3 ms·

The notion of a neurally connected Facebook or Google scares the heck out of me. Apart from the countless petabytes of data they would collect, just imagine a w

The notion of a neurally connected Facebook or Google scares the heck out of me. Apart from the countless petabytes of data they would collect, just imagine a world where the powers that be can actually tap into your thoughts, perhaps even implant ideas that they think you should have. At a certain point, we lose our individuality and become subsumed by the global AI, game over. But before that distant dystopian point is reached, I do hope we develop ways for paralyzed people to regain sensory control and live normal lives.

badjeans 6y ago
What's so dsytopian about that?
ElFitz 6y ago
> At a certain point, we lose our individuality and become subsumed by the global AI, game over. In a way, we already have. Each and every one of us is constantly influenced by and influencing untold numbers of people, and most beliefs and knowledge are more or less "standardised". Most people follow the school -> (college ->) 9 to 5 -> retire consensus, and even those who believe themselves to be outliers actually behave how outliers are expected to behave, all of us furthering the goals set by others, some of which died have even died long ago. Actual individuality is quite rare and usually expressed at a very small scale.
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  How would individuality be expressed at large scale, anyhow? Funny thought.
  - ElFitz 6y ago
    By figuring and trying out new ways of being instead of seeking to conform to archetypes. By trying out new ways out of repeating situations and creating new behaviours instead of either repeating the same habits or trying to adopt someone else’s response to them. At an individual’s scale, those would be large and have big impacts. Much more so than the colour of my living room’s wall, my type of car or defining myself by wearing either shirts or T-shirts and trying to impose on everyone else what I consider to be professional or unprofessional.
- sigg3 6y ago
  I think your identification of individuality and a measure of uniqueness is a mistake. We're not individuals apart from others, the others are presupposed. The I is an abstraction in the sense that it presupposes social terms to understand itself. You need a reference, like culture, to be correctly understood as "alternative" (although 'peripheral' in terms of some specific aspects is more correct). If you're not in a community at all, you're not going to reproduce. Actual individuality is merely recognizing the exercised autonomy by an agent. You are still an individual even when you behave according to existing mores you did not create. (The extra social esteem bestowed to relative difference is a cultural trend and a historical phenomenon. It does not determine our species, only our current conditions and predicaments.)
  - ElFitz 6y ago
    I fail to see how your arguments contradict my words. Each ant constantly exercises it’s autonomy. Would you nonetheless argue that it has any individuality in the way the gp intended the word?
    - sigg3 6y ago
      I make two points that "contradict" here: Primarily, I argue that we're a social species and cannot employ individuality without a culture and community. This contradicts any notion of being artificially programmed by a deus ex machina. On the contrary, we program and reprogram each other reciprocally and continuously. A strong AI shaping of human kind would be parasitic to existing practice, not a new thing. Kind of like how propaganda presupposes a practice of telling the truth. Second, and perhaps wrongly so, I address the seeming notion of difference being a moral good; a sentiment I interpret in your final sentence. I might very well have misunderstood it. Being different is not good, in and of itself. Striving to be different seems to be a recipe for unhappiness, because the internal resources cannot explode the context without a major risk of ending up in social vacuity, where your actions are systemically misinterpreted and the individual itself misinterpret his or herself on the rebound. The so-called historical individual in Hegel , Nietzsche's grand most free of all superman, relies on contingent reality to succeed; in other words, the successful "being different" is a harmony of the individual's actions and intentions with existing but as of yet unexpressed social trends. Again, individuality presupposes sociality, completely opposing the view that "true individuality" is so rare. It's unfair to the ant to talk about them in human terms, and I am not an expert in ants. But a human being expressing her taste is an expression of her individuality, even though it's exactly the same thing "everyone else" think as well. What matters is that it expresses her as an individual, not that it differs from the majority.

badjeans 6y ago

What's so dsytopian about that?

ElFitz 6y ago

> At a certain point, we lose our individuality and become subsumed by the global AI, game over. In a way, we already have. Each and every one of us is constantly influenced by and influencing untold numbers of people, and most beliefs and knowledge are more or less "standardised". Most people follow the school -> (college ->) 9 to 5 -> retire consensus, and even those who believe themselves to be outliers actually behave how outliers are expected to behave, all of us furthering the goals set by others, some of which died have even died long ago. Actual individuality is quite rare and usually expressed at a very small scale.

hypertele-Xii 6y ago
How would individuality be expressed at large scale, anyhow? Funny thought.
- ElFitz 6y ago
  By figuring and trying out new ways of being instead of seeking to conform to archetypes. By trying out new ways out of repeating situations and creating new behaviours instead of either repeating the same habits or trying to adopt someone else’s response to them. At an individual’s scale, those would be large and have big impacts. Much more so than the colour of my living room’s wall, my type of car or defining myself by wearing either shirts or T-shirts and trying to impose on everyone else what I consider to be professional or unprofessional.
sigg3 6y ago
I think your identification of individuality and a measure of uniqueness is a mistake. We're not individuals apart from others, the others are presupposed. The I is an abstraction in the sense that it presupposes social terms to understand itself. You need a reference, like culture, to be correctly understood as "alternative" (although 'peripheral' in terms of some specific aspects is more correct). If you're not in a community at all, you're not going to reproduce. Actual individuality is merely recognizing the exercised autonomy by an agent. You are still an individual even when you behave according to existing mores you did not create. (The extra social esteem bestowed to relative difference is a cultural trend and a historical phenomenon. It does not determine our species, only our current conditions and predicaments.)
- ElFitz 6y ago
  I fail to see how your arguments contradict my words. Each ant constantly exercises it’s autonomy. Would you nonetheless argue that it has any individuality in the way the gp intended the word?
  - sigg3 6y ago
    I make two points that "contradict" here: Primarily, I argue that we're a social species and cannot employ individuality without a culture and community. This contradicts any notion of being artificially programmed by a deus ex machina. On the contrary, we program and reprogram each other reciprocally and continuously. A strong AI shaping of human kind would be parasitic to existing practice, not a new thing. Kind of like how propaganda presupposes a practice of telling the truth. Second, and perhaps wrongly so, I address the seeming notion of difference being a moral good; a sentiment I interpret in your final sentence. I might very well have misunderstood it. Being different is not good, in and of itself. Striving to be different seems to be a recipe for unhappiness, because the internal resources cannot explode the context without a major risk of ending up in social vacuity, where your actions are systemically misinterpreted and the individual itself misinterpret his or herself on the rebound. The so-called historical individual in Hegel , Nietzsche's grand most free of all superman, relies on contingent reality to succeed; in other words, the successful "being different" is a harmony of the individual's actions and intentions with existing but as of yet unexpressed social trends. Again, individuality presupposes sociality, completely opposing the view that "true individuality" is so rare. It's unfair to the ant to talk about them in human terms, and I am not an expert in ants. But a human being expressing her taste is an expression of her individuality, even though it's exactly the same thing "everyone else" think as well. What matters is that it expresses her as an individual, not that it differs from the majority.