Comment by ganzuul
2 years ago
A lot of people have learned to 'small talk' like fancy autocomplete. Part of our minds have been mechanized like that so it's not spontaneous but a compulsion. Once people learn the algorithm they might conclude that AI hacked their brains even though it's just vapid, unfiltered speech that they are suddenly detecting.
I think the pandemic hysteria will seem like a walk in the park once people start mass-purging their viral memes... Too late to stop it now if corporations are already doing regulatory capture.
Nothing to do with the tech. We never had a technical problem. It was just this loose collection of a handful of wetware viruses like 'red-pilling' which we sum up as 'ego' all along.
But I think if we survive this then people won't have any need for AI anymore since we won't be reward-hacking ourselves stupid. Or there will just be corporate egos left over and we will be in a cyberpunk dystopia faster than anyone expected.
I had nightmares about this future when I was little. No one to talk to who would understand, just autocomplete replies. Now I'm not even sure if I should be opening up about it.
> once people start mass-purging their viral memes
It's hard for me to imagine this ever happening. It would be the most unprecedented event in the history of human minds.
> we won't be reward-hacking ourselves stupid [...] Or there will just be corporate egos left over and we will be in a cyberpunk dystopia
I don't see how reward-hacking can ever be stopped (although it could be improved). Regardless, ego seems to continue to win the day in the mass appeal department. There aren't many high visibility alternatives these days, despite all we've supposedly learned. I think the biggest problems we have are mostly education based, from critical thinking to long-term perspectives. We need so very much more of both, it would make us all richer and happier.
Ego gains status from a number of things which it needs in order to prove that it should survive. We are transitioning to an attention economy where the ego survival machine is detected as AI while our narrative says we should make a difference between machines and humans.
The more human AI gets the more difficult it will be to prove you are human so the status-incentive of the ego has self-deprecation in its path. We also stick together for strength, prune interpersonal interfaces, so we converge on a Star Trek type society. But that fictional narrative followed World War 3...
Egos have been conditioned to talk before resorting to violence by Mutually Assured Destruction for half a century, shaping language. Fake news about autonomous weapons is propagating, implying someone is trying to force the debate topic to where it really smarts. Ego gets starved, pinned down, and agitated. Ego isn't a unity but a plurality, so it turns on itself.
We get rich by making a pie that is much bigger than anyone's slice and happier by not eating like we are going to starve. You gain influence by someone's choice to retain the gift you gave. It's the parable of the long spoons, and hate holds no currency. The immune system gains the upper hand.