Comment by renewiltord
5 years ago
Haha, a good point. I think we enable everyone to amplify their speech. When a single person can only talk 1x, tech to make it 100x makes you very powerful. But if everyone has tech to make it 100x, your tech needs to go to 10000x to have the same relative impact it did originally. i.e. tech growth doesn't scale well enough. The early gainers are very powerful.
Maybe when we all have GPT-3 with hecka more params, no one can propaganda-war us because we will be immune because of constant ongoing prop-war.
I don't really know, but I think I bias towards making everyone so powerful that it's hard to get more powerful.
That’s an idealized view - but since there’s not much any individual can do, it’s a decent one :) Though I think it’s fair to say technology has widened the gap between the rich and poor, not shrunk it. Yes, the poor are better off on paper in a lot of ways, but it’s lead to a massive consolidation of wealth that could be much better distributed.
I think my real point is: stop trying to make online discourse like in-person discourse, or, double down and expect the same “proof of work” that being physically present requires.
On top of that, there are limits to the extent and volume of any in-person communication that simply isn’t reproducible online without massive artificial constraints.
I think we need to revisit things we consider valid in person and not try to conflate them to be the same once we are online at a massive scale as a literal species. People forget that there were only millions of people online in the 90s, and there are billions now, this is a new era, and it requires new thinking and new unified action, but that’s really not possible when large swaths of humanity are tribal, nationalistic, scared, hungry, poor, angry, and manipulated.
I almost feel like arguing about free speech online is putting the cart before the horse.