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Genuinely curious what do you see as the dangers and concerns caused by social media/potential dangers and concerns caused by AI? Take the atomic bomb for exam

Genuinely curious what do you see as the dangers and concerns caused by social media/potential dangers and concerns caused by AI? Take the atomic bomb for example: it pretty much ended large scale industrial warfare on the level of the world wars. There are still wars but not ones in which entire continents are destroyed and entire generations across dozens of countries are lost. All things told the nuclear bomb saved the world a lot of suffering. For the most part I tend to think of social media such as facebook etc as something that will soon be used mostly by out touch old people and hobbyists participating in hobby groups. All things told social media has probably helped the world more than harmed despite enabling Google and others to get filthy rich off private data, in the long term I suspect it will be a flash in the pan caused by the newness of seemless online communication.

nmeagent 3y ago
> There are still wars but not ones in which entire continents are destroyed and entire generations across dozens of countries are lost. Yet. Nuclear weapons are an existential threat and may yet destroy human civilization. We've come very close many times already to starting a nuclear war and we're all basically lucky to be alive. Pour one out for Stanislav Petrov and take a look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls
- MeImCounting 3y ago
  While the paranoia of the cold war was certainly terrifying and its sure that we narrowly avoided nuclear strikes several times. MAD stayed the hands of the megalomaniacs capable of pulling the trigger and fortunately it seems we are at a point where such paranoia is no longer quite so prevalent in society.
  - haswell 3y ago
    The paranoia is no longer prevalent, but I don't think this has much bearing on the underlying risk that exists regardless of the degree of awareness by the general population. One of the only reasons MAD has held up is because we've successfully restricted the reach of nuclear weapons, i.e. if every country that wanted them could get them, the average person would have a lot more reasons to be paranoid.
haswell 3y ago
Regarding social media, I think the current form threatens the fabric of society. It causes people to believe things about each other that they would never believe if not for the algorithmic rage machines promoting the worst outliers. The upvote/downvote systems in most communities lead to promotion of binary thinking and a seeming inability for many participants to consider nuance. One you factor in the advertising incentives and dark patterns used to keep people coming back, it's hard to see much benefit in the current state of social media. It wasn't always this way. The early Internet was a very different place. I credit some of those early communities with helping me escape a complicated childhood. But that Internet no longer exists, and it hasn't for quite some time. So while I'm willing to agree that social media has provided quite a bit of benefit, I don't believe it continues to do so, nor will it until people categorically reject the current generation of social sites and their business models. This is to say nothing of the privacy and data harvesting issues inherent to these sites in 2024, which by themselves are a threat to democracy when you factor in the overreach we already know is occurring by our governments. Regarding AI, I think there's a very real concern about social upheaval as entire categories of work are eliminated if not introduced with care. I think it's deeply concerning that fewer and fewer people will prioritize the cultivation of first hand expertise and instead opt to just let various AIs handle things. I think it will lead to the further erosion of independent thought, and to a future where fewer and fewer people know how to reason about things. The misinformation landscape will be changed forever. People will/are already starting to worship AIs. AIs will be constructed that know how to radicalize people more effectively than any YouTube algorithm ever could. AIs will be implemented as experts (this is already happening now), and we will increasingly defer to these "experts" for critical decisions despite their flaws/biases. > in the long term I suspect it will be a flash in the pan caused by the newness of seemless online communication I hope you're right, but this also seems like a very optimistic take. Seamless online communication is here to stay, but we still know very little about the long term impact of this kind of communication ability on humans. The group dynamics in play when our brains evolved look nothing like the group dynamics enabled by this kind of tech. I should say I don't necessarily think we'll see the worst of every one of these concerns come to fruition, i.e. I'm not just an AI doomer, but I also expect we'll encounter issues we haven't thought about yet, and that the societal impact of even just a subset of these issues could be immense.

nmeagent 3y ago

> There are still wars but not ones in which entire continents are destroyed and entire generations across dozens of countries are lost. Yet. Nuclear weapons are an existential threat and may yet destroy human civilization. We've come very close many times already to starting a nuclear war and we're all basically lucky to be alive. Pour one out for Stanislav Petrov and take a look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls

MeImCounting 3y ago
While the paranoia of the cold war was certainly terrifying and its sure that we narrowly avoided nuclear strikes several times. MAD stayed the hands of the megalomaniacs capable of pulling the trigger and fortunately it seems we are at a point where such paranoia is no longer quite so prevalent in society.
- haswell 3y ago
  The paranoia is no longer prevalent, but I don't think this has much bearing on the underlying risk that exists regardless of the degree of awareness by the general population. One of the only reasons MAD has held up is because we've successfully restricted the reach of nuclear weapons, i.e. if every country that wanted them could get them, the average person would have a lot more reasons to be paranoid.

haswell 3y ago

Regarding social media, I think the current form threatens the fabric of society. It causes people to believe things about each other that they would never believe if not for the algorithmic rage machines promoting the worst outliers. The upvote/downvote systems in most communities lead to promotion of binary thinking and a seeming inability for many participants to consider nuance. One you factor in the advertising incentives and dark patterns used to keep people coming back, it's hard to see much benefit in the current state of social media. It wasn't always this way. The early Internet was a very different place. I credit some of those early communities with helping me escape a complicated childhood. But that Internet no longer exists, and it hasn't for quite some time. So while I'm willing to agree that social media has provided quite a bit of benefit, I don't believe it continues to do so, nor will it until people categorically reject the current generation of social sites and their business models. This is to say nothing of the privacy and data harvesting issues inherent to these sites in 2024, which by themselves are a threat to democracy when you factor in the overreach we already know is occurring by our governments. Regarding AI, I think there's a very real concern about social upheaval as entire categories of work are eliminated if not introduced with care. I think it's deeply concerning that fewer and fewer people will prioritize the cultivation of first hand expertise and instead opt to just let various AIs handle things. I think it will lead to the further erosion of independent thought, and to a future where fewer and fewer people know how to reason about things. The misinformation landscape will be changed forever. People will/are already starting to worship AIs. AIs will be constructed that know how to radicalize people more effectively than any YouTube algorithm ever could. AIs will be implemented as experts (this is already happening now), and we will increasingly defer to these "experts" for critical decisions despite their flaws/biases. > in the long term I suspect it will be a flash in the pan caused by the newness of seemless online communication I hope you're right, but this also seems like a very optimistic take. Seamless online communication is here to stay, but we still know very little about the long term impact of this kind of communication ability on humans. The group dynamics in play when our brains evolved look nothing like the group dynamics enabled by this kind of tech. I should say I don't necessarily think we'll see the worst of every one of these concerns come to fruition, i.e. I'm not just an AI doomer, but I also expect we'll encounter issues we haven't thought about yet, and that the societal impact of even just a subset of these issues could be immense.