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So basically more ways of trying to make people buy things, do things, think things than before? I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around man

• sassymuffinz 6mo ago
  Self inflating nipple shaped balloons that generate their own lift without any helium would be an incredible achievement but that doesn't mean it's useful beyond being novel. Chatbots are ultimately just predictive text on steroids, and only complete fools would base their business, or entire economy around it.
  • throwanem 6mo ago
    The invention you describe, by making possible cargo transport without dependency on either a supply of fuel or the vagaries of weather, would revolutionize the global economy to an extent little short of utopian. You might want to pick a better example the next time you advance this argument, is what I mean to say.
    • sassymuffinz 6mo ago
      Gemini says it’s a genius idea and I should patent it.
      • throwanem 6mo ago
        I can't argue with that!
• groundzeros2015 6mo ago
  > The issue is not so much what they do or that they exist, but how they are utilized This is exactly how we got here though. Technology is not passive. It changes incentives, procedures, ideas and shapes the world. If we don't structurally limit what and how it's used, then we are not in control, no matter what are choices personally are.
  • Nasrudith 6mo ago
    I hate to tell you this but nobody has ever been in control. To think you can is to think you can unring a bell.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    • pixl97 6mo ago
      Right, and that's why we all died in a nuclear war.....
      • ElectronCharge 6mo ago
        The disincentives to nuclear war are glaringly obvious enough that even politicians (and their masters) get it. AI isn't like that. One problem is that it's rather generally misunderstood at this point. "AI" is not "intelligence". It's intelligence-adjacent, and something like LLMs is part of our psyche...the subconscious facility that allows us to form sentences without really thinking about it. At any rate, I have to agree with most of the points the blog author brings up.
        • pixl97 6mo ago
          I mean, not really. The only reason we've not died in a nuclear war is building nuclear bombs is very very difficult and expensive. If suddenly it became quick and easy to get nukes, we'd flash fry pretty quick when any and every suicidal nut with convictions got their hands on one.
  • 6mo ago
• nalekberov 6mo ago
  > Right now, they are utilized to further the class divide between rich and poor. Ironically this was the main reason LLMs were introduced in the first place, not to benefit the poor, but to widen the gap between the rich and the poor.
• LogicFailsMe 6mo ago
  Local models and powerful consumer HW and an informed populace that doesn't hate STEM, but that's not good for the shareholder value so you get expensive everything everywhere all at once instead. And if you dare question the mindset of hating on STEM whilst being addicted to its fruits, that just means you're another one of those maximally SV-aligned sociopaths so why bother? Evolve and let the chips fall where they may because I don't see any other options that play out in the idiocracy craving for strong confidently wrong leadership.
• SoftTalker 6mo ago
  > I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation Hate to break it to you but it's always been this way, and it was easier in the past when information was so much more expensive to distribute.
  • bigfudge 6mo ago
    I really didn’t experience the early internet that way.
  • djeastm 6mo ago
    Cheap distribution makes manipulation easier, not harder. The time it takes for a bad actor to capture attention is much smaller now. It used to be you'd read one news article about a story once a day in a newspaper and maybe once more in the evening news. In between you could think about it, talk about it with other people you know in real life, etc. Now you're getting meme after meme of the same story multiple times throughout the day, twisted in so many ways. And since we all have our feeds/algorithms adjusted to suit our own tastes we're all getting our own silo'd view of things and can barely rely on a shared set of facts. All that makes manipulation of people much easier.
    • olyjohn 6mo ago
      And the memes are all just one sentence gotchas with no real substance. And that's how people ingest the news. Headlines and Memes. Who needs actual articles?
    • Barbing 6mo ago
      >read one news article about a story once a day in a newspaper and maybe once more in the evening news. In between you could think about it, talk about it with other people you know in real life The bit about having processing time and the social check and balance has been missing from my perspective. Thank you.
  • georgemcbay 6mo ago
    > it was easier in the past when information was so much more expensive to distribute. As a 52 year old my life experience disagrees. It is much easier now because information flows both ways and "They" have a lot of information on you (and everyone else) and can use that information to manipulate you with algorithmic ragebait, and to extract maximum rents (in all aspects of commerce, not just literal rents) from you, etc. Not that things were ever perfect in the past, they certainly weren't, but increasingly so much of everything is literally just an outright fucking scam these days and all of it is being turbocharged by various forms of "AI" adjacent technology and increasing deregulation.
• mentalgear 6mo ago
  > Time to organize around groups and collectives that we know we can trust I’ve had the same thoughts, but if you look deeper, it all circles back to what we already had: (open, transparent) public institutions, society, and government by the people. The foundation wasn't the problem; the environment was. Along the way, social media noise, engagement-optimisation and Kardashian-style "entertainment news" infecting real news made an attention economy where, no matter how scandalous you are, attention can be minted into dollars. That is what polluted our infosphere and lead to the lack of trust. Now, nobody trusts these previously mentioned public entities any more - sometimes due to state-actor or ad-tech disinformation, and sometimes for good reason like when the poisoned public allowed these 80s-style telemarketer-style political weirdos and their cronies to take over public administration.
  • cindyllm 6mo ago
    [dead]
• drzaiusx11 6mo ago
  The majority of human history has been written by the ruling class of the day. Transparency only seems to follow in the wake of their inevitable fall, usually at great cost in retrospective research via the oft thankless unraveling of threads of truth from their more copious fictions. Much like the machines we construct in our likeness, we too seem to get stuck in endless regressive cycles. Folks in the "now" have always had a tendency to cling to their fictions as if they were truth for whatever reason; like nationalist exceptionalism, racial superiority, or religions rooted in "othering", etc. Humans seem to have an innate desire to fool themselves and trust in things they should not. Perhaps it's simply a sort of existential coping mechanism of living in a cold, unforgiving reality. We seek the comfort of lies. Organizing around groups of trust, tends to lead to factionalism and conflicts. Knowing and trusting are sadly very different things in our species.
• intended 6mo ago
  Our society, pre internet, built systems to manage trust. The conditions that allowed those systems to exist (the speed of transmission of data, the ratio of content generation to verification, the ability to shape consensus), have changed. You are ringing the clarion call for community and cooperation, and it will not work. Not because people don’t want community or the better things, but because incentives make the world go round. The choice between making some money at the cost of polluting the information commons is no choice at all. That degradation of the commons means no one can escape. No community you form, no group you build, dodges the fallout when someone decides to set fire to shared infrastructure. We are moving into the dark forest era of the information economy. As models improve, inference costs drop, and capacity increases, the primary organism creating content online will be the bot. Instead of building communities of people, build collections based on rules of engagement. Participants - be it bots or humans - must follow proscribed rules of conflict and debate. That way it doesn’t matter if you are talking to a machine or a person. All that matters is that the rules were followed.
  • Barbing 6mo ago
    Very interesting, I've thought in a completely different direction, towards human verification. "IRL KYC for friends" or something I always hit problems with it though. Let's say I can find someone I trust. Maybe it's me. Say I only enter online spaces, at least with intent of discussion, with those I've met in real life. Well, at some point, someone I've met face to face would be incentivized to maybe share a link to their friend's concert. Perhaps there's a free guest list spot in it for them if the show sells out. Or maybe it's all gravy, but eventually: I want to expand the network we've created together, and it means trusting someone else to bring in people to the online space I've never met in real life. This could again be fine for a long time, but won't someone eventually be incentivized (especially if this practice were common) to promote this supplement, promote that politician...? (recognize astroturfing is different from the impending slop tsunami but both feel to be in the same stadium)
    • intended 6mo ago
      Proof of human is the natural first stop. Your solution shares its essence with a club, a WhatsApp group or interest group. It works, but you will still be at the mercy of the large communities and economies of thought that the members are a part of. That is the broader environment you are a part of. Everyone from FAANG firms, governments to game companies struggle to identify real people from bots. If your platform is global, then you have to contend with users from different legal regimes and jurisdictions. The issue is that verification is logistically expensive, ends up infringing on rights, legally complex and on top of all that - error prone. To top it off - If proof of life ends up gatekeeping any form of value, you will set up incentives to break verification.
• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 6mo ago
  The Old Internet was a whalefall - Information online was fairly trustworthy while being more convenient and more plentiful than in-person information. The whale's been eaten now. The broader Internet is mostly not trustworthy, or convenient, and the information is not even very plentiful. People will and are retreating into high-trust zones. In-person networks, product recommendations from real friends, and closed group chats. It's not the end of the world, but things have changed. We'll have to put more work into finding information than we're used to.
• gaythread 6mo ago
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