No, it does not. It preserves them as they where. Spreading of cultures that can not build institutions and uphold the rule of law does. To which stanford contributed considerately. The faction that can not build a working economic system and yearns to rule the economic system, is also incapable to build working societies, institutions and rule of law.
I struggle with the thesis that our institutions haven't already been fatally wounded. Social media and endless content for passive consumption have already errored the free press, short-circuited decision-making, and isolated people from each other.
I don't think AI is the cause, it's merely the mechanism that is speeding up what has already been happening.
Social media was already isolating people. It is being sped up by the use of AI bots (see dead internet theory). These bots are being used to create chaos in society for political purposes, but overall it's increasingly radicalizing people and as a result further isolating everyone.
AI isn't eroding college institutions, they were already becoming a money grab and a glorified jobs program. Interpersonal relationships (i.e. connections) are still present, I don't see how AI changes that in this scenario.
I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.
The article does highlight one thing that I do attribute to AI and that is the lack of critical thinking. People are thinking less with the use of AI. Instead of spending time evaluating, exploring and trying to think creatively. We are collectively offloading that to AI.
Honestly, I know I'm going to sound off my rocker but thinking of e.g. Mass Effect or The Matrix, are we watching ourselves getting evolved/replaced in real time?
All of existence has been a to-and-fro of larger organisms emerging by connecting and subsuming smaller ones. Organelles, cells, organisms... Are we creating the instruments of our own ascension (fancy calculators) or are we doomed to watch AI and the internet manipulate and supersede us?
>I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.
I'll use a rather extreme example here, but this sounds a bit like "Heroin addiction is just speeding up aspects that society already does. It's so easy to get addicted to smoking cigarettes".
Sometimes the catalyst is the problem, even if it's not the only problem. In this case I think placing some guardrail on both social media and AI is worthwhile.
> Civic institutions - the rule of law, universities, and a free press - are the
backbone of democratic life
It probably was in 1850-1950s, but not in the world I live today.
Press is not free - full of propaganda. I don't know any journalist today I can trust, I need to check their affiliations before reading the content, because they might be pushing the narrative of press owners or lobbies
Rule of law? don't make me laugh, this sounds so funny, look what happened in Venezuela, US couldn't take its oil, so it was heavily sanctioned for so many years, then it still couldn't resist the urge to steal it, and just took the head of the state.
Universities - do not want to say anything bad about universities, but recently they are also not good guys we can trust, remember Varsity Blues scandal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal - is this the backbone of democratic life?
>do not want to say anything bad about universities
I'll make a slightly warm take: Co-opting our higher education institutions to be used as an extended job pipelne was a huge mistake. Your primary goal for attending college should not be to prepare for a job unless you are aiming for a highly specialized position.
Hotter take: jobs above a certain size should require a 3 month onboarding pipeline that is demonstrably used if they want to make the argument of hiring H1-B's. If you can learn the job in that period, it's clear that there is domestic talent.
It's hard for me to argue with these few direct sentences.
They delegitimize knowledge, inhibit cognitive development, short circuit
decision-making processes, and isolate humans by displacing or degrading human connection.
The result is that deploying AI systems within institutions
immediately gives that institution a half-life.
... even if we don't have a ton of "historical" evidence for AI doing this, the initial statement rings true.
e.g., an LLM-equipped novice becomes just enough of an expert to tromp around knocking down chesterton's fences in an established system of any kind. "First principles" reasoning combined with a surface understanding of a system (stated vs actual purpose/methods), is particularly dangerous for deep understanding and collaboration. Everyone has an LLM on their shoulder now.
It's obviously not always true, but without discipline, what they state does seem inevitable.
The statement that AI is tearing down institutions might be right, but certainly institutions face a ton of threats.
The natural process of creative destruction deterritorializes everything, that's how every advance in history has always came about. The apparent difference perceived here is merely that this time, the human capital in the institutions that's supposed to reinvent the institutions alongside each new development are struggling.
Coincidentally, this has happened exactly when the Flynn effect reverted, the loneliness epidemic worsened, the academics started getting outnumbered by the deans and deanlings and the average EROI of new coal, oil and gas extraction projects fell below 10:1. Sure, we should be wary of the loss to analysis if we just reduce everything to an omnicause blob, but the human capital decline wouldn't be there without it.
I am skeptical of hypotheses like this when the deterioration has begun before its supposed cause. This is how I look at social media or tinder being blamed for loneliness or low fertility. While they may have exacerbated the issues, trends have been unfavorable for decades if not centuries before.
Similarly, it seems to me like the rule of law (and the separation of powers), prestige press, and universities are social technologies that have been showing more and more vulnerabilities which are actively exploited in the wild with increasing frequency.
For example, it used to be that rulings like Wickard v. Filburn were rare. Nowadays, various parties, not just in the US, seem to be running all out assaults in their favoured direction through the court system.
Sorry to be this person, but I don't really agree with the first sentence:
--> "Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life."
People are the backbone of our civilization. People who have good intentions and support one another. We don't NEED an FDA to function -- it's just a tool that has worked quite well for a long time for us.
Fun quotes from the paper
> I. Institutions Are Society’s
Superheroes: Institutions are essential for structuring complex human interactions and enabling stable, just, and prosperous societies.
> Institutions like higher education, medecine, and law inform the stable and predictable patterns of behavior within organizations such as schools, hospitals, and courts., respectively,, thereby reducing chaos and friction.
>Similarly, journalism, as an institution, commits to truth-telling as a common
purpose and performs that function through fact-checking and other
organizational roles and structures. Newspapers or other media sources lose
legitimacy when they fail to publish errata or publish lies as news.
> Attending physicians and hospital administrators may each individually possess specific knowledge, but it is together, within the practices and purposive work of hospitals, and through delegation, deference, and persistent reinforcement of evaluative practices, that they accomplish the purpose of the institution
> The second affordance of institutional doom is that AI systems short-
circuit institutional decisionmaking by delegating important moral choices to AI
developers.
>Admittedly, our institutions have been fragile and ineffective for some time.36 Slow and expensive institutions frustrate people and weaken societal trust and legitimacy.37 Fixes are necessary.
> The so-called U.S. “Department of Government Efficiency” (“DOGE”)
will be a textbook example of how the affordances of AI lead to institutional
rot. DOGE used AI to surveil government employees, target immigrants, and
combine and analyze federal data that had, up to that point, intentionally been
kept separate for privacy and due process purposes.
I think the paper is really good and makes loads of valid points... and it's kinda terrifying.
Having super accessible machines that can make anything up and aren't held accountable run the world is going to break so many systems where truth matters.
I firmly believe "AI will be used by the psycho weasel billionaires to torture us all", but this article is weak. It seems like it was written by people too scared of AI to use it. They have a couple of points you realize in your first month of using AI, and they wrap them in paragraphs of waffle. I wish the anti AI camp was more competent
I think that as communities spread (as with increased joining of online communities) we lost much in our local communities, this feels to me like a sort of extension of that, it's a community of one (well kinda, it's a sum of communities, and kinda missing the bidirectional communication, of the community) maybe?
64 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 65.3 ms ] threadThe link to download the paper is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5870623
Most of the sections had no citations and anecdotes.
Like many who have predicted doom or ChatGPT can never do XYZ, anecdotes do not build a substantive argument.
JFC downvoters; when I posted this comment the title did not match the article title.
Social media was already isolating people. It is being sped up by the use of AI bots (see dead internet theory). These bots are being used to create chaos in society for political purposes, but overall it's increasingly radicalizing people and as a result further isolating everyone.
AI isn't eroding college institutions, they were already becoming a money grab and a glorified jobs program. Interpersonal relationships (i.e. connections) are still present, I don't see how AI changes that in this scenario.
I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.
The article does highlight one thing that I do attribute to AI and that is the lack of critical thinking. People are thinking less with the use of AI. Instead of spending time evaluating, exploring and trying to think creatively. We are collectively offloading that to AI.
All of existence has been a to-and-fro of larger organisms emerging by connecting and subsuming smaller ones. Organelles, cells, organisms... Are we creating the instruments of our own ascension (fancy calculators) or are we doomed to watch AI and the internet manipulate and supersede us?
I'll use a rather extreme example here, but this sounds a bit like "Heroin addiction is just speeding up aspects that society already does. It's so easy to get addicted to smoking cigarettes".
Sometimes the catalyst is the problem, even if it's not the only problem. In this case I think placing some guardrail on both social media and AI is worthwhile.
It probably was in 1850-1950s, but not in the world I live today.
Press is not free - full of propaganda. I don't know any journalist today I can trust, I need to check their affiliations before reading the content, because they might be pushing the narrative of press owners or lobbies
Rule of law? don't make me laugh, this sounds so funny, look what happened in Venezuela, US couldn't take its oil, so it was heavily sanctioned for so many years, then it still couldn't resist the urge to steal it, and just took the head of the state.
Universities - do not want to say anything bad about universities, but recently they are also not good guys we can trust, remember Varsity Blues scandal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal - is this the backbone of democratic life?
I'll make a slightly warm take: Co-opting our higher education institutions to be used as an extended job pipelne was a huge mistake. Your primary goal for attending college should not be to prepare for a job unless you are aiming for a highly specialized position.
Hotter take: jobs above a certain size should require a 3 month onboarding pipeline that is demonstrably used if they want to make the argument of hiring H1-B's. If you can learn the job in that period, it's clear that there is domestic talent.
e.g., an LLM-equipped novice becomes just enough of an expert to tromp around knocking down chesterton's fences in an established system of any kind. "First principles" reasoning combined with a surface understanding of a system (stated vs actual purpose/methods), is particularly dangerous for deep understanding and collaboration. Everyone has an LLM on their shoulder now.
It's obviously not always true, but without discipline, what they state does seem inevitable.
The statement that AI is tearing down institutions might be right, but certainly institutions face a ton of threats.
Coincidentally, this has happened exactly when the Flynn effect reverted, the loneliness epidemic worsened, the academics started getting outnumbered by the deans and deanlings and the average EROI of new coal, oil and gas extraction projects fell below 10:1. Sure, we should be wary of the loss to analysis if we just reduce everything to an omnicause blob, but the human capital decline wouldn't be there without it.
Similarly, it seems to me like the rule of law (and the separation of powers), prestige press, and universities are social technologies that have been showing more and more vulnerabilities which are actively exploited in the wild with increasing frequency.
For example, it used to be that rulings like Wickard v. Filburn were rare. Nowadays, various parties, not just in the US, seem to be running all out assaults in their favoured direction through the court system.
--> "Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life."
People are the backbone of our civilization. People who have good intentions and support one another. We don't NEED an FDA to function -- it's just a tool that has worked quite well for a long time for us.
Fun quotes from the paper > I. Institutions Are Society’s Superheroes: Institutions are essential for structuring complex human interactions and enabling stable, just, and prosperous societies.
> Institutions like higher education, medecine, and law inform the stable and predictable patterns of behavior within organizations such as schools, hospitals, and courts., respectively,, thereby reducing chaos and friction.
>Similarly, journalism, as an institution, commits to truth-telling as a common purpose and performs that function through fact-checking and other organizational roles and structures. Newspapers or other media sources lose legitimacy when they fail to publish errata or publish lies as news.
> Attending physicians and hospital administrators may each individually possess specific knowledge, but it is together, within the practices and purposive work of hospitals, and through delegation, deference, and persistent reinforcement of evaluative practices, that they accomplish the purpose of the institution
> The second affordance of institutional doom is that AI systems short- circuit institutional decisionmaking by delegating important moral choices to AI developers.
>Admittedly, our institutions have been fragile and ineffective for some time.36 Slow and expensive institutions frustrate people and weaken societal trust and legitimacy.37 Fixes are necessary.
> The so-called U.S. “Department of Government Efficiency” (“DOGE”) will be a textbook example of how the affordances of AI lead to institutional rot. DOGE used AI to surveil government employees, target immigrants, and combine and analyze federal data that had, up to that point, intentionally been kept separate for privacy and due process purposes.
It's all politics. 150% bullshit.
Having super accessible machines that can make anything up and aren't held accountable run the world is going to break so many systems where truth matters.