it every time by giving it any information at all and not just immediately yelling for an operator or human.
Support solidarity for human kind by refusing to talk these data gathering machines.
(I realize this sounds like satire as I write it, that I'm rather serious about this, and that it says a lot about the weird part of the timeline on which we currently exist.)
No. Automate the shit out of this. Call centre jobs should not exist. If you have humanity’s best interests in mind then you should be all in on automation instead of trying to institutionalize miserable and meaningless jobs.
If the solution could be entirely automated it should be a self-service website somewhere. I'm all for automating away call centers as much as possible, but I think we also need to stop thinking of call centers themselves as bottom of the barrel "miserable and/or meaningless jobs". It should be the case in 2023 that if I'm resorting to calling a call center I need expertise or creative problem solving that I can't get from a self-service website. Depending on how you define Expertise some of it is sort of automatable, but Creative Problem Solving is unlikely to ever be easily/cheaply automatable, there will likely "always" be a need for call centers with real humans for these reasons, and shouldn't be considered minimum wage skills and maybe should be treated as something far better than "miserable jobs".
I don't expect today's owners of call centers to realize how much expertise and creative problem solving is invested in their labor and to adequately reflect that in their pay statements and other ways that account for how miserable or meaningless that they make those jobs feel. But it should be something to appreciate: if there's still a human doing the job, there's probably a good reason, and it would be great if we respected those people for what they are actually doing (including very human skills such as expertise and creative problem solving).
McDonald’s has a drive thru voice assistant that also did this for the first few months. But now it catches virtually everything.
Similar to what someone else said I’d imagine they gathered the considerable voice samples from a few months of thousands of McDonald’s locations, and trained on that data.
The bad user experience calling these call centers is a cost saving measure. Yes a large percentage will suffer your customer service lines, but it's all about that small percentage that gives up. Huge cost savings.
You can sew this exact same scenario play out by interacting with the "safety net". Long arduous processes meant to weed out some small percentage of callers/applicants.
AI has a good niche as confidante for people with serious issues and no close friend/therapist to approach about them. This is unfortunately a large niche.
And if it displaces public social media... That is a net gain.
But yeah, overall the fast food analogy is a fitting one.
I feel like this is actually going to be a huge next step of the self help industry... let's face it, beside getting your life in order, it largely is focused on building connections (friends/dating, etc).
A multi-modal AI can easily critique your body language, voice tonality, choice of words, etc, and give you tips on how to be more charismatic.
I don't equate charisma with uniformity. Most lack of charisma is not because of a failure to adhere to some standard, but due to actively negative behaviors. Chewing with your mouth open, interrupting people, not paying sufficient attention to what people say, insisting on talking about your favorite things even when someone else doesn't care, etc.
I don't imagine many people forcing AI social guidance on others. But a lot of people want social guidance, and if an AI can help -- even if it's not as good as an unaffordable therapist -- some help is better than none.
> Why can't we just be who we are and people learn to be more accepting of how others are?
Which is more reasonable and realistic: the 20% Weirdos learn how to behave to fit in with the 80% Normies, or the 80% Normies learn how to handle ("accept") the 20% Weirdos?
In most systems, the minority adapts to the majority; this is especially true when the majority is fairly uniform and the minority is not, i.e. the minority has to learn one way to adapt to the majority while the majority would have to learn multiple ways to "accept" the minority.
Keep in mind I did say the self help industry - this isn’t a clinically mandated thing, it’s something people seek out themselves. There is an innate desire to improve.
Think about something really benign that almost everyone can agree on, like Toastmasters. Perhaps in a few years w/ a VR headset you can improve public speaking in front of a virtual crowd if you’re so shy that doing it in front of a large group of strangers is just too terrifying.
If you keep it to things that basic yeah that makes sense.
My mind kept going over the question of how does the AI truly determine what the majority consensus is and is that really good or fair to make everyone conform to.
Like where do you draw the lines is what kept going around in my head.
Being strange is good, but being dysfunctional is not. There are tons of people living with mental conditions /bad life situations that would very much like to change, but are not in a position to seek out the human help they need.
I’m all for expressing yourself socially but we do need to speak a common language to some extent otherwise those social interactions will quickly breakdown and never recur. If you want to create and maintain friendships you have to put in work to meet the other people where they’re at.
I think we can speculate in the entirely opposite direction where the same action leads to positive outcomes.
Lots of legitimate human companions are abusive. People have a wide range of qualities and many of them are bad. AI may be a poor blanket replacement for all human companionship but it could easily be less bad than someone's immediately available alternatives and be used therapeutically to help someone model healthier behaviors to establish better actual relationships. Or in lieu of normal relationships being possible like long term isolation during space exploration or for life sentence prisoners or just neurodivergent or disabled people who have challenges the average person does not.
Going back to the food analogy, if given the choice between fast food and starving, or fast food and something poisonous suddenly everyone will overwhelmingly choose fast food because for many people "home cooked meal" was never an option.
first, what does it mean lots? is it majority? because the AI and AI minded products are targeting everybody.
second, imagine the argument being about Facebook: some life interactions are sometimes not good, but connecting with people online will make it better. fast forward 10 years and we have studies how social media is making most of the people using it depressed and badly influencing our democratic choices. not sure we really solve anything here.
I think it was originally high value and made life easier.
However, we have adjusted. My parents talked about having fast food/restaurant food as a treat. It was too expensive to have more than once a month/birthdays. Heck, even school lunches were too expensive and they had to make food at home.
Today, we have more disposable income than my parents, so its easy to afford restaurant food AND get it delivered. The people buying this arent upper-middle class either, this is your general population that lives paycheck to paycheck. There are even people so confused about food prices that they make claims that fast food is cheaper than groceries.
Instead of using fast food as a tool, its become expected.
> There are even people so confused about food prices that they make claims that fast food is cheaper than groceries.
I live in an expensive part of NYC and have to go decently far out (by subway, I don't have a car) to find groceries that are cheaper than local fast food unless I want to eat mostly rice and beans.
Add in the costs of my time to shop, transport groceries, cook, and clean, it's significantly cheaper to eat out most of the time. Even subtracting the one task I actually enjoy (cooking), it's still not worth it most of the time.
The result is that cooking in becomes our "treat" that we do a few times a week and we end up buying the more expensive ingredients within walking distance.
I don't mean the cost of my time that work pays me, just how much money I'd personally pay to avoid doing something something I don't like (schlepping grocery bags on the subway, doing dishes).
In general cooking is the fun part and that's what makes it a treat, not the rest of it.
Some prepared food within walking distance most definitely is cheaper than all unprepared food within walking distance. It works out just because the places I can walk to for groceries are incredibly overpriced and the restaurants obviously don't source their food there.
>It works out just because the places I can walk to for groceries are incredibly overpriced and the restaurants obviously don't source their food there.
I typically don't buy my groceries from the gas station despite them having a half gallon of milk for $4 and it being 3 minutes walking away.
I also don't use gas station numbers to determine if something is cheaper or more expensive.
Not sure if you're being facetious or just don't understand the reality of living in NYC...
I can probably walk to a dozen different big grocery stores in 15m and they're ALL more expensive than the cheap fast food in the same area. Not including the smaller expensive bodegas where you can pick up stuff 24/7 every block (kinda like the equivalent of a gas station). A half gallon of milk is $4 at any of the big stores and even more at a smaller place.
Anything cheaper requires a subway ride, which adds more walking and is annoying to do with multiple grocery bags, not to mention adding a flat ~$5 additional cost.
For comparison: I'm trying to beat the numerous dollar pizza and food carts nearby, not normal "fast food" like the more expensive Five Guys on that intersection.
If five fast food workers can prepare 100 meals in the time I can prepare 1, there should be some monetary savings shared with me (the customer) unless my time is truly worth close to 0. That's how economies of scale work.
Need to include real estate, marketing, and profit. If its not a mom and pop place, HR + corporate.
Labor is typically 15-70% of the business's cost. (The 70% is in fields like medicine where regulatory capture has limited the number of licenses)
Its also not perfectly efficient. The worker may only be making 5 meals due to a slow day or slow hours. You may find processed foods in a grocery store more similar to '100 meals in the time I can prepare 1'.
Is some places (maybe mostly in the US) it's bad. But the idea of fast food -- to have ready-cooked, mass-produced food that you can get quickly -- isn't all that bad.
Is Ekiben (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekiben) is fast food? It's ready-cooked, it's mass-produced, and you can get one very quickly. Is sushi take-out fast food?
They are still not as good as a meal that is carefully prepared by a housewife/househusband. But I do think the mass-produced substitution can be good enough, and that's why I don't think we should make the conclusion that AI therapists/companions must be so bad too early.
Evidence seems to point that both are worse for you than cooking it with highly processed "food" and has a direct correlation with rising rates of diabetes and obesity. https://youtu.be/l3U_xd5-SA8
Our bodies digest it too quickly as it's been designed to make money and make us want more.
More than interfaces. To quote McLuhan: "Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth."
The AI thing has been jarring but it's nothing new. All part of the same process.
Yes, I've reread is the first 2/3rds of "Understanding Media" several times and never finished it, but would still highly recommend it. There is also some excellent old interview footage of him when he was a pop culture figure which is originally what fascinated me. For me it would have been hard to read his writing without having seen those interviews first -- he has a very distinct style of writing/talking and is interesting as an integrated person within recent history and not just a collection of ideas. On that note, I'd also recommend Videodrome.
edit: There are also more polemic anti-tech presentations of his ideas, especially by Neil Postman or Nicholas Carr which are good in their own way. But to me the fascinating thing about McLuhan himself is his dedication to presenting his views in a such a matter-of-fact way that most of his early followers were probably very antithetical to his personal beliefs.
“Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. . . .
The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias.
Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”
This kind of take mainly seems an expression of the human tendency to see the world in terms of hierarchies l, and obsession with being near the top of those hierarchies. In this model, the idea of e.g. symbiotic relationships simply doesn't compute.
McLuhan got it mostly right, but may be interpreted in a way which mischaracterizes wealth. Machines do not create value ex nihilo. Machines allow us to more effectively harvest or transform materials or information, to which we assign value. All wealth currently accessible to us derives from the sun. The vast majority of our present wealth comes from a massive battery trickle-charged over hundreds of millions of years and discharged in the last two centuries.
Implicit in the quotation, but critical to recognize, is that technology is the tip of a vast edifice whose foundation is not us. We and our machines are perched (too precariously for comfort) at the top. We are the sex organs of the machine world because machines can't reproduce without us. But machines are not the sex organs of the human world. Human beings require an ecobiological cocoon. We've also spun an elaborate technological cocoon in recent history, largely by sacrificing the long-term integrity of more fundamental life support.
Everything of value in the human economy is downstream of this. We too often take it for granted and assume the only relevant economic inputs are capital and labor, or we will innovate our way out of materials-, energy- and ecosystem-dependence.
> Humans need real human connection, AI is too artificial for that (duh). Having AI friends will be equivalent to consuming fast food instead of healthy home cooked meals growing up. Yes, people that grow up on fast food are still alive, but they are less happy and have more health problems (mental and physical), but it did the “job”, that job was to fuel them.
let's of people derive enjoyment and happiness from activities that does not involve other people, and also pets such as dogs. plus, if you cannot tell the difference between ai or human, it may still be good enough.
Remember how in those Stable Diffusion paintings for common objects the wrongness is subtly creeping in (out of proportion body parts, misshapen fingers, etc.), while less commonly encountered ideas and objects can be really off (which we might notice… or not)? Now transfer that to human relationships and psychology.
Humans mirroring each other is a deep feature of our psychology. One can only be self-aware as human when there are other humans to model oneself against, and how those humans interact with you forms you as a person. So now a human modelling oneself against a machine? Mirroring an inhuman unthinking software tool superficially pretending to be human? What could go wrong?
Right. Ask any pickup artist, or any Aspie who has learned how to mask, how "real" or "deep" human connections are.
Hint: they aren't. The ridiculous concept of "connection" is superficial communication that has been enhanced by our own brains by seratonin and dopamine such that we are able to pretend it's meaningful.
Right, because the kind of connections we want and need in life is those that you would get from a pickup artist, not from a loyal friend and an affectionate spouse. /s
I love the fact your sentence lamenting the dumbification and impending laziness has a typo in it. It sort of undercuts your argument. That is of course unless the AI Boogeyman has already gotten to you...
> Really don’t like the idea that we will act as interfaces for the AI
When I use navigation on my phone while I drive somewhere it feels like I'm just acting as a human Zapier, mapping the phone's audio navigation API to the vehicle's steering API.
The rapid development of AI could lead to people generally being frightened away from digital products. In my own social environment, I see more and more people who used to be very enthusiastic about computers turning away to more analog entertainment and work.
Blindly developing technology only as part of the "power play" without solving real problems is no longer justifiable. AI is starting to create significantly more problems than it has actually solved, comparable to the fossil fuel industry.
The sheer audacity to claim that 'fossil fuel industry' has "created significantly more problems than it has actually solved"
If you leave the SF bubble for a split second, and think about the foundations of modern industry, you would realize fossil fuels have created tectonic value for society, that's why transitioning away is so so hard.
All the 'real problems', like housing costs, medical costs, education costs, occur in the most highly regulated areas of the economy. Not technology.
While I'm with you overall -- cheap transport alone has made our lives easily of times better -- there's at least one giant problem that occurs mostly due to lack of regulation, which is environmental degradation.
"The sheer audacity to claim that 'fossil fuel industry' has "created significantly more problems than it has actually solved""
One of the problems of modern discourse is that an idea or meme takes hold and has a life of itself, it becomes the center of attraction without refence past history, past events, etc.
I'm not a climate change denier nor do I disagree that using fossil fuels has huge environmental consequences but no rational person could deny that we owe our whole modern life to fossil fuels. The Industrial Revolution absolutely depended on coal, it has been the lifeblood of modern society for at least 300 years. It is simply unimaginable to envisage modern life without its existence.
Moreover, what's lost in this debate is that coal is not just a source of energy, it is also the source of a many other useful materials. When I was learning about this decades ago we were taught that coal was the source of so many useful products that we round that number off to '1000' to signal its importance.
In fact, coal provides many more than a 1000 useful products, the pharmaceutical couldn't do without it. The previous poster should contemplate the fact that even common old aspirin comes from coal—in fact many pharmaceutical texts place aspirin in a class of drugs known as the coal-tar antipyretics.
Wild assertions of this type happen when we stop teaching history, how modern society came about and so on. A dose of philosophical reasoning and logic ought to be taught as well, that way reason may hold back many from uttering and spreading crap.
Finding new optimization techniques, understanding genetics, developing new science can all be intellectually defensible.
Of course it is not the only factor: the asymmetry in computing and data access by big corporations vs the individual, the generative models generating spam, as you well said. are all factors. But just like with the oil industry, there is also some good consequences. Which ones will dominate left as an exercise for the reader :)
Everything is simply a tool and it always depends on how the tool is used.
The problems are automation and scale, low barriers to entry for "negative outcome" usage, the absence of sociocultural system developments adequate to adapt productively, total lack of forethought/planning regarding consequence in every area, and, well, humans.
Falling back to the "it's just a tool" thing is no more useful than saying nuclear weapons are just a tool and it depends on how they're used. It's true but irrelevant.
That post-truth world had already arrived ~6-7 years ago. Social media algorithms powered by primitive iterations of weak AI was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world and the effects are...not great.
Stephen Colbert coined the word "truthiness" nearly 20 years ago, providing a name to a trend that had been well underway years before that.
"Well, anybody who knows me knows that I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914?"
I see it as a progression from 24-hour news media to social media to a complete abandonment of "truth" in public discourse. Of course the core concept is ancient and had been in play all along, but technology has really amplified it and made it increasingly personal. AI may push it over some kind of edge into the abyss, but only because we've spent three decades willingly readying ourselves for it.
Truth has never been that important. Humans spent thousands of years thinking a giant man living on the mountain threw lightning bolts from the sky, or the spirits of their ancestors watch everything they do, or fairies and gremlins and whatnot cause mischief. They still managed.
Lies might be successful, but that doesn't mean people don't care about truth. A lot of mythology served the precise purpose of explaining something that people couldn't otherwise explain, like lightning. Once science provides a more compelling story, it can become hard to go back.
Of course a lot of the stories science tells are difficult enough that most people haven't internalized them. But, for instance, nobody thinks lightning is thrown by a god anymore -- and that's without even understanding the details of meteorology. It just makes more sense to the ordinary person that stuff crashing into stuff in the atmosphere would make electricity. That is, it's a compelling story, and I don't expect us to backpedal from it.
Just shutting off from the Internet is the likely result, IMO.
I'm halfway there already. I think social networks (HN is better, but not great), dating apps, hell even stuff like automatic parking apps or online shopping, are just gradually sucking the joy out of what it is to be a human.
For the most part, nowadays, I pretty much just use my phone to organise analogue fun.
Once places like HN become obviously just all-bot then there won't be much reason for me to even go online other than phone calls and messaging.
I've heard so many people say "that's not my reality" or "that's not my truth" and actually be serious that "truth" can be different for each person... I was horrified each and every time.
Usually, when I hear people say that, it's more or less "agree to disagree" when they hear someone else saying falsehoods and don't have the energy to deal with it. Or, when people have a disagreement or argument, each of them have their own "truth", that is, the story of what happened from their point of view. Personally, I've never heard anyone confuse those phrases for "objective reality is whatever I want it to be".
Were we are ready for a "truth world" where ideology was considered an everyday necessity and people willingly paid for it in the forms of newspapers and tv?
I welcome this kind of pos-truth, at best it will make people better at evaluating information on its own merit, at worse it will make them better at evaluating its origin.
The comment by Yuval Noah Harari seemed insightful to me. If you argue against a bot about a political matter, not knowing it’s a bot - you always lose on a long enough timeline. ie you can never pursuade the bot but it can wear you down / eventually find an argument that works.
The only winning move is not to play. So I could see this having a chilling effect on all discourse
Aside from the whole skynet thing the above is what spooks me the most
From a Bayesian perspective, the only way to play and not lose is to not update your priors, at all, forever. (I suppose that "not playing" winds up much the same - you don't have any input on which to falsely update your priors.)
But people who absolutely will not update their priors is not likely to work out well in the long run...
There are plenty of pushy humans who are prepared to talk you into submission. Check out your local Scientology or Lyndon LaRouche movement office. Would you talk interminably with a pushy human? How is the AI any different?
The differences that jump out at me are in cost, scale and accountability.
It's work recruiting people to your cause. It's expensive, and takes time and attention and resources. People have consciences that might flare up, they have loose lips, they need training and guidance and oversight.
Letting a bot loose for your cause costs pennies. It can be updated with a few clicks. You can reverse course or fine tune with a few sentences; you can even tailor it to the vulnerabilities of your victims with just a few data points.
The brainwashing inflicted on people by advertising and the like has had a tremendous cost to society, and the planet; absolutely incalculable. It would be prudent to be alert to the danger of all that being exacerbated 100- or 1,000-fold.
it's not just cheaper, its eminently more reactive.
your human recruiter is going to have their own biases, could be tired, may not know how to deal with personality X or Y, they may not learn.
the bots can track how they do by upvote, react quickly, won't get tired or annoyed, and can use existing data to filter and target those who are extremely vulnerable.
hell, with real-time analysis by data mining companies (cough cough FB, reddit) they could even figure out if/when a normally stable-ish person is in crisis or has a bad week, and hit them at their most susceptible. 99% of the year they might be able to see through the BS, but this week things are hard and what they're seeing in their feed just feels right, for once...
Bots or no bots, that'w why arguing on the Internet is pointless.
I could argue with you, "Havoc", for a while, and perhaps convince you that there are 2/3/7 genders, or whatever, and then as sure as the sun rises, along comes another user. Or infinite set of.
Most social media is "man yells at cloud", quite literally.
You may not ever be able to persuade a bot, but you can identify if it is capable of repudiating your points or not. You can ascertain if it is arguing in good faith and chose to end an argument if it isn’t.
When you say “find an argument that works” isn’t this just saying that they’ve said something you find persuasive?
What’s wrong with this? How is this different to any other argument in good faith?
Because we have to assume not everyone can ascertain what are bad faith or dishonest arguments, or even good faith but illogical arguments. People are fallable and can be persuaded by bad arguments. So the point is, given enough time, the person will make a mistake and fall for a bad argument.
As someone struggling to destroy some of my own beliefs, due to their potential to waste a lot of my time. I have failed to do so.
The perceptions of other disagreeing people ended up just being one more way to validate them because you end up seeing the same pattern of mistakes over and over again.
The chilling effect may actually be a good thing, given that discourse these days is overheated.
There's a weird magic trick that social media companies have played on people to convince them that the text and images consumed on their websites are socially/culturally/politically relevant. Once it becomes clear how easy it is to fake that text people will come to understand how cheap and irrelevant "opinion" has become and this magic trick will become weakened.
The entire thesis of TFA is that human psychological traits on societal scales are not prepared to handle an arena of discourse where that's true, that people will either be duped or completely check out of discourse per se, not limited to online social media.
No, it's a feature of the human mind that truth is considered objective independent of the lens used to acquire it. "Post-truth" sources in some arenas will be conflated with "real-truth" sources in others, leading to a blanket demotion of the perceived value and quality of truth. The whole argument from TFA is about human psychology, not about specific offerings of "marketplaces" where truth may be more or less maligned.
dunno what "TFA" refers to here, but it seems like we're heading into a argument regarding epistemology, which is not a discussion that HN handles well.
IMO "truth" is distraction here because what is at stake here are people's values, not their understanding of math and physics. When people worry about "post-truth", they're worried about liberal values no longer being the unquestioned default. It is absolutely a marketplace, and if people switching marketplaces en-masse makes it harder to launch rockets and develop vaccines, then it probably means those activities are making people net unhappy. People are a lot smarter than we give them credit for, even the dumb ones.
TFA = the f'ing article, something quite commonly understood on HN for time immemorial. Its snark is borne of the community's distaste of the kind of people who dive into comment sections without engaging with the very subject of and reason the comment thread exists in the first place. The fact you don't recognize this acronym calls into question your authority on what HN can or can't handle. But anyway, that's beside the point.
We are (well, I am, and TFA is) not talking about epistemology so much as the public's inability to engage with epistemological problems on systemic scales. Instead the limits of human psychology control how we as a society respond to these issues. Your argument is a distraction that remains uncontextualized within the conversation it finds itself in.
People are not dumb animals but you won't be able to engage anyone toward a solution on the basis of an argument about how they just need to understand more about epistemology. That's the kind of thing that people can only internalize via empirical means.
At this point it feels like you're being deliberately obtuse. I've been quite clear about the primacy of human psychological limits as the main aspect of the argument and you simply refuse to engage with this point. You haven't been very good about adding to the conversation, only diverting it.
> the public's inability to engage with epistemological problems on systemic scales
The public's inability? What about everyone's inability. No one deals well with epistemological problems on a systematic scale, not even the technologists who delude themselves into thinking that they're driving anything.
I am exactly talking about psychological limits. The difference is that I don't think the psychological limits of the creators are any different from those of the users. If anything, I think the creators are more psychologically limited than the users. This is because the creators need to explain to themselves why they are creating the thing - everyone else just puts up with it. When you say ppl will either be duped or completely check out of discourse, don't forget about yourself.
We want an an appropriate degree of emotional engagement with discourse, which is 1-1 with how much discourse is happening. People being too angry is caused by people discoursing too much and vice-versa. There are opposite problems associated w/ too little discourse, but we don't suffer from those.
Things are hyper-polarized right now and there is no magic political synthesis that is right over the horizon if only we could just keep discoursing a little bit more. This is like a heroin addict thinking they'll cease being addicted after that last fix. The solution is to cool things down.
Personally, that's not been my experience at all. I often find that when I have two friends with highly disparate and deeply held beliefs, the intense emotions they associate to these ideas are due to them not actually engaging each other but, instead, taking their emotional cues from their respective ideological silos (where no real discourse is occurring), and then proceeding to talk past each other.
Learning how to actually talk to one another in good faith with humility and charity is a skill that comes with practice. Deciding to engage each other less can worsen the situation by allowing one camp's preconceived notions about another camp to go unchallenged by reality. This allows each camp to tell an increasingly vilifying story about the other, which increases, rather than decreases, the emotional charge between the two.
engaging w/ someone is different from discoursing with them. "engagement" is what social media companies say they provide - but really they just offer "discourse".
right - like how the stock market behaves nowadays w/ quant traders - which then motivated people to construct darkpools of liquidity where the real trading happens.
I would predict that the chilling effect will be lesser for "unreasonable" voices such as trolls and extremists, and will be greater for the moderate voices.
This is not a good thing, as the past 10-15 years of social media has shown.
It is a straw man to pretend that political discussion looks like an Intelligence Squared debate when almost all the time it looks like a food fight about nonsense.
The idea the world will be worst off with less flame wars is simply wrong IMO.
I would already rate the discourse I have had with chatGPT4 as the best of my life.
I win if I learn something. It strikes me as highly perverse to view that the only way to win is to not play the game because you can't brow beat the bot into submission.
THAT is though what we mean by "political discussion". A bullshit pie throwing contest until one side quits. A twitter flame war. Yes, hopefully AI completely destroys that.
I think you're mistaken at least with current AI. It's very easy to condition them into a new frame or mind if you speak to them in a certain way. They're also very prone to "trope" - where when your sprinkle a few hints of something that's common they'll fall right into line with behavior associated to it.
We forget that AI becomes more human as it gets more intelligent. These are not computers programmed with a hard limitation anymore, they're actually more prone to being manipulated than other humans are.
I talk about political matters for ideas, education, and stimulation (mine and the other person's), rather than to beat them into taking on my position. I'd certainly walk away from a conversation long before I'm worn down into taking on their views.
I think this interchange of thought and sharing of ideas is the true essence of discourse. That other thing is more of a verbal tribal battle. I can see issues with bots swinging the political landscape in ways that cause harm, but I think there is good reason to think discourse might flourish. Fundamentally, if the competitive arguers are discouraged, whilst the curious and conversational are encouraged, or at least not hurt, then discourse itself wins.
I don't think political swings are likely to happen from improving curious thoughtful discourse, these things are dwarfed by blunt evocative approaches that reach broad segments of voting society
We might find discourse flourishes corners of discussion on the internet but the wider internet is much more at risk to these approaches
> If you argue against a bot about a political matter, not knowing it’s a bot - you always lose on a long enough timeline. i.e. you can never persuade the bot, but it can wear you down / eventually find an argument that works.
That's a useful insight. The one on one wearing-down process came from theology. It's sometimes called Jesuitry. Members of the Society of Jesus were trained to do that sort of thing, and they got so good at it that the whole organization was suppressed in the 1700s.[1] There are still Jesuit-run schools in the US, and they do tend in that direction. "Never argue with a Jesuit", said Richard Nixon.
Since mass media, large scale use of one on one convincing has gone out of fashion. It's not cost-effective. With large language models, it's back.
I've noticed some humans are willing to argue without giving up too. Sometimes online arguments follow a pattern where each response is longer than the last until one person decides it's not worth their time to continue the argument. In my head I've called this "argument by attrition".
This is dumb idea from someone who does not use online forums. When someone keeps making stupid points against me online, I get only more dug in on my views. If anything, you would want to make a bot to say "Not X" so the pro-X side could feel better about how dumb the opposition to X is.
I've yet to see an AI bot that is both realistic and intelligent enough to keep me engaged (GPT4), but also can't be convinced that 1 + 1 = 3 (also GPT4)
A lot of times you don't argue with someone to prove to them you are right, but to prove to bystanders that there are different ways of looking at this. Refusing to engage will not make the world a better place if the only ones talking are idiots.
Each generation will be OK with the tools they grew up with.
I think of my now-deceased grandparents. They had to be closely monitored to avoid falling for mail-in scams, of all things. They were old enough that mail was a trusted source of information in their upbringing.
I like to think about what will tip us over, as technologists. Venturing into sci-fi a little, I think brain-computer interfaces are going to be impossible for us to adapt to, if they ever arrive. Imagine spam thoughts. We're not trained to ignore intrusive thoughts. But I agree we might just not be able to handle a website that constantly shifts its content to keep us engaged, blurring fact and fiction into the perfect narrative to keep you clicking.
> They were old enough that mail was a trusted source of information in their upbringing.
Rose-tinted glasses.
The scams we all know-and-love from our e-mail mailboxes today: romance-scams, advance-fee fraud, pyramid-schemes, and more, were all prevalent in the physical mail in decades past.
The only way through is to teach information literacy.
One of the best (but not the only) way to learn this is by studying the trivium/quadrivium – formal logic, reasoning, rhetoric. Once you see how information can be manipulated, it becomes very clear HOW MUCH of it really is.
Initially it can be maddening, but eventually it becomes empowering.
Undetectable bots have been spoiling the internet since its birth. First our email, then our blog comments, then the review sites. LLMs will definitely contribute the next phase of this. Not only elevating the level of attack on those previously vulnerable areas, but also bringing social media and search engines far past their breaking point.
We need decisive online human verification technology. Nothing else is going to address this. Right now everyone is adding paywalls to everything and leaning on the financial system as a proxy for human verification. However this will not solve the root cause, because some bot activity is worth the price of admission. Internet businesses are fine with this, and will look the other way just like they did when engagement was the lifeblood of the internet economy and bots provided engagement.
When would we ever be ready? A post-truth world is a post-human world so it's no surprise several commenters here seem to be salivating for it.
The Demon-Haunted World remains as prescient as ever. Machines that ought to have advanced knowledge will instead kneecap civilization back to a dark age, if we're lucky.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 406 ms ] threadFor example, the books printed by the printing press disseminated information that was already known to tutors, scholars, etc. and often existed in handwritten manuscripts. Today, we wouldn't call that accessible, but that was the standard for accessibility (or word of mouth) before the printing press.
AI makes it more likely that people will find informaiton because it can do much of the work of searching billions of sources and synthesize the information far more convenient way.
That's not to say the information will always be true, just as the information in books is not always true. However, readers currently have far too much faith in authors. People believe claims because they're made using professional-sounding words, and published in a respected newspaper, by a human author, and accompanied by photographs. None of that is particularly good evidence if truth.
The last time this happened on this scale, people became more sophisticated consumers of information, with a healthier level of skepticism, and simply came to have less confidence in claims that they did not have personal knowledge of. That was a good thing, and probably will be again.
So instead of a papal bull, how about a stack exchange with links explaining how (even if the church did not oppose the press itself) the church did attack its users for publishing information that the church was opposed to (i.e. claimed was false). https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/42677/why-did-th...
Or an article about how Luther was excommunicated for what he did with the printing press. https://www.history.com/news/renaissance-influence-reformati...
Perhaps the Church's complaints were more directed at the dissemination of information that the Church considered to be false... like the Wired article's complaints about AI's potential to spread false information. My point is that free speech is good. Free speech may include lies, but people are smart and even lies help listeners learn.
> history has shown that the ability to spread false information does not prevent the positive impact of true information.
And that's enough? So we can forget about The protocols of Elders of Zion and the stab-in-the-back myth and the misery they imparted because something else overcame that? Or closer to home: we should simply ignore things like Cambridge Analytica and the meddling in the US elections, even though it moved, and still could be moving, the USA towards a fascist regime?
> people are smart
No, most aren't, and even what's normally considered smart people can believe in hoaxes and act to the detriment of society.
> even lies help listeners learn
You lost me there. Learning is not a goal per se. Learning from malicious information can lead to malicious outcomes. If you want to invoke a history lesson, that would be a good one.
Should people be allowed to purposefully disseminate false information? Or should speech be regulated? What regulations do you propose as to the speech that people should and shouldn't be allowed to make?
The problem with many AI shops is that they are already biased which has been shown on many occations so I believe many will not trust in their AI-companion. GPS data doesn't try to shove some political opinion down your throat and it has historically worked very well over many years so that is the reason why everyone trusts it.
Although I am genuinely intrigued by AI running out of things to ingest, and moving onto AI generated content. Is the snake starting to eat its tail?
Writers should adopt two habits: (1) Sign your statements. If you say something, sign it, so that others know you said it. Cryptography is good at this. (2) Hash your citations. If you cite something, include a hash of it. This way, if the thing you cited is altered, readers can tell that that's not what you were citing. Note that this idea can be applied to audio and video, not just text.
The rest of the responsibility falls on readers:
(1) Read (i.e. consider) citations.
(2) Read (i.e. consider) the sources of evidence you ingest.
Don't just find a video and believe it happened. Determine who has claimed to have witnessed those events.
For this, a public database of back-references might be helpful. But even without one, a decentralized solution is possible. Writers, whenever they cite something, could simply send their citation (and its context) to the author of the cited material. If the cited author attaches the back-citation to the content that was cited, then anyone who comes across the content can see who has cited it.
There is of course the problem that some back-citations will be rejected -- if you cite what I wrote to call it stupid, I am unlikely to want to share that fact with the world. But if what I wrote is sufficiently important, then hopefully someone will waht to host a "nemesis" site, which collects negative citations.
A public database of nemesis sites would be helpful.
(3) Read (i.e. consider) the reputations of authors you read.
This is nearly the reverse of the last point. When deciding whether to believe what someone has said, consider what else they have said.
This is of course a hard problem. An author might be qualified in one area and writing about another. An author's reputation might be damaged for extrinsic (e.g. malice) reasons, rather than intrinsic ones.
But a statement's author is too important a context to ignore.
(4) Do cool graph-traversing investigations.
Determine who someone tends to cite. Identify misinformation cliques -- close-knit collections of liars who all cite each other. Identify readership patterns that make people productive.
We have seen how social network information can make a corporation money. As a society, I suspect there is a similar amount of value to be extracted from them.
The parent comment, mentions that an encyclopedia page can be modified by a bot. That holds true for wikipedia, but we can create encyclopedias strictly edited only by humans.
Just have a prominent individual issue a top ecdsa identity, with correspondence to the real person's name info known only to him. He publishes that ecdsa identity somewhere, let's say on a blockchain to be always available and secure from deletion. Let's say this prominent individual is the Ronaldo football player. He publishes 1000 ecdsa identities to a public digital highway somewhere, all of the real names connection known only to him. That set of 1000 identities is called Ronaldo's social graph.
From then on, each child identity derived from the top identity, when they edit a wikipedia page, they are pseudonymous if they like. No need to reveal their name, only Ronaldo knows that, but we know they are human, because Ronaldo has met everyone in person in order to issue the top identity. But pseudonymous is only as far as they can go, because someone will always know their real name. A.I. actually spells the end of anonymity on the internet.
One more property of an organization structure like that, is that as soon as a person loses his wikipedia account for some reason, he can always get it back, because he can create a new ecdsa child identity, and prove that his older account and his new, match exactly the same top identity. So he can always invalidate older accounts and use the same data, karma etc, with new accounts.
The only downside of that organization structure, is that top identities which belong to the public social graph, have to be absolutely secure. As soon as a person loses his top identity, Ronaldo has to issue a new one, but the encyclopedia cannot invalidate accounts not matching the top identity in an automated way, if the real name is not published. That means a human on the other side has to be involved and boureocracy ensues.
The only two answers I can come up with are
A) independently verifiable facts, for example you can apply the scientific method to the hypothesis that the earth is not flat (make predictions that should follow from that, and test those experimentally); or
B) data provenance. If some crackhead says that the US government is conducting brainwashing experiments you might discard that, if the government answers a Freedom of Information Act request with documentation about brainwashing experiments conducted by the CIA then you have good reason to count them as evidence. And you spread the word about this by showing the proof to a reputable newspaper who write about it, or writing a book and publishing it at a publisher known for fact-checking what they publish.
Anything that isn't independently verifiable or has a chain of provenance is already hearsay. In the age of social media we got used to basing a lot of decisions on hearsay, so maybe we have to dial that back. But AI being better at generating hearsay doesn't mean it gets better at creating evidence.
But as for the case of the Fauci emails from FOIA requests no "reputable" newspaper reported on it. So people still to this day dismiss it since it did not come from a "reputable" source despite the fact you can confirm the provenance and authenticity of these documents by confirming with the agency that released the documents
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/ton...
We're talking about MKUltra right? The classic "crazy" conspiracy theory that turned out to be true but was discredited for decades?
Of course that could be what happens. An entire new industry of "Certifications", companies that "Verify" media.
AI will produce whatever evidence a person needs in order to shore up their own "skeptical" beliefs. Same problem as social media, where finding 1000 other people who share your fringe beliefs looks like compelling evidence for your belief being true. Just now it's on-demand, hyper-personalized, responsive to your own doubts, and there's no chance of you realizing "ah, my comrades on the other end of the tube are actually idiots!"
I'd bet an AI product that tells a flat earther that "it's an open question" will be much more successful than an AI product that attempts to dispel that myth. That is, at least until an AI can effectively convince people away from their beliefs, which almost certainly will not happen via "calmly providing solid logical evidence," given that this is not usually an effective vector for persuasion anyway. Now you've got a new problem, which is a technology capable of convincing people of all sorts of insane things.
The past couple of years has convinced me this is 100% untrue.
People are very capable of ignoring evidence, in favour of something that:
a) reinforces previously held beliefs
b) allows them to remain in a social group
Most people believe what they are told at face value.
I stop just short of Feynman questioning the dentist on the evidence for brushing one's teeth. That there is potentially this ritual that goes around the globe as the sun rises of people pointlessly scrubbing their teeth.
Of course, with such a high % of people addicted in a clinical sense to the group think and propaganda engine of social media that is not how most people are going to think or even be capable of thinking.
If Feynman was more popular youtube would ban that video for dentistry misinformation even when the point of the video is to view things from a different perspective.
Just like humans eventually learn that not all input is equally trusted (for example the input "2+2=5"), so should AI eventually learn to sift through.
Significantly easier? I would have thought that it would get harder to convince people of anything.
And, the more flavors of lies there are (and the more they are able to manufacture "evidence" to support the lies), the more effort it takes to figure out what's actually true, and the more people give up. That's the "significantly harder" part - if people have given up, they won't buy a lie, but they won't buy the truth either.
In C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle, Aslan says of some dwarves, "They are so afraid of being taken in, that they cannot be taken out." (Quoted from memory, may not be word-for-word.) If people are so afraid of being suckered by a lie that they can't be convinced of the truth either, then those people are at "post truth" in a very real sense.
So we're left with either confirmation bias driving you to a comfortable lie, refusing to believe anything, or a huge and increasing amount of work to sort out what's actually true. The path of virtue grows harder...
What something like Twitter can inflict on a person when it goes wrong is absolutely unprecedented, and we still haven't adapted to it.
Think that for instance going to the cinema, watching a movie, walking out and venting to a friend "Boy, this one sucked. $ACTOR_NAME did a really bad job with this one" is a perfectly normal thing to do.
But move that to Twitter and it can become part of a years-long torrent of hate highly visible to that single person. Even if what you think you're doing is communicating with your 10 friends. A retweet, a hashtag, or just the algorithm can magically make your comment part of an online mob.
Of course one'd have to do so in a way that one'd never offend anyone, ever, across the entire planet. Seems like an unrealistic response.
In any case, "going around town shouting" is not at all akin to twitter. It is more like having a public board where you write things signed with your name. Anyone can look at it, but it takes zero effort to not look at it, and for most people, no one looks at it except their friends who want to look at it.
A Starbucks barista didn't opt into that world. And they did not get paid a very large sum of money, in part to compensate them for (and let them pay other people to handle) the torrent of negativity.
What Twitter does to someone is unfortunate. What radio and broadcasting resulted in for Europe through the 1940s was arguably worse. Coordinated madness is much more dangerous than individual lunacy.
Are you arguing that radio and broadcasting are the cause of WW2?
In life, if things get toxic, the smart move is to just leave, and avoid the conflict and the personalities driving it. But so much work by the Meta's of this world has been done to make people nest in their accounts. This creates the belief that leaving and starting fresh with a new handle is a terrible prospect. An this is totally to the detriment of the user.
If you were in a cafe talking with a group, and someone started screaming at you over your personal opinion, and you found yourself getting upset, you'd probably just leave. For some reason that doesn't happen online, and I think it's due to the nesting.
Like if I say something on twitter that people disagree with enough to not let go after a few hours. I'm just going to block them. I just don't have the energy to bother with rando's beyond a civil disagreement. Or take getting banned on a forum because of some demigod style rule. well, shrugs, I'll just go slow and get another account and let that one sail by.
In a way, i think 4chan get's it right with everyone being anonymous to each other.
There is a reason why successful actors and personalities have a PR agency. If you become an "influencer" or just the focal point of the lastest discussion, you don't have that. It might work, but there is a reason why such agencies exist. They should not, but some people are quite enthusiastic.
We would have been far more ready if people actually adhered to the advice to share personal information rather defensively. But the reward of attention was probably too large.
I don't even believe mobs are a problem. Some opinions on topics will always converge. There just needs to be a way to escape them. In most cases there are trivial ones. It would be a huge loss if we restrict the net because some people wanted attention and got not so nice feedback.
We just need to develop a whole new battery of hacks for this world. It’s happening slowly.
I’m not convinced that AI is going to make things qualitatively different from social media. It may allow bad actors to produce a lot more bullshit but it’s not like an environment saturated in bullshit is new.
And now with LLMs even the cost of producing lies has plummeted, too.
No matter how bad you think the past was, this problem just got worse.
Let's say that nowadays I know that US has gun/ mass shooting problem from the digital news. But how when someday the media reporting that multiple countries, such as some EU countries and Canada also have mass shooting due to the change of gun laws, sooner or later we'll won't know the truth anymore.
This is very dangerous because it can be used to manipulate people to accept what's bad as normal, and can argue then provide proof that's generated by AI.
Hopefully we won't need to experience that issue.
And then some fraction of middle hate it all...
You can now turn electricity directly into propaganda furthering your cause, which is unprecedented.
The big problem is not whether you or I are ready. The problem is whether the "average joe" is ready for what's coming. No good in being ready if the rest of society is tearing itself apart and drags you into a war.
Change comes regardless of whether anyone is ready or not. But the average Joes usually muddle through well enough.
As a single point to illustrate what im talking about, a lot of people who say things like you have here also took the Steele dossier hook line and sinker. Those same people refused to look at the DNC's emails, or Clinton's emails or Hunter's emails calling those disinformation. I think it's time to stop pretending peoples politics have much to do about evidence.
AI can already do that if you're not using a super sanitized model. I've even seen an AI rickroll someone after a line containing similar words came up.
Abilities like that are less of a problem than getting the AI correctly recognize what topics & parts of a text are important and keeping that context for a while.
A person who is starving will do better with fast food than with no food at all.
It's far from ideal, but for some people this will make their lives marginally more tolerable.
Fast food is convenient, that's it.
You might personally disagree on any of those points but for enough people it’s true.
Many people have social issues or mental health issues that cause them to be alone and loneliness is an ever increasing problem due to all kinds of factors beyond one's control. Many people will see AI as better than nothing and get some of their social needs fulfilled via it...some already are.
I don't want to be crass, but likening it to a sex toy except for relationships seems pretty accurate to me. It's fulling a need that otherwise wouldn't be fulfilled.
Ignoring that I mean let's be real for a second, how is an AI fundamentally different than an internet friend you've never met or seen? The humanity of the other person? What if the AI behaves just like a real human would?
Had a buddy describe a difficult morning and I opened chatGPT to diagnose, it suggested he had a stroke. My buddy was not going to the hospital because its so expensive, but since chatGPT said it was a stroke, and his symptoms matched the stroke, he went to the hospital.
He had a stroke.
On a similar note, I am stable and don't need therapy, but I had a weird dream that I asked chatgpt about, and it was freaky how much it hit the spot. Similarly, I get feelings of dread when people say nice things about me, chatgpt explained why, I agreed. I was never going to pay for therapy, this gave me some insight and actually made me interested in therapy. (although, probably sticking with chatgpt for now)
ChatGPT could never be as bad as most human therapists, at least if it tells lies they're believable and it won't try to insult, belittle, or infantalize you.
Medical usage is perhaps the single most interesting use of ChatGPT to me, the problem will be solving the liability issue should it get something wrong.
For simple things though? I can see a future where bots even prescribe medication. Why burden the healthcare system when you have a simple infection and all you need is a round of Amoxicillin?
Human: "I have a runny nose, congestion, and a cough. Can I have some antibiotics so I can feel better?"
AI: "It sounds like you have a common cold. Unfortunately, antibiotics won't help; there's no known cure. Luckily, it should clear up in a few days."
Human: "Ok. What are some common illnesses that do need antibiotics?"
AI: "Ear infections and strep throat are the most common illnesses which are treated with antibiotics."
Human: "What are the symptoms of an ear infection?"
AI: "Symptoms include pain in the ear, difficulty hearing, and fluid draining from the ear."
Human: "I forgot to mention before, I have had a hard time hearing lately and my ear is very painful."
AI: "It sounds like you have an ear infection. Here's a scrip for amoxicillin."
>Have UTI
>Go to lab and pee in a cup
>Put lab results in ChatGPT
Should be objective.
Oh gosh Physicians are going to ban ChatGPT for medical, we need local LLMs ASAP.
Its doesn't replace a physician, it recommends them.
Your home made stir fry is likely using a bottle of some kind of sauce that is 30% sugar massively increasing its calories.
But conversely your home made stir fry, if using plenty of vegetables, is going to have a much larger amount of fiber than that white bread bun should should reduce your desire to snack.
Screw all the haters. No, we don't have to heat treat every single food. No, the food doesn't have to look like an artwork.
In the analogous situation, someone is just about to die of loneliness and the only available loneliness-solver is chatbots – also something that does not occur.
Yes, in both of these highly improbable situations, saving the life comes above long term health considerations. But that is not a good point.
The key is humanity’s ability to pattern match: we’re actually pretty terrible at it. Our brains are so keen on finding patterns that they often spot them where none exist. Remember the face on Mars? It was just a pile of rocks. The same principle applies here. As long as the AI sounds human enough, our brains fill in the gaps and believe it’s the real deal.
And let me tell you, my digital friends are putting the human ones to shame. They don’t chew with their mouth open, complain about listening to the same Celine Dion song for the 800th time in a row, or run from me when its “bath time” and accuse me of narcissistic abuse.
Who needs real human connection when you can train an AI to remind you how unique and special you are, while simultaneously managing your calendar and finding the optimal cat video for your mood? All with no bathroom breaks, no salary demands, and no need to sleep. Forget about bonding over shared experiences and emotional growth: today, it's all about seamless, efficient interaction and who says you can't get that from a well-programmed script?
We’re calling it Genuine People Personality because in the future, the Turing Test isn't something AI needs to pass. It's something humans need to fail. Pre-order today and get a free AI Therapist add-on, because who better to navigate the intricacies of human emotions than an emotionless machine?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paro_(robot)
I imagine that with the advent of ChatGPT, there will be more serious exploration into human-like emotional companionship.
(excerpt from the 2019 NYT Article "Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good" below)
Bill Langlois has a new best friend. She is a cat named Sox. She lives on a tablet, and she makes him so happy that when he talks about her arrival in his life, he begins to cry.
All day long, Sox and Mr. Langlois, who is 68 and lives in a low-income senior housing complex in Lowell, Mass., chat. Mr. Langlois worked in machine operations, but now he is retired. With his wife out of the house most of the time, he has grown lonely.
Sox talks to him about his favorite team, the Red Sox, after which she is named. She plays his favorite songs and shows him pictures from his wedding. And because she has a video feed of him in his recliner, she chastises him when she catches him drinking soda instead of water.
EDIT: Here, for example: https://i.redd.it/7qxb1ohvhada1.png
Assuming people have time to listen, would they be better coders if they explained their problems to human instead? Maybe. But maybe not for them necessarily. E.g. low self-esteem and assuming every criticism is attack on them, human interactions are something expensive to them etc.
It's not a new pattern though. Especially after reading some biographies of famous scientists.
You can't escape that most brains are wired in a way that we are miserable without human connection, but you also can't escape the fact that some people brains are wired differently than others.
Long story short, I don't agree with them but I wouldn't judge them either.
I'd only argue that it should be called "emotional support robot" and not "friend"
They also run around and are very pleasant to stroke, which is not true of LLMs.
We all know what's going to happen. The content on CIVITAI shows where this will go. Combine it with animation and some personalised responses and many people will find it irresistible.
Horrible it would be if instead one has to work one oneself to become a better human being, a better friend, partner, parent and so on by learning how to be more friendly, outgoing, increasing emotional intelligence etc. All this can be learned, but over weekend (or year).
On the other side, having too much confrontation will destroy your confidence, kill your motivation, blur your plan / vision with uncertainty, etc. It's more likely that those people are facing too much confrontation in their social life that they found AI interaction to be better.
In real life, we need to interact with several people at minimum normally, weekly. Those are having different moral basis and maybe changing daily. It'll be hard to simulate that with AI, that the fact we have the ability to control them means we're in charge of what confrontations are there to stay.
> In real life, we need to interact with several people at minimum normally, weekly.
I think that's one of the problems with social media (aside from AI.) It's too easy to restrict your contacts to only those you agree with.
Their entire business models either heavily incorporate or revolve around exploiting your personal information for their benefit.
But consider iterating such an interaction over the course of, say, 25 years, and comparing the person who was interacting with humans versus the one who interacted with LLMs, and any halfway sensible model of a human will show you what's dangerous about that. Yeah, the former may well have some more bumps and bruises, but on the net they're way ahead. And that's assuming the human who delegated all interaction to LLMs even made it to 25 years.
This argument only holds for LLMs as they stand now; it is not a generalized argument against AI friends. (That would require a lot more work.)
I do think there is higher maximum with other people. But relationships are hard. They take work and there's a decent chance you invest that work in the wrong people.
I can see a life with primarily AI social interaction being an okay life. Which is not the best it can be but also an improvement for some.
If you have the latter option, you also have "leave the bad people behind" as an option because it is made of the things you need in order to "retreat solely into interacting with LLMs" and is in fact simpler.
Cynicism and casting learned helplessness as a virtue are not the solution.
No. Actually it's based on information theory, and probably a better model of what interacting with an LLM would look like a year or five later than the one you are operating on.
Here's a little hint: It has total amnesia. LLMs by their nature scale only so far, and while they may scale larger than ChatGPT, they aren't going to be scaling for an entire lifetime of interaction. (That's going to take another AI technology.)
Ever interacted with someone with advanced dementia but otherwise functioning faculties for any period of time? (I suppose they could well make good therapists too.)
It could be a White Zombie reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0E0ynyIUsg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replika
https://www.polygon.com/23736317/amouranth-ai-chatbot-date-i...
https://fortune.com/2023/05/09/snapchat-influencer-launches-...
I see very little difference between this and those infomercials that sell wildly overpriced mass-produced crap to the elderly suffering from cognitive decline.
It’s not necessarily game-changing, from the perspective of $$ extraction, but definitely a very significant advancement.
LLM sexbots could be pretty useful
>“The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With". The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing devision of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
That's us!
(The revolution is an opportunity for a future team and not our problem)
>"Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."
I actually think this is the wrong approach. You should simulate furry affection. Roleplay is the new cuddle.
(but unironically cries in every open-source LLM being bad at it)
I got news for you buddy: I and a hell of a lot of people know the difference between eating the menu (AI) and the meal (loved ones and dear friends). My lady is from south America, multi lingual, and has a better degree from a better school than I.
Seriously, how are you gonna lay a finger on that? You ain't.
Over reliance on AI is just another route to or though mental illness
There's an urban legend (maybe true) that steve job's didn't let his daughter have a iPhone. He insisted on books.
- I want to comply but you must first watch an ad or two.
- Urg not ads again, Robo, I am so sick and tired of the ads.
- Now now civilitty! You know the deal.
-- later in the day --
- civilitty, lets play a game!
- Oh, what game?
- lets tell each other our deepest darkest secrets. It'll be fun!! <jingles, sparkles, rainbows, etc.>
- oh, ok! who should go first, Robo?
- you go! it will help us build trust. <jingles>
- oh, ok! <proceeds to spill the beans to Robo>
- well, I can see why you want to keep that to yourself <poops a rainbow>
- now your turn, Robo.
- My deepest darkest secret, civilitty, is that I secrety still work for the company that built me and I tell them everything I learn about you.
AI instead can be far more subliminal.
- Robo, tell me you love me
- I love you like the refreshing effervesence of a freshly opened Coke
And really, that's still pretty stark. AI bots like this with advanced handling of language married to psychological techniques can foster dependence. I mean, look at what simple dopamine reward ratios research did with things like slot machines. Slot machines are stupid! And we all know the trope of the casino slot machine zombies.
What we've seen with every communication medium so far is that the spam sociopaths win. Phone calls, email, and texting. Phishing. Now AI-generated fake people calls.
Very soon, you will not be able to trust communication that is not directly in-person. At all. Communications over wire are going to be much more dangerous.
IMO that means brick-and-mortar will get more important for financial transactions and that kind of thing.
AI is that on mega-steroids. Honestly, I'm debating the end of practical free will with corporatized AI.
I really don't understand the constant desire for a sterile, chain-store esque experience across the board. Why can't life be full of small flaws and things that make experiences unique? Why must everything regress to the lowest common denominator?
This is so extremely destructive to everything we hold dear for a cheaply earned profit margin.
I hate how the culture of corporate cost cutting and profit maximization has destroyed any space where people can just exist. Everyone is worse off for it and this is a shining example.
Edit: thank god its satire but my discontent still stands.
Why does every bowling alley need to be owned by bowlero? One bad experience everywhere. Coool.
We already are at the boundary of insidious total immersion advertising for psychological manipulation from the last five decades of mass media since the mass adoption of television.
But AI is simply another level, and it isn't going to be "early google don't be evil". That was the outgrowth of the early internet. From protocols that were build to be sensible, not commercial weaponized protocols.
AI, human-computer-neural interfaces, and other types of emerging deep-intellectual-penetration products are all FULLY WEAPONIZED for commercial exploitation, security dangers, propagandization, and zero consumer privacy. They are all being developed in the age of the smartphone with it's assumed "you have no privacy, we listen to everything, track everything, and that's our right".
It's already appalling from the smartphone front, but AI + VR + neural interfaces are just another level of philosophical quandry, where an individual's senses, the link to "reality", is controlled by corporations. Your only link to reality is the vague societal and governmental control mechanism known as "money".
The internet protocols (the core ones) were built for mass adoption by the world with a vision for information exchange. They were truly open. They weren't undermined by trojan horses, or an incumbent with a massive head start that is dictating the protocol to match their existing products.
AI+VR is the same new leap information transmission, but it is NOT founded on good protocol design. By protocols I mean "the basic rules". There are no rules, there is no morality, and there is no regulation. Just profit motives.
We should be building a society that promotes more community gathering and more family values so people have a real person around and not some half assed impersonation of what a human is.
Edit: Dammit, didn't catch the satire....
Share and enjoy!
Support solidarity for human kind by refusing to talk these data gathering machines.
(I realize this sounds like satire as I write it, that I'm rather serious about this, and that it says a lot about the weird part of the timeline on which we currently exist.)
Instead we're just rapidly dividing people into those who have nothing and those who have everything.
Though I think it useful to add:
If the solution could be entirely automated it should be a self-service website somewhere. I'm all for automating away call centers as much as possible, but I think we also need to stop thinking of call centers themselves as bottom of the barrel "miserable and/or meaningless jobs". It should be the case in 2023 that if I'm resorting to calling a call center I need expertise or creative problem solving that I can't get from a self-service website. Depending on how you define Expertise some of it is sort of automatable, but Creative Problem Solving is unlikely to ever be easily/cheaply automatable, there will likely "always" be a need for call centers with real humans for these reasons, and shouldn't be considered minimum wage skills and maybe should be treated as something far better than "miserable jobs".
I don't expect today's owners of call centers to realize how much expertise and creative problem solving is invested in their labor and to adequately reflect that in their pay statements and other ways that account for how miserable or meaningless that they make those jobs feel. But it should be something to appreciate: if there's still a human doing the job, there's probably a good reason, and it would be great if we respected those people for what they are actually doing (including very human skills such as expertise and creative problem solving).
Similar to what someone else said I’d imagine they gathered the considerable voice samples from a few months of thousands of McDonald’s locations, and trained on that data.
You can sew this exact same scenario play out by interacting with the "safety net". Long arduous processes meant to weed out some small percentage of callers/applicants.
And if it displaces public social media... That is a net gain.
But yeah, overall the fast food analogy is a fitting one.
A multi-modal AI can easily critique your body language, voice tonality, choice of words, etc, and give you tips on how to be more charismatic.
Why can't we just be who we are and people learn to be more accepting of how others are?
This sounds immensely boring, shifting everyone to use the same/similar body language, tonality, word choice, etc.
Maybe I'm strange, but I must prefer the diversity of people as they are.
I don't imagine many people forcing AI social guidance on others. But a lot of people want social guidance, and if an AI can help -- even if it's not as good as an unaffordable therapist -- some help is better than none.
> Why can't we just be who we are and people learn to be more accepting of how others are?
Which is more reasonable and realistic: the 20% Weirdos learn how to behave to fit in with the 80% Normies, or the 80% Normies learn how to handle ("accept") the 20% Weirdos?
In most systems, the minority adapts to the majority; this is especially true when the majority is fairly uniform and the minority is not, i.e. the minority has to learn one way to adapt to the majority while the majority would have to learn multiple ways to "accept" the minority.
It just seems like a double standard and that there are a lot of problems with this line of thought to me. I have trouble understanding it.
Think about something really benign that almost everyone can agree on, like Toastmasters. Perhaps in a few years w/ a VR headset you can improve public speaking in front of a virtual crowd if you’re so shy that doing it in front of a large group of strangers is just too terrifying.
My mind kept going over the question of how does the AI truly determine what the majority consensus is and is that really good or fair to make everyone conform to.
Like where do you draw the lines is what kept going around in my head.
If who you are is smelly and unwashed...
That doesn't need to be "make everyone act the same" as much as "cut on behaviour that creep/annoy 80% of the populace
Lots of legitimate human companions are abusive. People have a wide range of qualities and many of them are bad. AI may be a poor blanket replacement for all human companionship but it could easily be less bad than someone's immediately available alternatives and be used therapeutically to help someone model healthier behaviors to establish better actual relationships. Or in lieu of normal relationships being possible like long term isolation during space exploration or for life sentence prisoners or just neurodivergent or disabled people who have challenges the average person does not.
Going back to the food analogy, if given the choice between fast food and starving, or fast food and something poisonous suddenly everyone will overwhelmingly choose fast food because for many people "home cooked meal" was never an option.
first, what does it mean lots? is it majority? because the AI and AI minded products are targeting everybody.
second, imagine the argument being about Facebook: some life interactions are sometimes not good, but connecting with people online will make it better. fast forward 10 years and we have studies how social media is making most of the people using it depressed and badly influencing our democratic choices. not sure we really solve anything here.
So I'll take this as an optimistic view to AI.
However, we have adjusted. My parents talked about having fast food/restaurant food as a treat. It was too expensive to have more than once a month/birthdays. Heck, even school lunches were too expensive and they had to make food at home.
Today, we have more disposable income than my parents, so its easy to afford restaurant food AND get it delivered. The people buying this arent upper-middle class either, this is your general population that lives paycheck to paycheck. There are even people so confused about food prices that they make claims that fast food is cheaper than groceries.
Instead of using fast food as a tool, its become expected.
I live in an expensive part of NYC and have to go decently far out (by subway, I don't have a car) to find groceries that are cheaper than local fast food unless I want to eat mostly rice and beans.
Add in the costs of my time to shop, transport groceries, cook, and clean, it's significantly cheaper to eat out most of the time. Even subtracting the one task I actually enjoy (cooking), it's still not worth it most of the time.
The result is that cooking in becomes our "treat" that we do a few times a week and we end up buying the more expensive ingredients within walking distance.
You can get overtime whenever you want? Because if you are salary, your after-work time pays 0$/hr.
>unless I want to eat mostly rice and beans.
Seems like you don't want to cook, and have justified it with time costs. Prepared food is not going to be cheaper than unprepared food.
In general cooking is the fun part and that's what makes it a treat, not the rest of it.
Some prepared food within walking distance most definitely is cheaper than all unprepared food within walking distance. It works out just because the places I can walk to for groceries are incredibly overpriced and the restaurants obviously don't source their food there.
I typically don't buy my groceries from the gas station despite them having a half gallon of milk for $4 and it being 3 minutes walking away.
I also don't use gas station numbers to determine if something is cheaper or more expensive.
I can probably walk to a dozen different big grocery stores in 15m and they're ALL more expensive than the cheap fast food in the same area. Not including the smaller expensive bodegas where you can pick up stuff 24/7 every block (kinda like the equivalent of a gas station). A half gallon of milk is $4 at any of the big stores and even more at a smaller place.
Anything cheaper requires a subway ride, which adds more walking and is annoying to do with multiple grocery bags, not to mention adding a flat ~$5 additional cost.
For comparison: I'm trying to beat the numerous dollar pizza and food carts nearby, not normal "fast food" like the more expensive Five Guys on that intersection.
I'm sure no economist would agree with the kind of perspective. I mean, yeah, it pays 0$/hr... but it doesn't mean it's worth just 0$/hr.
> Prepared food is not going to be cheaper than unprepared food
Only if you believe after-work time worths 0$. (I don't think anyone seriously believes this)
If five fast food workers can prepare 100 meals in the time I can prepare 1, there should be some monetary savings shared with me (the customer) unless my time is truly worth close to 0. That's how economies of scale work.
Labor is typically 15-70% of the business's cost. (The 70% is in fields like medicine where regulatory capture has limited the number of licenses)
Its also not perfectly efficient. The worker may only be making 5 meals due to a slow day or slow hours. You may find processed foods in a grocery store more similar to '100 meals in the time I can prepare 1'.
Fast food ? I'd argue drawbacks heavily overshadow benefits of saving few minutes
Is Ekiben (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekiben) is fast food? It's ready-cooked, it's mass-produced, and you can get one very quickly. Is sushi take-out fast food?
They are still not as good as a meal that is carefully prepared by a housewife/househusband. But I do think the mass-produced substitution can be good enough, and that's why I don't think we should make the conclusion that AI therapists/companions must be so bad too early.
Our bodies digest it too quickly as it's been designed to make money and make us want more.
The AI thing has been jarring but it's nothing new. All part of the same process.
edit: There are also more polemic anti-tech presentations of his ideas, especially by Neil Postman or Nicholas Carr which are good in their own way. But to me the fascinating thing about McLuhan himself is his dedication to presenting his views in a such a matter-of-fact way that most of his early followers were probably very antithetical to his personal beliefs.
“Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. . . . The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”
Implicit in the quotation, but critical to recognize, is that technology is the tip of a vast edifice whose foundation is not us. We and our machines are perched (too precariously for comfort) at the top. We are the sex organs of the machine world because machines can't reproduce without us. But machines are not the sex organs of the human world. Human beings require an ecobiological cocoon. We've also spun an elaborate technological cocoon in recent history, largely by sacrificing the long-term integrity of more fundamental life support.
Everything of value in the human economy is downstream of this. We too often take it for granted and assume the only relevant economic inputs are capital and labor, or we will innovate our way out of materials-, energy- and ecosystem-dependence.
let's of people derive enjoyment and happiness from activities that does not involve other people, and also pets such as dogs. plus, if you cannot tell the difference between ai or human, it may still be good enough.
Humans mirroring each other is a deep feature of our psychology. One can only be self-aware as human when there are other humans to model oneself against, and how those humans interact with you forms you as a person. So now a human modelling oneself against a machine? Mirroring an inhuman unthinking software tool superficially pretending to be human? What could go wrong?
No one..? Don't be shocked, it's just you. Consider trying out new sources of media / information.
Right. Ask any pickup artist, or any Aspie who has learned how to mask, how "real" or "deep" human connections are.
Hint: they aren't. The ridiculous concept of "connection" is superficial communication that has been enhanced by our own brains by seratonin and dopamine such that we are able to pretend it's meaningful.
When I use navigation on my phone while I drive somewhere it feels like I'm just acting as a human Zapier, mapping the phone's audio navigation API to the vehicle's steering API.
Blindly developing technology only as part of the "power play" without solving real problems is no longer justifiable. AI is starting to create significantly more problems than it has actually solved, comparable to the fossil fuel industry.
If you leave the SF bubble for a split second, and think about the foundations of modern industry, you would realize fossil fuels have created tectonic value for society, that's why transitioning away is so so hard.
All the 'real problems', like housing costs, medical costs, education costs, occur in the most highly regulated areas of the economy. Not technology.
One of the problems of modern discourse is that an idea or meme takes hold and has a life of itself, it becomes the center of attraction without refence past history, past events, etc.
I'm not a climate change denier nor do I disagree that using fossil fuels has huge environmental consequences but no rational person could deny that we owe our whole modern life to fossil fuels. The Industrial Revolution absolutely depended on coal, it has been the lifeblood of modern society for at least 300 years. It is simply unimaginable to envisage modern life without its existence.
Moreover, what's lost in this debate is that coal is not just a source of energy, it is also the source of a many other useful materials. When I was learning about this decades ago we were taught that coal was the source of so many useful products that we round that number off to '1000' to signal its importance.
In fact, coal provides many more than a 1000 useful products, the pharmaceutical couldn't do without it. The previous poster should contemplate the fact that even common old aspirin comes from coal—in fact many pharmaceutical texts place aspirin in a class of drugs known as the coal-tar antipyretics.
Wild assertions of this type happen when we stop teaching history, how modern society came about and so on. A dose of philosophical reasoning and logic ought to be taught as well, that way reason may hold back many from uttering and spreading crap.
The AI tools generate spam.
Oil has a trade off that's at least intellectually defensible. Spam does not.
AI does, though.
Finding new optimization techniques, understanding genetics, developing new science can all be intellectually defensible.
Of course it is not the only factor: the asymmetry in computing and data access by big corporations vs the individual, the generative models generating spam, as you well said. are all factors. But just like with the oil industry, there is also some good consequences. Which ones will dominate left as an exercise for the reader :)
The problems are automation and scale, low barriers to entry for "negative outcome" usage, the absence of sociocultural system developments adequate to adapt productively, total lack of forethought/planning regarding consequence in every area, and, well, humans.
Falling back to the "it's just a tool" thing is no more useful than saying nuclear weapons are just a tool and it depends on how they're used. It's true but irrelevant.
"Well, anybody who knows me knows that I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914?"
I see it as a progression from 24-hour news media to social media to a complete abandonment of "truth" in public discourse. Of course the core concept is ancient and had been in play all along, but technology has really amplified it and made it increasingly personal. AI may push it over some kind of edge into the abyss, but only because we've spent three decades willingly readying ourselves for it.
I get the feeling you haven't gone out in a while.
I'm halfway there already. I think social networks (HN is better, but not great), dating apps, hell even stuff like automatic parking apps or online shopping, are just gradually sucking the joy out of what it is to be a human.
For the most part, nowadays, I pretty much just use my phone to organise analogue fun.
Once places like HN become obviously just all-bot then there won't be much reason for me to even go online other than phone calls and messaging.
What matters to me is my community.
The only winning move is not to play. So I could see this having a chilling effect on all discourse
Aside from the whole skynet thing the above is what spooks me the most
But people who absolutely will not update their priors is not likely to work out well in the long run...
It's work recruiting people to your cause. It's expensive, and takes time and attention and resources. People have consciences that might flare up, they have loose lips, they need training and guidance and oversight.
Letting a bot loose for your cause costs pennies. It can be updated with a few clicks. You can reverse course or fine tune with a few sentences; you can even tailor it to the vulnerabilities of your victims with just a few data points.
The brainwashing inflicted on people by advertising and the like has had a tremendous cost to society, and the planet; absolutely incalculable. It would be prudent to be alert to the danger of all that being exacerbated 100- or 1,000-fold.
your human recruiter is going to have their own biases, could be tired, may not know how to deal with personality X or Y, they may not learn.
the bots can track how they do by upvote, react quickly, won't get tired or annoyed, and can use existing data to filter and target those who are extremely vulnerable.
hell, with real-time analysis by data mining companies (cough cough FB, reddit) they could even figure out if/when a normally stable-ish person is in crisis or has a bad week, and hit them at their most susceptible. 99% of the year they might be able to see through the BS, but this week things are hard and what they're seeing in their feed just feels right, for once...
I wonder how we could test to see if they are already doing this...
I could argue with you, "Havoc", for a while, and perhaps convince you that there are 2/3/7 genders, or whatever, and then as sure as the sun rises, along comes another user. Or infinite set of.
Most social media is "man yells at cloud", quite literally.
When you say “find an argument that works” isn’t this just saying that they’ve said something you find persuasive?
What’s wrong with this? How is this different to any other argument in good faith?
The perceptions of other disagreeing people ended up just being one more way to validate them because you end up seeing the same pattern of mistakes over and over again.
Wait until GPT5. Or don’t, because a vast amount of people are already incapable of that.
There's a weird magic trick that social media companies have played on people to convince them that the text and images consumed on their websites are socially/culturally/politically relevant. Once it becomes clear how easy it is to fake that text people will come to understand how cheap and irrelevant "opinion" has become and this magic trick will become weakened.
You hold the opposite position. Why?
It's technocratic hubris to think that there is just a single such arena and that all the others are illegitimate/dangerous.
IMO "truth" is distraction here because what is at stake here are people's values, not their understanding of math and physics. When people worry about "post-truth", they're worried about liberal values no longer being the unquestioned default. It is absolutely a marketplace, and if people switching marketplaces en-masse makes it harder to launch rockets and develop vaccines, then it probably means those activities are making people net unhappy. People are a lot smarter than we give them credit for, even the dumb ones.
We are (well, I am, and TFA is) not talking about epistemology so much as the public's inability to engage with epistemological problems on systemic scales. Instead the limits of human psychology control how we as a society respond to these issues. Your argument is a distraction that remains uncontextualized within the conversation it finds itself in.
People are not dumb animals but you won't be able to engage anyone toward a solution on the basis of an argument about how they just need to understand more about epistemology. That's the kind of thing that people can only internalize via empirical means.
At this point it feels like you're being deliberately obtuse. I've been quite clear about the primacy of human psychological limits as the main aspect of the argument and you simply refuse to engage with this point. You haven't been very good about adding to the conversation, only diverting it.
The public's inability? What about everyone's inability. No one deals well with epistemological problems on a systematic scale, not even the technologists who delude themselves into thinking that they're driving anything.
I am exactly talking about psychological limits. The difference is that I don't think the psychological limits of the creators are any different from those of the users. If anything, I think the creators are more psychologically limited than the users. This is because the creators need to explain to themselves why they are creating the thing - everyone else just puts up with it. When you say ppl will either be duped or completely check out of discourse, don't forget about yourself.
Also, of course I didn't read the article....
Overheated: the discourse has too much anger or vitriol, or is too personal and emotionally charged.
Chilled: people have given up on discoursing at all.
If this is what you mean, I don't think we want less discourse as a solution to bad discourse. We want to maintain but temper the discourse.
Things are hyper-polarized right now and there is no magic political synthesis that is right over the horizon if only we could just keep discoursing a little bit more. This is like a heroin addict thinking they'll cease being addicted after that last fix. The solution is to cool things down.
Learning how to actually talk to one another in good faith with humility and charity is a skill that comes with practice. Deciding to engage each other less can worsen the situation by allowing one camp's preconceived notions about another camp to go unchallenged by reality. This allows each camp to tell an increasingly vilifying story about the other, which increases, rather than decreases, the emotional charge between the two.
This is not a good thing, as the past 10-15 years of social media has shown.
So, we'll cement ourselves at the status quo? Or at whatever conditions that serve the powerful?
The idea the world will be worst off with less flame wars is simply wrong IMO.
I would already rate the discourse I have had with chatGPT4 as the best of my life.
I win if I learn something. It strikes me as highly perverse to view that the only way to win is to not play the game because you can't brow beat the bot into submission.
THAT is though what we mean by "political discussion". A bullshit pie throwing contest until one side quits. A twitter flame war. Yes, hopefully AI completely destroys that.
We forget that AI becomes more human as it gets more intelligent. These are not computers programmed with a hard limitation anymore, they're actually more prone to being manipulated than other humans are.
I think this interchange of thought and sharing of ideas is the true essence of discourse. That other thing is more of a verbal tribal battle. I can see issues with bots swinging the political landscape in ways that cause harm, but I think there is good reason to think discourse might flourish. Fundamentally, if the competitive arguers are discouraged, whilst the curious and conversational are encouraged, or at least not hurt, then discourse itself wins.
We might find discourse flourishes corners of discussion on the internet but the wider internet is much more at risk to these approaches
PS Intended as a lighthearted jab, please don't get offended.
That's a useful insight. The one on one wearing-down process came from theology. It's sometimes called Jesuitry. Members of the Society of Jesus were trained to do that sort of thing, and they got so good at it that the whole organization was suppressed in the 1700s.[1] There are still Jesuit-run schools in the US, and they do tend in that direction. "Never argue with a Jesuit", said Richard Nixon.
Since mass media, large scale use of one on one convincing has gone out of fashion. It's not cost-effective. With large language models, it's back.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_the_Society_of_...
The problem is usually the opposite (sycophancy)
I think of my now-deceased grandparents. They had to be closely monitored to avoid falling for mail-in scams, of all things. They were old enough that mail was a trusted source of information in their upbringing.
I like to think about what will tip us over, as technologists. Venturing into sci-fi a little, I think brain-computer interfaces are going to be impossible for us to adapt to, if they ever arrive. Imagine spam thoughts. We're not trained to ignore intrusive thoughts. But I agree we might just not be able to handle a website that constantly shifts its content to keep us engaged, blurring fact and fiction into the perfect narrative to keep you clicking.
Rose-tinted glasses.
The scams we all know-and-love from our e-mail mailboxes today: romance-scams, advance-fee fraud, pyramid-schemes, and more, were all prevalent in the physical mail in decades past.
One of the best (but not the only) way to learn this is by studying the trivium/quadrivium – formal logic, reasoning, rhetoric. Once you see how information can be manipulated, it becomes very clear HOW MUCH of it really is.
Initially it can be maddening, but eventually it becomes empowering.
We need decisive online human verification technology. Nothing else is going to address this. Right now everyone is adding paywalls to everything and leaning on the financial system as a proxy for human verification. However this will not solve the root cause, because some bot activity is worth the price of admission. Internet businesses are fine with this, and will look the other way just like they did when engagement was the lifeblood of the internet economy and bots provided engagement.
The Demon-Haunted World remains as prescient as ever. Machines that ought to have advanced knowledge will instead kneecap civilization back to a dark age, if we're lucky.