Yes. Also yes, but imho it isn't. Zizek is verbose because he aims to be precise. Sometimes his long-winded sentences generate a reaction of 'so what, everyone knows that' but ime he's often trying to point out something that 'everyone knows' but few have fully thought through.
I’ve learned that whenever someone uses tons of big words in long paragraphs, especially if they have a credential next to their name, it’s ridiculously easy for them to BS you.
I didn't have Žižek on substack and HN on my bingo card..
As always, there are good bits connected with mediocre glue. The point about automating the unpleasant parts of activity and losing the very point of the exercise (automatic dildo and automatic vagina, but automatic research papers too!) is a good one.
But damn Slavoj, please use some headings, sections and the like. Work with your thoughts more as you claim it's important to do!
A nit, the word socialists is actually in the acronym (ie in the name). Fascism actually is a descendant of socialist ideology and Mussolini was a Socialist before inventing Fascism. Concepts of left and right only have meaning in one political unit at one point in time. The axis we use to judge right and left changes from time to time and is different in different places. Also, some fascist policies are similar to policies in socialist societies. And some policies are very different between the two. So the debate implied in your question, like most debates, comes down to the definitions of words.
This is why it isn't all that helpful to base political ideologies on history farther back than one human lifetime. The writers often meant something different than you think they did.
So I'm already joking with my friends (who tend to be physically distant, so I don't see them often) that we are just LLMs vicariously writing to each other.
I've been talking to these friends for decades now, with digital records. I think someone already trained an LLM on their IM records.
How many people do you suppose have two-way LLM substitutes that occasionally write to each other with articles from the news to discuss?
There's already services that use this kind of thing to pretend dead people are alive.
Now here's the question: are you in some sense living forever? Say you have a number of friends, who have over time been trained into AI, and they live on various servers (it ain't expensive) forever. They're trained as you, so they read the kind of article you would read. They know your life story, they know their history with their friends. They will be interested in the controversial offsides goal in the 2250 world cup final. They are just made of calculations in data centres that go on, forever.
The counterpoint is that we must formalize the rights of sentient synthetic beings. The Emergency Medical Hologram gained sentience and was horrified to find his next version was relegated to cleaning ships as a glorified janitor. Whereas he developed his own hobbies, interests, hopes, dreams, and even romantic relationships in the Delta Quadrant.
All right, I get it. The driving impulse for why our societies and civilizations exist is the fact that we are complex beings with desires, emotions, and so on. A machine facsimile built to imitate these things will have no such drive to 'expand' so to speak.
The bots talking to bots world is a problem only because the objective is finally for a human to observe the bot-bot conversation and have their objectives changed in some way. It's 'advertising' of some concept. Bot-bot conversations of the form currently possible have no purpose in a world without humans. There is no one to convince.
I think it's an interesting idea, certainly, but there is no reason to write it like this. The bits about call centre scamming etc. are sort of pointless. In general, I like when the complexity of a representation of an idea is required because the territory being mapped is complex.
I know he's a famous philosopher and all that, but the complexity of his text appears to be sort of like older segmentation models. You ask it to extract a circle from a background and it produces an almost fractally-complex circle-approximation. "What is the object in the foreground?", you ask, and the machine (and here the philosopher) responds "It is a strange approximation of a circle with a billion jagged edges". No, it's a circle.
This makes sense once you understand the definitions of Hegelian an sich vs für sich and Lacanian objet petit a. It might look like rumbling to you but it is a very precise philosophical-technical text that does pure analysis. I liked it really a lot and gained much from it.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 58.5 ms ] threadIs it possible that this is to a large degree utterly pointless textual wankery?
As always, there are good bits connected with mediocre glue. The point about automating the unpleasant parts of activity and losing the very point of the exercise (automatic dildo and automatic vagina, but automatic research papers too!) is a good one.
But damn Slavoj, please use some headings, sections and the like. Work with your thoughts more as you claim it's important to do!
This is why it isn't all that helpful to base political ideologies on history farther back than one human lifetime. The writers often meant something different than you think they did.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwDrHqNZ9lo)
I've been talking to these friends for decades now, with digital records. I think someone already trained an LLM on their IM records.
How many people do you suppose have two-way LLM substitutes that occasionally write to each other with articles from the news to discuss?
There's already services that use this kind of thing to pretend dead people are alive.
Now here's the question: are you in some sense living forever? Say you have a number of friends, who have over time been trained into AI, and they live on various servers (it ain't expensive) forever. They're trained as you, so they read the kind of article you would read. They know your life story, they know their history with their friends. They will be interested in the controversial offsides goal in the 2250 world cup final. They are just made of calculations in data centres that go on, forever.
The bots talking to bots world is a problem only because the objective is finally for a human to observe the bot-bot conversation and have their objectives changed in some way. It's 'advertising' of some concept. Bot-bot conversations of the form currently possible have no purpose in a world without humans. There is no one to convince.
I think it's an interesting idea, certainly, but there is no reason to write it like this. The bits about call centre scamming etc. are sort of pointless. In general, I like when the complexity of a representation of an idea is required because the territory being mapped is complex.
I know he's a famous philosopher and all that, but the complexity of his text appears to be sort of like older segmentation models. You ask it to extract a circle from a background and it produces an almost fractally-complex circle-approximation. "What is the object in the foreground?", you ask, and the machine (and here the philosopher) responds "It is a strange approximation of a circle with a billion jagged edges". No, it's a circle.