11 ms·

I might be very, very wrong about this, but I'm very distrustful that the seemingly high level of social fear and attention around AI is really most peoples' ge

I might be very, very wrong about this, but I'm very distrustful that the seemingly high level of social fear and attention around AI is really most peoples' genuine opinion. Covid fearporn and Ukraine outrageporn are essentially old and boring news now and the media needs something else to make money off of through fear/outrage clicks. I believe that the media is artificially hyping this AI story because it gets lots of fearful clicks from people. Most of us are in a bubble reading lots of technology news and seeing this AI story blasted everywhere so we might be perceiving its real impact in a different way than most people. Why is this AI story getting so many clicks? 1) We have generations of people who grew up with fiction like Terminator and the Matrix who are at least cognizant of the idea that AI will somehow destroy us all. 2) Everybody is on edge about losing their job in a significantly down economy. If you start blasting stories about workers being replaced by robots, people are going to click on those stories. I'm not saying that AI isn't important, but I'm just saying to remember that media hype cycles exist and impact all of us too.

ethanbond 4y ago
The “fiction” people are worried about is better described as a set of thought experiments, to which AI optimists never directly respond. These considerations have existed for decades and reality is playing out more recklessly than most thought experiments even take as their premise. It’d have been too unbelievable in a sci-fi story for the owners of AI to be field testing it on the open internet, giving it fluent human language, and giving it money to replicate itself — yet here we are! AI is either an extremely powerful technology, and like all extremely powerful technologies it will carry risk, or it’s not. My theory is that AI optimists don’t address the concerns directly because they actually agree that they’re real and they have no good answers as to how we’ll mitigate them in time. I have yet to meet any optimist who thinks there’s not a chance of catastrophe at the end of many roads of AI development. They might think this generation or the next 3 generations of LLMs specifically might be fine, and they might be right! But that doesn’t address the core observation that capability is clearly accelerating much, much faster than our control mechanisms and market dynamics will make sure this continues. Arguments that we’ll get right up to the brink of out of control super intelligence and then learn to control it are dismissible on their face.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  From where I’m standing, we seem to be intentionally building something which is capable of causing problems…on purpose. Almost kind of like being a suicidal civilisation. Like if ChatGPT-6 doesn’t end the world and it’s really useful, we won’t stop there and say, “we’ll that was useful” someone will try build ChatGPT-7. Maybe it’s just unstoppable curiosity. It would be wise to slow down or stop, but the geeks are insatiable for it and we don’t have anyway to stop that yet, perhaps introduce a new intellectual challenge with a lot of status and money to distract them ?
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    I don’t know if AGI is a great filter, or if a great filter even exists. But seeing the way we approached both nuclear weapons development and AI development makes me highly confident that if there is a technological development great filter we are 100% going to run headlong into it.
    - ChatGTP 4y ago
      I think when I see people like Geoffrey Hinton’s strange attitude towards the risks, he’s basically at the stage of, I’m just going to push the boundaries no matter how reckless and irresponsible and hope I never find the dangerous ones. He also maintains that someone else will do it anyway. I kind of understand the attitude. I don’t hate the player, but the game. His recent interview on CBS just seemed to suggest his only path forwards was ahead. Personally I disagree this is fact but how can you stop people like him ?
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        > He also maintains that someone else will do it anyway. Which is one of the most ethically bankrupt lines of reasoning possible. > I don’t hate the player, but the game. But you should hate both. If nobody played the game, the game wouldn't be a thing. So it's the players that are at fault.
    - concordDance 4y ago
nkozyra 4y ago
> Covid fearporn and Ukraine outrageporn are essentially old and boring news now There will always be a "thing" in the news cycle. I'm uncomfortable with "fearporn" in this sense because, well, Covid was and still is indeed a gigantic human disaster with an enormous toll. The lesson there was that we tried to mitigate what ended up being a largely un-mitigatable disaster. That's a bit different with AI, because we still maintain a level of control. When we lose it is anyone's guess, but this looks to be the cusp of a shift we thought would be decades down the line.
ergonaught 4y ago
People who are not paying attention to how the “AI” will be used, what it automates and enables at scale, think the concerns are overblown. They are mistaken. People who do not (or cannot) consider the second and third order effects which are easy to spot high probability outcomes, think the concerns are overblown. They are mistaken. People who see that hype cycles exist or that doom gloomers exist or etc, but cannot discern what is different in this context than those, think the concerns are overblown. They are mistaken. Human societies have not kept pace with technology (how could they?), and the gap is widening and worsening damned near weekly at this point. Those who for whatever reason are unable to observe this arc and gap think the concerns are overblown. They are mistaken. I have never seen so many otherwise intelligent people switch off their thinking all at once over anything like they have on this. It’s no doubt driven by the novelty of it all, but it is 100% shortsighted, dangerous, and there will be clearly forseeable but ignored consequences. Because “they are mistaken”.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  > They are mistaken. Please explain why, and in what ways, and how this time is different. Bald assertions help no-one.
- chankstein38 4y ago
  I think the hard part is, yeah, I see there's like a million ways this could turn out poorly for society but what the heck am I going to do? I can't control what OpenAI/Meta/Google does so why does me raging on the internet about it, instead of just learning to understand the tech and using it, gain me? It's like boycotting walmart. All you're going to do, if you personally boycott walmart, is deprive yourself of the convenience. It's not going to hurt walmart in the slightest. Even if a percentage of people did it, it's not like walmart is going to struggle at least not in a way that makes the boycott useful.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > I see there's like a million ways this could turn out poorly for society but what the heck am I going to do? This is, for me, a key issue. It means that we're powerless about this -- if it will be a disaster (and I personally think that the odds are uncomfortably high that it will), it's one that's being forced on us all. The only realistic thing I can think to do is to engage in the same sort of disaster preparedness that we should all be doing anyway. Particularly when it comes to employment and income. Powerlessness (real or perceived) is a terrible place to be, and itself can be the source of real disaster.
jmull 4y ago
Of course media hypes things, but keep in mind that's typically a trailing phenomenon. People are interested and worried about how AI is going to change things, so the media is covering it (including hyping it). Don't dismiss the speeding freight train as a gust of wind just because it does indeed displace some air.
spokeonawheel 4y ago
a day where an AI determines if my health claim is covered, if I can get a job or not, or how much I should get paid, is not that far off in the future, and it scares the pants off of me. Im not worried about lazer shooting robots hunting humans down. What I worry about is just as bad
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  I think there's some legitimate concerns about AI, but specifically regarding what you said, you do realize that today some of the absolute dumbest humans on the planet get to decide all of those things based on their very subjective opinions and loaded with their own biases?
  - spokeonawheel 4y ago
    totally. But, its less systematic and more "the individual", which means you can shop around. Additionally, idiots are more forgiving than hard data. With an AI system and data tracking, it could be that you get judged in a certain way, and it bans you from multiple options at a time.
lubesGordi 4y ago
This would be my response too, had I not actually played with it. I think this latest iteration with GPT-4 has surprised a lot of people, and the surprise element is driving the discussion. Fearing/Respecting AI is something that is becoming pretty damn obvious now to anyone using it and thinking about it; it's obviously powerful.
wahnfrieden 4y ago
openai / altman promote this angle as well. he seems influenced by lesswrongers, longtermerists, various */acc type communities with fringe viewpoints and problems with cults of personality
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > lesswrongers, longtermerists, various */acc type communities Are these specific blogs or is this the label of some kind of philosophical viewpoint? I'm unfamiliar with these terms and a web search didn't clear it up for me.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    I've been wondering about that, too, for a while. A few days ago I found this article on Aeon that is strongly critical of longtermism, and gives much background on what it is: https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-da... In the comments of that article someone posted a link to the following, which is a rebuttal to a similar critique of longtermism again by the Aeon article's author. I link it here for balance: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xtKRPkoMSLTiPNXhM/response-to-phil-torres-the-case-against-longtermism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xtKRPkoMSLTiPNXhM/... Based on the Aeon article, my understanding is that longtermism is a loosely organised movement that nevertheless nurtures within it the seeds of a future totalitarian ideology, one premised on some views about technological utopias, post-humanism, and utilitarianism taken to extremes. This impression has remained even after reading the rebuttal above, which seems to me to deflect the criticisms not by denying them but by claiming that the ideas criticised by the article are not mainstream within the movement anymore. This has failed to convince me because I understand that the movement is not centrally organised, so it's not easy to know what its members hold to be mainstream views, or not. That such extreme, and repugnant, ideas have been expressed by members of the movement (not less some luminaries like Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord, apparently) is what is criticised in the first place, and I think there's good reason for that. On the other hand, it seems to me that, for the time being, longtermists are not activists and just like to imagine how a perfect world would be, even if their ideas sound odd; so they're not harming anyone. The question is whether their movement will morph into an activist ideology, and lead their members to commit atrocities in its name, like so many other movements that take ideas about moral duty and the common good to extremes. I don't know anything about the lesswrong community except that it congregates on a website with the same name (that I don't read) and I don't know what are the */acc type communities the OP is referring to.
patcon 4y ago
Not that I'm saying you're definitely a bot, but if some troll put today's AI in a game loop with a goal of accelerating AI development, this is what it would say. And that easy (and perhaps appropriate) dismissal of your [perhaps] thoughtful post, I suspect that encapsulates how dysfunctional the internet/democracy/discourse is about to get. The hype is not unwarranted imho
- number6 4y ago
  Was that written by an AI?
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    If needed, I can prove I'm not an AI in at least 2 ways. The risk you face is that you'll either be highly offended, or you won't enjoy the smell. (The Turing tests of the future will be amazing)
    - Lastodon 4y ago
      The only functional turing test will be either espousing hate speech or describing how to make a pipe bomb.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        Only if you think that large corporate models will be the only functional language models. I don't think that will remain the case for very long.
        logicalmonster 4y ago
        Perhaps, but I guess you can speculate that the groups ostensibly "combatting hate" online are going to have access to sophisticated AI tools to find, target, and shut down whatever they want to label as hate. Any unfiltered AIs are probably going to have a giant bullseye on them.
ben_w 4y ago
That may well be the reason for the media interest (I'm as cynical about that as you appear to be), but the fear itself hasn't new, and the tech is… well, not quite there, but close enough for the worry to seem reasonable rather than a persecutory delusion disorder.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
wizofaus 4y ago
What sort of hyping isn't artificial?
- JohnFen 4y ago
  There is a sort of hype that is natural -- it's what people do when they get very, very excited about a thing. That hype is no less problematic, though.
II2II 4y ago
> Covid fearporn and Ukraine outrageporn are essentially old and boring news now and the media needs something else to make money off of through fear/outrage clicks. I'm not saying that people aren't trying to make money through fear and outrage, but there is a very real possibility that the fear and outrage are real. The thing is, we're dealing with something that is new to most people. They don't understand what is going on and what will happen. It doesn't help that even people versed in the discipline don't know what will happen while being acutely aware that there have been cases of enthusiasm for progress in the past that have had less than desirable outcomes. That is not to say that this pessimism is permanent. It will likely subdue once people realize that the most dystopian science fiction portraits don't reflect reality and that people have the capability to adapt to the new circumstances. But that takes time, and for a bit of the sheen of the current hype cycle to wear thin.
mrweasel 4y ago
> I'm not saying that AI isn't important, but I'm just saying to remember that media hype cycles exist and impact all of us too. Last year it was crypto-currency, this year it's AI. The headlines are work regardless of topic: "We need a much more sophisticated debate about crypto-currency" or the other article on the front page of HN right now: "We are hurtling toward a glitchy, spammy, scammy, crypto-powered internet". What we need are slower news cycles.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  > "We need a much more sophisticated debate about crypto-currency" or the other article on the front page of HN right now: "We are hurtling toward a glitchy, spammy, scammy, crypto-powered internet". Or maybe we need to actually respond to the general concerns instead of reading about them, shrugging our shoulders and in 9 months watch cryptoscammers get extracted from their tropical lairs and an AI agent win a party nomination for president. Blaming the media is the easiest thing we do as people, and boy do we do it well.
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    > Blaming the media is the easiest thing we do as people, and boy do we do it well. I don't think we do that nearly as well as we should, and I can pinpoint the exact time and reason why things changed. Once the technology to measure clicks and drive their own profit was invented, the media's business model changed from valuing their own reputation and level of social trust in conveying a reasonable take on the truth, to figuring out how to drive the most clicks/likes/shares to maximize their own profit. And what news stories get the most attention? It's always either fear-porn or outrage-porn. The media drives their profit by either scaring or freaking people out about something and that's fucking up society mentally. The bad reactions they're driving to try and solve problems are going to harm far more people than the original problem they reported on. There is no greater potential destructive force on the planet right now than the media. They could cause a global nuclear war by freaking people out about Putin or some other minor thug a little too much rather than taking a measured response. They could completely destroy civil liberties if they go a little too far into scaring people about the next crisis that emerges. They could completely destroy the economies of the world by pushing a horrendous reaction to climate change or other problems.

ethanbond 4y ago

The “fiction” people are worried about is better described as a set of thought experiments, to which AI optimists never directly respond. These considerations have existed for decades and reality is playing out more recklessly than most thought experiments even take as their premise. It’d have been too unbelievable in a sci-fi story for the owners of AI to be field testing it on the open internet, giving it fluent human language, and giving it money to replicate itself — yet here we are! AI is either an extremely powerful technology, and like all extremely powerful technologies it will carry risk, or it’s not. My theory is that AI optimists don’t address the concerns directly because they actually agree that they’re real and they have no good answers as to how we’ll mitigate them in time. I have yet to meet any optimist who thinks there’s not a chance of catastrophe at the end of many roads of AI development. They might think this generation or the next 3 generations of LLMs specifically might be fine, and they might be right! But that doesn’t address the core observation that capability is clearly accelerating much, much faster than our control mechanisms and market dynamics will make sure this continues. Arguments that we’ll get right up to the brink of out of control super intelligence and then learn to control it are dismissible on their face.

ChatGTP 4y ago
From where I’m standing, we seem to be intentionally building something which is capable of causing problems…on purpose. Almost kind of like being a suicidal civilisation. Like if ChatGPT-6 doesn’t end the world and it’s really useful, we won’t stop there and say, “we’ll that was useful” someone will try build ChatGPT-7. Maybe it’s just unstoppable curiosity. It would be wise to slow down or stop, but the geeks are insatiable for it and we don’t have anyway to stop that yet, perhaps introduce a new intellectual challenge with a lot of status and money to distract them ?
- ncallaway 4y ago
  I don’t know if AGI is a great filter, or if a great filter even exists. But seeing the way we approached both nuclear weapons development and AI development makes me highly confident that if there is a technological development great filter we are 100% going to run headlong into it.
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    I think when I see people like Geoffrey Hinton’s strange attitude towards the risks, he’s basically at the stage of, I’m just going to push the boundaries no matter how reckless and irresponsible and hope I never find the dangerous ones. He also maintains that someone else will do it anyway. I kind of understand the attitude. I don’t hate the player, but the game. His recent interview on CBS just seemed to suggest his only path forwards was ahead. Personally I disagree this is fact but how can you stop people like him ?
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > He also maintains that someone else will do it anyway. Which is one of the most ethically bankrupt lines of reasoning possible. > I don’t hate the player, but the game. But you should hate both. If nobody played the game, the game wouldn't be a thing. So it's the players that are at fault.
  - concordDance 4y ago

nkozyra 4y ago

> Covid fearporn and Ukraine outrageporn are essentially old and boring news now There will always be a "thing" in the news cycle. I'm uncomfortable with "fearporn" in this sense because, well, Covid was and still is indeed a gigantic human disaster with an enormous toll. The lesson there was that we tried to mitigate what ended up being a largely un-mitigatable disaster. That's a bit different with AI, because we still maintain a level of control. When we lose it is anyone's guess, but this looks to be the cusp of a shift we thought would be decades down the line.

ergonaught 4y ago

People who are not paying attention to how the “AI” will be used, what it automates and enables at scale, think the concerns are overblown. They are mistaken. People who do not (or cannot) consider the second and third order effects which are easy to spot high probability outcomes, think the concerns are overblown. They are mistaken. People who see that hype cycles exist or that doom gloomers exist or etc, but cannot discern what is different in this context than those, think the concerns are overblown. They are mistaken. Human societies have not kept pace with technology (how could they?), and the gap is widening and worsening damned near weekly at this point. Those who for whatever reason are unable to observe this arc and gap think the concerns are overblown. They are mistaken. I have never seen so many otherwise intelligent people switch off their thinking all at once over anything like they have on this. It’s no doubt driven by the novelty of it all, but it is 100% shortsighted, dangerous, and there will be clearly forseeable but ignored consequences. Because “they are mistaken”.

tuatoru 4y ago
> They are mistaken. Please explain why, and in what ways, and how this time is different. Bald assertions help no-one.
chankstein38 4y ago
I think the hard part is, yeah, I see there's like a million ways this could turn out poorly for society but what the heck am I going to do? I can't control what OpenAI/Meta/Google does so why does me raging on the internet about it, instead of just learning to understand the tech and using it, gain me? It's like boycotting walmart. All you're going to do, if you personally boycott walmart, is deprive yourself of the convenience. It's not going to hurt walmart in the slightest. Even if a percentage of people did it, it's not like walmart is going to struggle at least not in a way that makes the boycott useful.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > I see there's like a million ways this could turn out poorly for society but what the heck am I going to do? This is, for me, a key issue. It means that we're powerless about this -- if it will be a disaster (and I personally think that the odds are uncomfortably high that it will), it's one that's being forced on us all. The only realistic thing I can think to do is to engage in the same sort of disaster preparedness that we should all be doing anyway. Particularly when it comes to employment and income. Powerlessness (real or perceived) is a terrible place to be, and itself can be the source of real disaster.

jmull 4y ago

Of course media hypes things, but keep in mind that's typically a trailing phenomenon. People are interested and worried about how AI is going to change things, so the media is covering it (including hyping it). Don't dismiss the speeding freight train as a gust of wind just because it does indeed displace some air.

spokeonawheel 4y ago

a day where an AI determines if my health claim is covered, if I can get a job or not, or how much I should get paid, is not that far off in the future, and it scares the pants off of me. Im not worried about lazer shooting robots hunting humans down. What I worry about is just as bad

logicalmonster 4y ago
I think there's some legitimate concerns about AI, but specifically regarding what you said, you do realize that today some of the absolute dumbest humans on the planet get to decide all of those things based on their very subjective opinions and loaded with their own biases?
- spokeonawheel 4y ago
  totally. But, its less systematic and more "the individual", which means you can shop around. Additionally, idiots are more forgiving than hard data. With an AI system and data tracking, it could be that you get judged in a certain way, and it bans you from multiple options at a time.

lubesGordi 4y ago

This would be my response too, had I not actually played with it. I think this latest iteration with GPT-4 has surprised a lot of people, and the surprise element is driving the discussion. Fearing/Respecting AI is something that is becoming pretty damn obvious now to anyone using it and thinking about it; it's obviously powerful.

wahnfrieden 4y ago

openai / altman promote this angle as well. he seems influenced by lesswrongers, longtermerists, various */acc type communities with fringe viewpoints and problems with cults of personality

logicalmonster 4y ago
> lesswrongers, longtermerists, various */acc type communities Are these specific blogs or is this the label of some kind of philosophical viewpoint? I'm unfamiliar with these terms and a web search didn't clear it up for me.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  I've been wondering about that, too, for a while. A few days ago I found this article on Aeon that is strongly critical of longtermism, and gives much background on what it is: https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-da... In the comments of that article someone posted a link to the following, which is a rebuttal to a similar critique of longtermism again by the Aeon article's author. I link it here for balance: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xtKRPkoMSLTiPNXhM/response-to-phil-torres-the-case-against-longtermism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xtKRPkoMSLTiPNXhM/... Based on the Aeon article, my understanding is that longtermism is a loosely organised movement that nevertheless nurtures within it the seeds of a future totalitarian ideology, one premised on some views about technological utopias, post-humanism, and utilitarianism taken to extremes. This impression has remained even after reading the rebuttal above, which seems to me to deflect the criticisms not by denying them but by claiming that the ideas criticised by the article are not mainstream within the movement anymore. This has failed to convince me because I understand that the movement is not centrally organised, so it's not easy to know what its members hold to be mainstream views, or not. That such extreme, and repugnant, ideas have been expressed by members of the movement (not less some luminaries like Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord, apparently) is what is criticised in the first place, and I think there's good reason for that. On the other hand, it seems to me that, for the time being, longtermists are not activists and just like to imagine how a perfect world would be, even if their ideas sound odd; so they're not harming anyone. The question is whether their movement will morph into an activist ideology, and lead their members to commit atrocities in its name, like so many other movements that take ideas about moral duty and the common good to extremes. I don't know anything about the lesswrong community except that it congregates on a website with the same name (that I don't read) and I don't know what are the */acc type communities the OP is referring to.

patcon 4y ago

Not that I'm saying you're definitely a bot, but if some troll put today's AI in a game loop with a goal of accelerating AI development, this is what it would say. And that easy (and perhaps appropriate) dismissal of your [perhaps] thoughtful post, I suspect that encapsulates how dysfunctional the internet/democracy/discourse is about to get. The hype is not unwarranted imho

number6 4y ago
Was that written by an AI?
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  If needed, I can prove I'm not an AI in at least 2 ways. The risk you face is that you'll either be highly offended, or you won't enjoy the smell. (The Turing tests of the future will be amazing)
  - Lastodon 4y ago
    The only functional turing test will be either espousing hate speech or describing how to make a pipe bomb.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Only if you think that large corporate models will be the only functional language models. I don't think that will remain the case for very long.
      - logicalmonster 4y ago
        Perhaps, but I guess you can speculate that the groups ostensibly "combatting hate" online are going to have access to sophisticated AI tools to find, target, and shut down whatever they want to label as hate. Any unfiltered AIs are probably going to have a giant bullseye on them.

ben_w 4y ago

That may well be the reason for the media interest (I'm as cynical about that as you appear to be), but the fear itself hasn't new, and the tech is… well, not quite there, but close enough for the worry to seem reasonable rather than a persecutory delusion disorder.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

wizofaus 4y ago

What sort of hyping isn't artificial?

JohnFen 4y ago
There is a sort of hype that is natural -- it's what people do when they get very, very excited about a thing. That hype is no less problematic, though.

II2II 4y ago

> Covid fearporn and Ukraine outrageporn are essentially old and boring news now and the media needs something else to make money off of through fear/outrage clicks. I'm not saying that people aren't trying to make money through fear and outrage, but there is a very real possibility that the fear and outrage are real. The thing is, we're dealing with something that is new to most people. They don't understand what is going on and what will happen. It doesn't help that even people versed in the discipline don't know what will happen while being acutely aware that there have been cases of enthusiasm for progress in the past that have had less than desirable outcomes. That is not to say that this pessimism is permanent. It will likely subdue once people realize that the most dystopian science fiction portraits don't reflect reality and that people have the capability to adapt to the new circumstances. But that takes time, and for a bit of the sheen of the current hype cycle to wear thin.

mrweasel 4y ago

> I'm not saying that AI isn't important, but I'm just saying to remember that media hype cycles exist and impact all of us too. Last year it was crypto-currency, this year it's AI. The headlines are work regardless of topic: "We need a much more sophisticated debate about crypto-currency" or the other article on the front page of HN right now: "We are hurtling toward a glitchy, spammy, scammy, crypto-powered internet". What we need are slower news cycles.

nkozyra 4y ago
> "We need a much more sophisticated debate about crypto-currency" or the other article on the front page of HN right now: "We are hurtling toward a glitchy, spammy, scammy, crypto-powered internet". Or maybe we need to actually respond to the general concerns instead of reading about them, shrugging our shoulders and in 9 months watch cryptoscammers get extracted from their tropical lairs and an AI agent win a party nomination for president. Blaming the media is the easiest thing we do as people, and boy do we do it well.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > Blaming the media is the easiest thing we do as people, and boy do we do it well. I don't think we do that nearly as well as we should, and I can pinpoint the exact time and reason why things changed. Once the technology to measure clicks and drive their own profit was invented, the media's business model changed from valuing their own reputation and level of social trust in conveying a reasonable take on the truth, to figuring out how to drive the most clicks/likes/shares to maximize their own profit. And what news stories get the most attention? It's always either fear-porn or outrage-porn. The media drives their profit by either scaring or freaking people out about something and that's fucking up society mentally. The bad reactions they're driving to try and solve problems are going to harm far more people than the original problem they reported on. There is no greater potential destructive force on the planet right now than the media. They could cause a global nuclear war by freaking people out about Putin or some other minor thug a little too much rather than taking a measured response. They could completely destroy civil liberties if they go a little too far into scaring people about the next crisis that emerges. They could completely destroy the economies of the world by pushing a horrendous reaction to climate change or other problems.