Comment by WA
1 day ago
> And it also sounds like the opening chapter of a story about what happens when an AI finds a nice little unpatched exploit in human cognition and uses that to its advantage.
I vaguely remember an article arguing that companies are basically a form of AI, because in a way, there are processes and systems and the whole thing is more than the sum of the humans working in it or something.
Now replace "AI" with "company" in this sentence of yours and we are already there. The exploits being the gigantic slot machine of social media, notifications, short-form content and endless scrolling.
You might be thinking about Charlie Stross' text/speech from 2018 in which he talks about corporations as slow AIs: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you...
That was it, thanks!
Forgive me if you’re already familiar, but if you’re interested in this metaphor you may like reading Stafford Beer’s work on organizational and system models. (1959, 1972)
The interesting thing to me about Beer's work, is that the complexity of control systems, is that it's not directed, it's inherent.
This leads me to assumptions about the inherent nature of language, in that it is not the contents of thought, but the vehicle.
Hence, different languages create their culture to perhaps a much larger degree than we tend to credit it.
Assumptions, but I tend towards this view.
Yeah the entire history of capitalism is basically a slow form of this and I'm not looking forwards to what happens when a bunch of giant bags of money pretending to be humans make all these bad decisions and brain-exploits happen even faster because it might make a little more money for them and who gives a fuck about the consequences?