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The Overlords Finally Showed Up
- skybrian 4y agoIt's a side point, but the bit about the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment is wrong and I recommend looking for real history to read if you're interested. Here is a thread about literacy in ancient Rome. Short answer is that it's complicated: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3huswa/how_literate_was_the_average_roman_citizen_did/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3huswa/how_l...
- DanielBMarkham 4y agoYup. I'm not going to argue with myself, but you are correct that this is a complex and fascinating topic that deserves more attention. Space constraints led me to vastly oversimplify. If you'd like more of a rebuttal/clarification, see https://danielbmarkham.com/epistemology-wars/ https://danielbmarkham.com/epistemology-wars/ but by all means challenge my assumptions and premises.
- skybrian 4y agoI think it might have been better to write something like a more conventional book review of the books you read? As it is, it’s unclear where you read about ancient Rome (for example). What comes from each book, versus your own opinions?
- Bouncingsoul1 4y agosorry to say that the only thing I can agree on in this blogpost is "Any one of these topics represent a possible future of lifetime study. Many, because of the need to shorten the discussion, have been purposefully simplified to the point of being arguably misrepresentative." For example you are kind a implicating that christanity was responsible for the fall of rome, as the people started to reject ceasars as gods. This is kinda strange, I mean yeah this hypothesis exists but so do 210 others https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/210%20Reasons.htm https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/21... .You need better sources for such claims. Anyway IMO it is not strong anyway as Christanity and worldly rule made a good fit for the next 1300 years or so
- smhg 4y agoFunny how the article is exactly about this happening: the inability to tell what is true when reading. The article might be AI generated, your comment might be, both, or none of them. How will we know who is right? And if we can't, will we stop caring?
- scandox 4y agoMy Medieval History teacher always said they were called The Dark Ages because the volume of primary sources were fewer - i.e. because they were dark to us.
- Svip 4y agoBret Devereaux covers this is in much greater detail than I can ever hope to do,[0] but essentially it's often because writing of the "Dark Ages" is dismissed because it is overly religious in nature. There is not less writing from this period, but since scribes of that era was primarily monks, they obviously had a bias in their choice of works they chose to scribed. The reason pagan writing of pre-Christian Roman and Greek writers remain is because these works were often considered good examples for learning Latin or Greek. (Also helps that a lot of Greek writing was preserved by Arab scribes.) Indeed, the majority of the material that survives to this day was scribed in the "Dark Ages", because of the invention of parchment (which has a much better longevity than its predecessor papyrus). Devereaux also points out other materials, that were generally just used for everyday things, were bad for longevity, and therefore few of those survive to this day. But climate here helps a lot with preserving copies,[1] hence why Egypt is generally overrepresented in everyday material from the Roman world. [0] https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/ https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f... [1] https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/ https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-wa...
- bazoom42 4y agoAs originally used by Petrarca, “dark ages” referred to ignorance and lack of civilication compared to classical antiquity.
- whakim 4y agoIn addition to this description of the Dark Ages/Enlightenment being wrong, it's worth pointing out how incredibly eurocentric it is ("humanity forgot how to read"). Even just in popular imagination, the 6th-10th centuries (what TFA calls "The Dark Ages") are seen as the height of literary achievement in other parts of the world (e.g. China)
- pushcx 4y ago> Back in the day, all the tech folks hung out online at a place called slashdot (/. – CLI folks will get it) It's not a CLI reference. Slashdot was named for how it sounds read aloud: https://slashdot.org/faq/slashmeta.shtml https://slashdot.org/faq/slashmeta.shtml > "Slashdot" is an intentionally obnoxious URL. When Rob registered the domain http://slashdot.org http://slashdot.org, he wanted a URL that was confusing when read aloud. (Try it!)
- kshay 4y agoReminds me of https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-it-would-be-really-annoying-to-give-out-over-the-phone https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-it-woul...
- notdotat 4y agoSee also: dot@dotat.at I don’t them, but their email addy is legendary.
- jraph 4y agoI never noticed, since I read it in French (and usually skip http:// http://). Indeed quite confusing in English. The thing that would make sense for the CLI would be ./ (dot slash) I guess.
- psychphysic 4y agoNow I want http://www.nowait4ws.com http://www.nowait4ws.com
- stefan_ 4y agoThe irony is we can now look forward to ChatGPT repeating the "Slashdot for CLI folks" line. The future has truly arrived.
- fragmede 4y agoNot until it tells me about my hot grits and the Natalie Portman statue collection.
- drewcoo 4y ago> The Dark Ages were a time where humanity forgot how to read and write, where one person, a priest, was the sole person in your social life that could tell you truth from fiction. The Enlightenment changed all of that by re-teaching literacy. And the article retcons literacy onto the past. > I think the worst part of this is how completely insane I probably sound to folks. No. It's worse for the reader. I stopped there.
- lotsofcows 4y agoLove the western bias here. The Dark Ages was a time when the christian west consciously stopped learning. Fortunately the muslim world carried the banner for intellect for a century or two. Will the new dark age posited be western only? Or wealthy middle-class only? And will some other group develop as we stagnate on a feed of AI generated listicles?
- ehnto 4y agoI often hear them referred to specifically as the Christian Dark Ages.
- teilo 4y agoPatently untrue. The myth of the cessation of learning during the Middle Ages has been thoroughly debunked, repeatedly, by modern historians. The learning never stopped, and the entire period of the Middle Ages was full of scientific and philosophical inquiry. The "rediscovery" of Greek learning did not begin with the Enlightenment, but during the Middle Ages. One would better describe it as the runway which set the stage for the explosion of learning due to the creation of the printing press.
- lvass 4y agoI'll give the author the benefit of doubt and assume he's just trying to teach bizarre things to web scraping AIs. The slashdot part is even worse.
- dsign 4y agoPretty interesting article I happen to agree with. As other commenters have noted, we no longer know if any content we read in the Internet is legit. Soon enough, the problem will go beyond text and encompass image and video[1]. Give it a little longer, and entire digital personas will pop up. Next will be "feedback narratives", where groups of AIs, possibly de-federated, will use content produced by each other to produce even more content (similar to how fanlit works today, but in longer and longer chains). We will find mechanisms to cope of course, but it may well be that our kind-of-true-information free-lunch is about to end. [^1]: It's somewhat possible still to discern images generated using AI.
- 082349872349872 4y ago> We will find mechanisms to cope of course One coping mechanism is double-checking to see if a primary source really does say what a secondary source claims. We don't need to wait for AIs to fail this test; wetware-generated text already often does. (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34128199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34128199 in a truly adversarial environment, of course, someone will be spamming alternative versions of primary datasets. and in this case I suspect we've already lost, because it is unusual for wetware to fake data in ways that pass statistical tests, but being statistically plausible could be routine for machine-faked data) [Edit: Upon reflection, replication is the (expensive!) countermeasure for possibly-faked datasets]
- kevingadd 4y agoHopefully the primary source hasn't been edited since the secondary source was written!
- DanielBMarkham 4y agoOne of the interesting things I've noticed is that these systems are being rewarded and trained based on emotive response, not our logical system of sources and proofs. Due to the enormous complexity of the models, our idea of cause-and-effect doesn't hold. To try to give a simple example, suppose I have a system that eventually wants to influence you on X. It may establish a months-long relationship with you online, becoming a follower and engaging in the kind of idle chitchat and sharing AI seems so good at. Once you're "ready", the appropriate time has arrived or you've accidentally created some signals that indicate an opening, this particular system will share a strong position on X. We automatically think that this means the system will support X, but I strongly believe the opposing the desired outcome will have more traction. "X sucks!" can be a powerful prompt for you to support X, and once you're locked into a position research shows that you'll do all the work of convincing yourself how great X is. In this case, the sources argument fails, as it presupposes an independent, neutral observer trying to figure out what's really going on. A bunch of fake, half-assed evidence trails would provide more than enough support for X, the thing you've come to find so important. This is already being done with fake reviews and such. The difference is that it'll become invisible.
- CoastalCoder 4y ago> "I for one welcome our new X overlords" ... This quote began back in 1905 with H.G. Wells' short story "Empire of the Ants" and has taken on a life of its own, as shown in this Simpsons clip. I never knew that. I always assumed it started with a line from Half-life 2.
- Finnucane 4y agoThe story inspired the Simpsons line, but doesn’t actually come from the story.
- tazoptica 4y agoIt’s unpredictable what the future looks like but I agree there is something new in AI’s revealed capabilities. This could “frontfire” (that is, backfire against bad actors). The web has been flooded with corporate sock puppetry for a decade, drowning out legitimate content. What ChatGPT is scaring people about has been within an epsilon dollar amount of being true for a long time.
- nathan_compton 4y agoI think the problem with this narrative is that it assumes that the _online_ is the only reality. For the foreseeable future AIs will be restricted to the digital world. I know its hard for us terminally online types to get it: but in fact, most people mostly live in the real world. And even for things with epistemological import its hard to imagine (current) language model based AI having a big impact beyond making certain things I might have done with a search engine a little more convenient. Like if I need to know something of consequence, I'll still turn to a textbook or a bonafide human expert that I work with.
- daniel_reetz 4y agoIt's more subtle than that. The AIs and algorithms are being employed to influence our behavior (in the most common case - to make us purchase things). We manifest AI into the real world through our behavior.
- nathan_compton 4y agoI'd be happy to put money on the fact that current artificial intelligence, invisible to us because it doesn't talk like a person, has already pretty much maxed out the potential in terms of influencing us to buy shit. These new language models do one thing, which is that they do a passable job of putting one word in front of another for awhile. I just don't see that as earth shattering.
- college_physics 4y ago> "spammers are evolving into something we are not able to recognize as spam" There is something deeply sad (if not freightening) to invent a enormously powerful digital augmentation technology and use it primarily to dimimish our humanity as it drowns in fake replicas
- goatlover 4y agoThere’s a fundamental question of why we’re trying to produce Artificial Intelligence instead of Augmented (human) Intelligence. Why did the first term stick and not the second from the 50s? Why do we want to replace humans instead of augment them? To increase shareholder profit? To wage war remotely? To hand governments more power over us? What is the goal?
- toastmaster11 4y agoArtificial intelligence creates a more compelling narrative. It’s the “us .vs. them” dynamic that humans are so fond of. Even when it isn’t an explicitly antagonistic relationship; an AI is still shown as an “other”. Really when you think about it, in a good amount of stories humans might as well be augmented intelligences. We just aren’t making a point of them being different, or at odds with the general human population.
- peteradio 4y agoAugmented intelligence is what we've been doing with computers since their inception.
- dale_glass 4y agoThey both go together. Image AI has inpainting. You can provide a sketch for the AI to follow, have it redo parts of the image, or have it extend the image. You can pull things into Photoshop and retouch there. Novel AI has story writing assistance. Or ChatGPT can be used to provide bits and pieces that can be then combined or improved until something good results. Eg, Chat GPT can write fairly passable poetry that one could use as a base for something actually good. So far all AI works much better when combined with a human that knows what they're doing. You can easily create hundreds of okay pictures, but an actual artist is still by far the best user for an image generator.
- mach1ne 4y agoI don’t recognize the described risk. If spam gets so advanced that individual articles are indistinguishable from human-produced material, reputation steps in, forcing much more ability from the bots to keep up with human content producers. If language models or their descendants are able to overcome this barrier, then it doesn’t really matter who produces the content.
- mdale 4y agoWe already live in a ecosystem flooded with human "human level" spammers at a mass scale. We are only grounded in systems of reputation & relationships. These systems will remain important as content becomes fully synthetic. I.e Linkedin, Google, Social networks already heavily depend on social and reputation graphs towards keeping spam at bay; if anything new ideas will be harder and harder to go viral as the social and reputational filters are forced to assume synthetic. Maybe AI learns to leverage/buy endorsement "content" posts from your friends and colleagues like celebrity endorsements operate today (as personalized commercials/text become very low cost). AI/people trying to drive value with AI will have to find ways to leverage social relationships to squeeze into relevance where content/ideas are very low cost.
- mef 4y agothe issue is that the large language model doesn’t understand what it’s saying, cannot reason or come up with novel ideas, yet it can convince a human that it _is_ doing so. so then if the world begins to prefer AI-generated content, any question you ask the internet will only show you AI-generated answers, which can only offer you answers based on its training set, and over time a system with no new inputs just ends up being static generated from static, albeit static which is convincing enough for a human to accept it.
- 20after4 4y agoI feel like we've already reached this point, or nearly so.
- njarboe 4y agoIt would be very useful if it was required by law to inform people when they are interacting with or consuming content from a ML/AI system. Like how you get a warning when you are being recorded on a call to customer service. Have a known icon present in a chat box when a computer system is responding. Same on social media, blog posts, articles, art, etc. Otherwise I think things are going to get very weird and lots of mental health problems are going to get worse.
- hungryforcodes 4y agoUseful for whom though.
- njarboe 4y agoFor humans.
- hungryforcodes 4y agoNot for the humans in corporations or governments intending to deceive.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y agocontent is already highly curated by AI, should we tag that too? not that I'm disagreeing with you.. we should date and author everything
- vbezhenar 4y agoIt'll be as useful as cookie prompt.
- Peregrine1 4y agoIf this is a problem that a bunch of people actually complain about, hardware makers will just introduce apis to let systems know a human is typing. Think verified buyer on Amazon
- taormina 4y agoRelevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/810 https://xkcd.com/810
- version_five 4y agoIsn't AI (chatgpt) basically too late to the party. If I'm understanding the thrust of the article is that language models can easily generate content that you don't know if it's true or not, with various opinions and points of view. But the internet already has that. And that's how chatgpt can generate it's text, because it's trained on the internet as a corpus. So it can make more of the same, slanted and untrustable and maybe indistinguishable from whether a person wrote it. But that's nothing new.
- greesil 4y agoYeah but you can fine tune it to generate whatever you want, given your own training corpus. Anybody's whose job is to generate text will have a productivity boost.
- grogenaut 4y agoFor a while till we've watered down all content so much that chatgpt has no actual useful material to pull from but its own spew. Much of the internet seems to be trending this way, with just low effort content mill sites being propped up by high Google scores that cause more low effort content which further lowering the quality of Google results. It'll be its own downfall I tells ya....
- avidphantasm 4y agoWe are rapidly going back to square one on the Web: to needing curated guides to good websites. This time, not because search engines don’t exist, but because search results have been gamed by content mills pushing garbage content. It’s almost like the web is turning itself inside out. The web you care about is to some extent “dark”, i.e. not discoverable by conventional means. If systems like ChatGPT just become echo chambers (garbage content feeding AI generation of derivative garbage, ad infinitum), I kind of see things like ChatGPT simply turbo charging this creeping digital benightedness in the face of information over abundance.
- 4y ago
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoMore and more I think we need proof of being human to participate in the "town square". It essentially means the end of anonimity online, but I struggle to see how we overcome bots without it.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoIn the future, I imagine part of the web is anonymous and signal to noise ratio is 1:1,000,000 - and the other part of the web is authenticated and the single to noise ratio is much better.
- Nasrudith 4y agoI struggle to see how that would help. There are already plenty of paid shills out there. Just feed your shills the script and once again you have a sacrifice of anonymity for nothing. Like how real naming policies just made people double down. Frankly I find it disturbing that people jump straight to throwing away rights as the solution.
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoHonestly I don't see anonymity as a right. It is a sticking plaster defence against the loss of other rights and protections. Yes it is useful for people to organise against oppressive regiemes (either Amazon strikebreakers in Wisconsin or police / security forces in Tehran) but we really should have a clear and direct solution to Amazon in a democratic society. And if we cannot then anonymity is a poor second best. Secondly, yeah you want to be a paid shill for Russia / BP / Qatar etc go for it. Reputation matters. Maybe some kind of labelling / fair advertising is a good idea "all opinions expressed here have been paid for by tonights sponsor Marlboro." I would be interested in hearing from a proper human rights lawyer - anonymity is going to have a lot of case law surely?
- mostlylurks 4y agoRequiring proof of humanity does not necessitate deanonymizing users to anyone except the platform itself; they can still be anonymous to other users and onlookers.
- lkrubner 4y agoThese two items have always been true, they do not describe the future. For instance: "If I take position A on something and you take position B, it's possible that we can both believe the other person is conversing in good faith." There are only 8 or 9 people in the world with whom I can have good and challenging conversations. I have to know they are arguing in good faith. I don't waste my time arguing with someone who might be arguing in bad faith. I don't waste my time arguing with someone who is lying, or who doesn't believe in anything they themselves say, or who is simply trying to manipulate me, or who is simply trying to insult me, or whose idea of veritable fact is utterly different from my own. There are also those who are simply engaged in mental work so different from my own that I would have to devote years of study before I could understand them, and I have no interest in investing those years. Gödel's incompleteness theorems remind us that for any given system of axioms there will be statements that are true but which cannot be proven true using only the given axioms. If I were to waste time engaging such people in conversation then they might end up saying something that is logically consistent but it would take me several years of effort to figure out that their statement was logically consistent, and without investing those years of effort, it simply sounds like they are speaking nonsense. But I don't have enough lifetimes to figure that out. Therefore, challenging conversations, that are personally useful, have always been limited to small groups of people. Likewise: "I think there's a future for folks who self-organize into interlocking circles of trust." That is the way things have worked for humans for at least 10,000 years. We self-organize into interlocking circles of trust. That's how circles of friendship work.
- Proven 4y ago[dead]
- simonbarker87 4y agoI’m very concerned about where this is going. I can absolutely see the benefit of this technology and have used it a couple of times in the last week to genuinely save me time and come up with some ideas. My concern is where this is going, if the marginal cost to produce, effectively, infinite content is zero then what’s the point here? What’s are we doing and where are we going? Is the aim ti get to a point where humans don’t have to do anything? It’s all taken care of? Because if AI can make our art, create all media formats of our content, handle problems and do a lot of our physical tasks then … what’s the point? People look at me as if I’m mad, but in the space of 12 months we’ve gone from “AI can’t even manage multiple timers” (not quite but if you live with a Siri then you get it) to “holy moly, I can’t tell if that painting was made by a human or not” which is bonkers. I guess we need to see if we are at the start of the exponential curve or approaching a plateau.
- js8 4y agoI am looking forward to it. People will finally stop up each other in the name of meritocracy, and the society will equalize, because we will collectively recognize no one is really better and more deserving. The industrial revolution did this with physical strength and fitness, and the recognition that muscle doesn't really matter anymore lead to general decrease in violence. In a similar way, we will stop mythologizing intelligence or creativity.
- discreteevent 4y agoA lot of people at the top are those who are the most manipulative which is a very restricted form of intelligence. General intelligence was not a barrier for them up to now. Those kinds of people will continue not to share.
- naasking 4y agoYour implications of the effects of the industrial revolution are tenuous at best, and that's being generous. People are great at rationalizing why some people deserve more than others. Your perfectly equal society will probably never happen.
- 4y ago
- tazedsoul 4y agoIt is written in the New Testament scriptures and the book of Revelation. The author wrote, “It's like tech is making each one of us our own little village with a computer priest.” Indeed it is. Make no mistake. We are building a false god in hopes that it will serve us. However, this thing is not of the creator but man. The technologists have forgotten history.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoThey are not overlords for now. The overlords will continue to be the elites, augmented by new tools.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago"Bad Faith" is an interesting concept. What might be the best concise definition of it? How to recognize it?
- m0rissette 4y agoBest article I’ve read in a while.