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Just finished Neil Stephenson's Anethem. In it (I'm paraphrasing here) the open internet is destroyed by media companies who flood the internet with "good garb
by roomey 4y ago
Just finished Neil Stephenson's Anethem.
In it (I'm paraphrasing here) the open internet is destroyed by media companies who flood the internet with "good garbage", that is stuff that is _almost_ correct.
It forced people to pay for curated accurate content (that is, pay the same people who generated the good garbage in the first place).
- amanzi 4y agoThis is the scary thing about this - I keep asking it questions, and it gives confident, lengthy responses that look perfect. But when you read it thoroughly, you start noticing small but important mistakes that are not obvious at first.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoI tried to get it to dig into some ethical questions and it was disturbing to see how cogent the argument was while mostly overlooking the ethical concerns of the question. I know it’s not actually meant to do that in the first place, but it’s quite excellent at it despite that shortcoming. I’m not looking forward to AIs learning to become even more convincing and authoritative.
- crabmusket 4y agoIt's like the ultimate solipsistic debate-club point of view, distilled and targeted in whatever direction you choose.
- wnkrshm 4y agoWhy have this mountain of noise? It'll end in: a) Wow such a nice tool that generates nice prose for emails and communication! b) Wow, such a nice tool that filters and summarizes the mountains of prose coming into my communication channels! It's as if we're just making the channel broader with less information for no reason.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago> It's as if we're just making the channel broader with less information for no reason. It's the usual: all that effort is generally wasted, because it averages out to zero, but the money is made on high-frequency fluctuations, the momentary imbalances. It's just another hamster wheel for the economy to work, and hopefully produce something useful every now and then as an accidental spinoff.
- omnicognate 4y agoI think much of the social corrosiveness of the web and news media as it stands is due to the adoption of advertising as the primary means of funding content creation, the resulting expectation that most content should be free, and the failure to produce effective micropayment systems so that paid content has become synonymous with paywalls (high cost barriers around large bodies of content). I would love to see a world in which it is possible to directly pay for content in a very fine grained and frictionless manner, and in which doing so is the norm. I hadn't considered that the success of large language models might break the current system in a way that can only be fixed by moving it in the direction I'd like to see (but maybe not the micropayments). What an exciting thought :-D I must read Anathem, maybe it'll change my mind. Neal Stephenson's always great anyway.
- Eleison23 4y ago
- BlueTemplar 4y agoAnd yet Flattr 2.0 didn't catch on for some reason... https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-24-adblock-plus-relaunches-flattr.html https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-24-adblock-plus-relaunches-...
- l0b0 4y agoThat's basically the Western story of the devil, more relatably portrayed as Sauron during the second age, giving gifts and teaching people, all the while sprinkling the teachings with heretical thoughts until, many generations later, the society was corrupt to the core.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoSo, we laughed off the warnings that we're blindly attempting to summon a god, and instead we just accidentally created a devil.
- Avamander 4y agoI am quite certain it will damage internet anonymity and search engines immensely. Pseudonymous things will be fine for some time, but will probably start requiring some identity verification.