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Nothing against Star Trek metaphors but its a sign how awkward our internalization of the role of computation in society when the only wholesome vision goes bac
by nologic01 3y ago
Nothing against Star Trek metaphors but its a sign how awkward our internalization of the role of computation in society when the only wholesome vision goes back seventy years, to Douglas Engelbart, augmenting human intellect and collective intelligence.
The greed and fear unleashed by the LLM algorithms is indicative of how dis-empowered and uninformed are vast numbers of people about what digital information technology can and cannot do.
The wasted potential is indeed gargantuan. But power structures never cared about wasted potential, their only concern is perpetuation.
The question is whether there is a threshold of tech availability and power where collective intelligence will emerge spontaneously and despite its oppression.
In other words, is Wikipedia an aberration or the shape of the things to come?
- AlotOfReading 3y agoSci-fi has been providing alternative visions of computation pretty much as long as it's existed. Star-trek has more mainstream awareness, but Bank's Culture series is barely a decade old (1987-2012). If you want more recent works, The Ancillary Justice and Murderbot Diary series' both explore the relationship between AI and society, as well as scores of others. The important thing here is the mainstream bit. The fact that these visions exist doesn't really move the needle because the popular narrative of rogue AI is such a dominant and constantly reinforced cultural narrative that it drowns out anything else.