5 ms·

I only skimmed the paper, but judging by the abstract/intro and the definitions at the end, it's not concerned with "hostile" anything, but rather, with AI medi

by the_af 3y ago

I only skimmed the paper, but judging by the abstract/intro and the definitions at the end, it's not concerned with "hostile" anything, but rather, with AI mediating access to knowledge. Specifically, they mention that "knowledge collapse" is the narrowing of the "human working knowledge" and the universe of things "worth knowing" or "epistemic limit", which may result in obscuring/hiding what they call "the long tail of knowledge" (they define all these terms). They explain this better than me, but I think it's all about constraining the human relation to knowledge by these new "recursive AI" processes, without any malice involved. I don't know if the paper mentions this, but I've thought about this (in less smart terms). It's probably not that AI is a radically new process in this sense but, like a lot of tech, it makes it faster. We often say "well, things were like this with [written language|printing press|the internet]" but isn't it possible that a relatively harmless process could be accelerated to a harmful level by technology, even if it's not "fundamentally" something new? Can we always fall back to the belief that "people from previous generations complained of $THING and it turned out ok, therefore $NEW_THING is probably OK too"?

OgsyedIE 3y ago
The baseline will always shift to accommodate the conditions, it's how the hedonic treadmill evolved. The perspective we have, stuck inside the system, doesn't make the people of Denmark and the people of Burundi equally happy.
wslh 3y ago
> but rather, with AI mediating access to knowledge. Rephrasing McLuhan "The medium is the m[ea]ssage" we can say that "The AI is the medium and the m[ea]ssage".
apantel 3y ago
Anyone who needs to know more than the narrow middle of knowledge will seek it out. The real issue as I see it is people who have that kind of knowledge need to share it and have it be seen by those who are interested in it. There’s a huge problem with search engines serving junk ‘narrow middle’ SEO-optimized content to the endless horde, as opposed to real, quality knowledge. This issue predated generative AI.
- the_af 3y ago
  > Anyone who needs to know more than the narrow middle of knowledge will seek it out. This is what happens now, but do we know it will remain so? If AI is carelessly integrated into the teaching loop, I suppose it may narrow the knowledge even there. And then, how will people know there's more to be known? And even outside formal teaching, how will regular people know there's more to be known beyond what AI tells them? How will you even know you "need to know more"? Who will tell you? Already we see a lot of what people "know" (about anything: biology, WW2, ancient history, politics, art) is mostly informed by Hollywood and internet-spread "pop knowledge" (directly or indirectly, as in watching a documentary or reading a newspaper article that were themselves informed by regurgitated "pop knowledge"). (In case anybody is wondering, I don't consider myself outside of this. I know I'm impacted!) So this phenomenon isn't new... but will AI make it worse?
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    The problem is that people assume others are too stupid for technical information. So its siloed. People in the field have learned to abrogate a search engine to return technical results (e.g. looking for direct links to documentation or using a search tool like google scholar to read scientific literature). However, most people aren’t taught these skills in the general sense. All they might know is that narrow scope written to a 6th grade reading level. On the other hand, if we are able to get more people ready access to the ground truth technical information on different topics to people instead of narrow scope information that often leaves you misinformed, I’d imagine that would kick start an untold era of innovation and progress for our species. Too bad using our computer networks to distribute advertising and propaganda is seen as more profitable than future advancements, that I guess must be liable to disrupt the profitable status quo.

by the_af 3y ago

OgsyedIE 3y ago

The baseline will always shift to accommodate the conditions, it's how the hedonic treadmill evolved. The perspective we have, stuck inside the system, doesn't make the people of Denmark and the people of Burundi equally happy.

wslh 3y ago

> but rather, with AI mediating access to knowledge. Rephrasing McLuhan "The medium is the m[ea]ssage" we can say that "The AI is the medium and the m[ea]ssage".

apantel 3y ago

Anyone who needs to know more than the narrow middle of knowledge will seek it out. The real issue as I see it is people who have that kind of knowledge need to share it and have it be seen by those who are interested in it. There’s a huge problem with search engines serving junk ‘narrow middle’ SEO-optimized content to the endless horde, as opposed to real, quality knowledge. This issue predated generative AI.

the_af 3y ago
> Anyone who needs to know more than the narrow middle of knowledge will seek it out. This is what happens now, but do we know it will remain so? If AI is carelessly integrated into the teaching loop, I suppose it may narrow the knowledge even there. And then, how will people know there's more to be known? And even outside formal teaching, how will regular people know there's more to be known beyond what AI tells them? How will you even know you "need to know more"? Who will tell you? Already we see a lot of what people "know" (about anything: biology, WW2, ancient history, politics, art) is mostly informed by Hollywood and internet-spread "pop knowledge" (directly or indirectly, as in watching a documentary or reading a newspaper article that were themselves informed by regurgitated "pop knowledge"). (In case anybody is wondering, I don't consider myself outside of this. I know I'm impacted!) So this phenomenon isn't new... but will AI make it worse?
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  The problem is that people assume others are too stupid for technical information. So its siloed. People in the field have learned to abrogate a search engine to return technical results (e.g. looking for direct links to documentation or using a search tool like google scholar to read scientific literature). However, most people aren’t taught these skills in the general sense. All they might know is that narrow scope written to a 6th grade reading level. On the other hand, if we are able to get more people ready access to the ground truth technical information on different topics to people instead of narrow scope information that often leaves you misinformed, I’d imagine that would kick start an untold era of innovation and progress for our species. Too bad using our computer networks to distribute advertising and propaganda is seen as more profitable than future advancements, that I guess must be liable to disrupt the profitable status quo.