Comment by Murfalo

I don’t disagree with you, actually I kind of feel the same about smartphone adoption. It’s basically assumed now that you have a smartphone. You can’t enter some places without a ticket on your smartphone, or can’t order at some restaurants. Government processes are starting to require smartphones. Maybe it will be similar with AI.

And you know, I love computers, I used to love the internet. And I’ve had so much fun, more fun then ever coding with AI assistance. Lets say all of these technologies can be abused and forced on us, but all of them have neat aspects too.

Memes replicate and survive or perish like genes, but the environment they have to survive in is the human mind, and the threat that they have to overcome is being criticized. One way to survive this is by being a good idea. So some memes are simply good ideas. But there are various ways a meme can dodge the attack that comes from criticism, and then you get memes that are trendy or holy or crazy or ideological. Since we're not perfect in our ability to criticize (what would that even be like? Sounds terrible) I think there's necessarily a hint of this anti-rational aspect in all ideas. But some of them go all-in on the anti-rational strategy.

> You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.

Economics does sometimes compel you to read books or other material as a condition or expectation of employment. It is difficult to get a good job while being illiterate and many jobs require reading huge volumes of written work. Work in law or journalism springs to mind as economically compelling people to read a lot even if they they might not necessarily want to.

Tipping points and technological lock-in aren't new (e.g., the printing press, the radio, TV, phones, the internet, etc.). I do absolutely see your distinction, though, that prior technologies may have been less capable of imposing specific belief systems compared to frontier LLMs.

That's a fair point, and a key reason why competitive open models are so important. I definitely don't want to be stuck using Google's latest and greatest LLM once companies, marketers, and PACs can pay to subtly influence responses as they choose.

We've all seen this movie before, though.

Well, the Bible sort of compels you to share it, and in some societies you are economically and socially encouraged to do so.

For many of us, AI adoption is really an AI mandate.

So this article makes sense as long as you assume that LLMs enslave their users into purely-harmful, inescapable cognitive slavery.

Other than that, it's pretty grounded!

> Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.

Things go viral in professional settings as well. Scrum, agile, pc language ... I'm sure you can find other professional trends that if you decided not to follow your career would be jeopardized.

>The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.

This is also how I was made, I think.

great book

> The framing of something as a disease

Is a well-known cognitive quirk, Sapolsky covered that in “Behave” and “Determined”. As I get it, our morality piggybacks on the sense of disgust from insula activation, which lights up the same way as with pathogen avoidance. So comparing social groups to rodents, insects, or disease is a popular propaganda trick. Same here with viruses.

The word was invented by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist. He described ideas as reproducing with variation under selection pressure, which is the definition of the evolutionary mechanism.

There is a more recent use of ‘meme’ to refer to what we used to call an ‘internet image macro’. So the meme of the idea ‘meme’ has itself evolved to have a more specific variant of the general idea.

I think I see how you're thinking about it, to see how I see it, consider the following: Memes don't have to be inherited from genetic biological parents. Memes can have their own memetic parents. Like the joke "I feel like I'm the average of my 5 best friends" - our habits, quirks, idiosyncracies, all fit into the framework. It just needs some reproductive medium (human brains). That's why evolutionary biologists would be interested in studying this and things like it. There are epigenetic traits that exist and aren't genes and might be able to self reproduce. To keep the analogy going, consider that things that are catchy are easier to have this "memetic reproduction" so a catchy song might get sung a lot, serving as its fitness condition. So it's a generalization of biological genes to not just dna and rna and physical molecules but any substrate that can carry information. It's familiar to how we call it a 'viral' video.

Memes are inherited. You brush your teeth because your parents do. Memes are subject to selection via biological fitness. The people who didn't brush their teeth died sooner of tooth disease, so those who brushed their teeth had more children. Memes mutate. You don't brush your teeth identically to your parents.

Dawkins memes.