joules77

Putin the magnificent has said "whoever leads in AI will rule the world". So it is a war. An arms race. Weirdly being run by private capital cuz there was no incentive(unlike during WW2/Cold War) to fund a state run Manhattan Project for AI.

Watch what happens if a breakthrough comes out of China, Russia or a shed in Nigeria. What is happening on Wall Street or who is loosing cash or jobs will drop instantly down the list of priorities. Money will be printed to the moon.

These kind of people make their living freaking out kids. I mean if you are that full of yourself, that you think your thoughts are critical to saving the lives of "millions and billions" of people why would you go and talk to a kid about it? Too many of these kind of pointless people being propped up. Monetizing fear and anxiety 24x7.

The evidence is overwhelming; the debate is long over.

This assumes everyone is the same. The detachment philosophy of the Buddhist/ Epictetus/Stoics emerged for a reason. It has lasted in one form or another for thousands of years - https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181/lecture-8

Horses for courses.

Ad prices (and revenue of these companies) keep going up tho...

2010-2022 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU365

2023-2025 - https://data.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/WPU366

Why not?

These are not new problems. They are ancient and different people have dealt with them with different levels of success. AI has access to all those strategies.

So maybe one day AI dawns Mr. Rogers persona to solve one problem and Abe Lincoln to solve another.

It can do it at scales no individual or group can, so there is potential to nudge the entire chimp troupe in directions never possible before, in ways that "will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills".

Its all subjective. There is no clear quantification of X Attention consumed = Y Value produced. So saying what the algo does is important is like saying astrology is important. Or HN is important ;) At the end of the day most info produced is just entertainment/placebo. 3 inch chimp brains have upper limits on how much they can consume and how many updates to their existing neural net are possible. Since there is nothing signaling these limits to people, people(both producers and consumers of info) live in their own lala land about what their own limits are or when those limits have been crossed, mostly everyone is hallucinating about Value of Info.

The UN report on the Attention Economy says 0.05% of info generated is actually consumed. And that was based on a study 10-15 years ago.

Not just your dad but the vast majority don't use these features either.

The human brain has a natural upper limit in how many times it's beliefs can update per year. If the Total new features shipped by every company in the land, every year exceeds that limit, most of it is a gigantic waste.

Large, cash rich companies beyond a point attract opportunists. And soon they outnumber innovators.

After that happens we get run away Involution (change without purpose).

There is never ending amount of work going on, hyper specialization, elon/trump style self glorification/back patting, and all happening with very little purpose or meaning being produced.

The solution is well known. Orgs which have purpose are tuned into the Limits baked into the system.

Cause the story is no more about Business or Economics. This is more like the nuke arms race in the 1940s. Red Queen Dynamics.

He is an Attention addict. Just like Trump. They keep churning out shit everyday to get people to pay Attention to them. Why else buy Twitter/start truth social etc. So that their drug keeps flowing.

Their biggest source of anxiety in life is enough people aren't paying attention to them. Anything else that captures more Attention is an automatic existential threat. Netflix captures a lot of Attention. Therefore its a threat.

Or they can move elsewhere. Just like their ancestors and every other immigrant on the planet does when they can't find a job at home.

What you are talking about is info overload and break down of "shared stories" as content explodes faster than there are people or time to consume it all. In Economics they will tell you what happens when Supply drastically overshoots Demand. But economics is too young and immature a field to tell you how to find meaning and how "to fit or be useful".

For that you need the Philosophy or Religion.

So here is a useful lecture from an actual Philosopher on Detachment and Flourishing cause "there is no obligation to fit or be useful or understand everything" - https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181/lecture-8

If you are the type who feels the need to fit - go through the previous lecture on Attachment and Flourishing.

creativity is, and should remain, human-centered

Gentle reminder human creativity did not produce photosynthesis or crispr or the color blue. Throughout history its a small self praising gatekeeping elite that decides what is labeled creative. Its usually a over-paid nihilistic morally detached leisure class. So good riddance.

Or just tell ChatGPT not to spoon feed you and to make you think and work harder on things you want to learn.

We are not living in the world of Windows or Google anymore, where you have no input into what Windows and Google does.

But I don't think it makes a diff. My friend circle has had a few guys drop into hermit mode. We have tried all kinds of things to pull them out, but it's like they have decided monastic life or whatever is their thing.

Don't ask it if an idea is good or bad.

Ask it to show you weaknesses, missing pieces or blind spots.

"I don't know off hand, but I'll have a better answer for you in X mins/hours/days."

Jan 6th showed everyone the level of competence they have to control the unpredictable.

And he is just making things more unpredictable for himself and the people who support him.

Good idea. Especially the data ownership flip. Check out Philosopher Andy Clark's work (Surfing Uncertainty/Natural-Born Cyborgs) on these kind of "mind extension" tools. His work was before LLMs showed up, but is still very useful food for thought, while designing this kind of stuff.

Good to see such experiments. Thought C-Suite would see it happen before Govt/Cabinets though. That is surprising.

Eric Schmidt type leaders use fear and doubt to get the chimp troupe to do things. Mostly always benefiting Eric Schmidt more than anyone else. He used the same methods in google and everyone can see what google has become thanks to the seeds this man planted.

Contrast with the leadership style of JFK, faced with the Soviets.

He gives a 'we shall go to the moon' speech. When he talks about the Soviets, he doesn't talk about the fear of Soviet domination. He talks about American tech being better and benefitting more of humanity than anything the Soviets have produced.

He is not even talking about getting to the Moon being the point of the story. He is saying goals have to be set that are hard, "because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills".

He is saying we pick goals so that everyone feels a need to be better than they were yesterday. This plants the seeds for producing a NASA. No talk about work life balance required.

Be conscious of Leadership styles. Cause they have a big effect on how your energies and thinking develop in life.

Well before it was the pedo priest with the same dialogue.

So maybe an improvement.

Good friend of the Church, Nietzsche predicted dystopia long ago but it never plays out the way people think. The chimp troupe is highly unpredictable. One day it props up Hitlers. Next day it kills him.

Philosophers say Modernity already produces that effect - "shared stories" start evaporating as individuals start focusing on their own needs, interests, goals etc (see Charles Taylor's The Secular Age). No AI required.

Marriage has outlived it's historical purpose. It's 2025 "make kin, not babies".

Nothing is permanent. Once upon a time investors loved the Steel magnates and Railway tycoons. Today its these tech companies.

But by themselves they don't solve structural problems.

For example - On the Housing front, Tech has made construction and design more efficient, but housing costs keep skyrocketing due to demand vs supply, zoning laws, speculative investing etc

On the Medical front it has given us all kinds of advances but cost of healthcare in the U.S., keeps rising due to high admin costs, expensive pharma drugs, and private systems that maximize profit etc.

On the Edu front, everyone has free access to infinite info but costs to educate and certify anyone's skill and knowledge is keeps jumping.

So Tech is not causing any great structural changes. It doesn't live up to its hype.

The system is just rebalancing. By its self.

Read some actual scholars like Charles Taylor (instead of the under developed/work in progress theories of Peter Thiel) who shows why Technocracy is not capable of generating Meaning/Shared Story/Transcendence the way religious systems once did. And how its going to try to cope with that limitation.

Why is all that required? The microbes, plants and frogs don't require all that to survive and flourish.

Chimps do. Cuz the 3 inch brain of the chimp, for whatever reason, hates randomness/unpredictability/lack of control. It exposes the limitations of rationality/logic/thinking/intelligence. So how does the chimp (and tech tools it produces) cope?

As technocracy/scaling/optimization/efficiency etc grapples with its own limitations, more and more people will start looking at how other systems produced Meaning/Shared Story/Hope/Faith/Transcendence in the face of limitations without collapse.

People like JFK and Obama (if you read their speeches) tap into those learnings to give the chimp troupe a secular version of it.

That generates hope but hope is not enough. What all religious systems do is also produce an army of pastors who will be present with people who suffer (not just give speeches, podcasts, ted talks and apps).

Pastoral Care is a missing feature of the Technocracy. The more it denies that its a required feature the more lost and confused everyone gets.

Matters to exporters. Not to everyone. SK is a 2 Trillion $$$ economy. What numbers are involved here is in the 20-50 Billion a year. Not like life or death.

Go deeper. Why does society needs parents at the current rate of change?

The ants discovered hundreds of millions of years before even the chimps got social, that parents are not required for functioning society.

We will get there soon with artificial wombs on the near horizon.

It's like being behind a McDonald fry station when suddenly thousand people show up for lunch. So sort of like a Prank video.

Now the real question is why do prank videos mesmerize people?

The chimp troupes handles randomness and unpredictability, with the 3 inch chimp brain whose hardware hasn't been updated in 100K years, only one way - tell stories. It's our randomness handling hack.

The stories breakdown all the time.

They are Attention capture specialists. Nothing else. Even Trump got kicked off social media. No one cried. It was the right decision.

In an Attention Economy where Attention is finite pool, like Land or Oil just allowing random people to suck everyone's Attention makes no sense. Especially when everyone is allowed to Broadcast simultaneously. Monetize their audience. Weaponize content. No reform to any of it.

All this system props up is Attention exploitation. That's how Trump emerges. And everyone is acting as if the emergence of Trump is not a flaw but a feature of this Attention exploitation system.

I don't understand how Americans on both the left and the right having such strong para-social relationships with their Media Celebs.

One would think from all the reactions, Tucker Carlson or Jimmy Kimmel are busy building hospitals, colleges and orphanages across the land.