121–130 of 1001 posts
> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life. They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many…
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Same here: I agree. On the other hand, it's a pest upon humankind that we can't leave public spaces clean and respect public property. We need money to pay people to make nice things, because apparently there is no critical mass that cares about the community. It's always individuals that burden it on their shoulders. And that's obviously not sufficient. Solution: money. Yeah, I hate it too.
Both hang together. We've been educated for selfishness.
> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life. They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many…
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In what way is dieting a scam? You literally just eat less, and you will lose weight as long as you're on a calorie deficit.
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I don’t understand how you u can’t worry about this. Like there’s a trend line of progress right? Ok so the thing isn’t effective now. But there’s a decade of upward progress and that projection line point to a future where a better AI exists. Trend-lines don’t point to an exact future just a most probable future. It is unwise to discount the most probable future.
If you gave me a model released two years ago and today and let me do some programming with both, I would have no problems telling you which one was released two years ago; progress on this front is very noticeable. But if you let me chat with each one for an hour, I'm honestly not sure I would be able to tell the difference.
Follow the 10 year trend-line. That’s the thing that points to the future.
But either way there’s progress on both fronts. Talking to it has improved we just can’t measure it quantitatively imo.
We've seen some of this with social media. Social media rose to prominence with ubiquitous always-on internet. That means that more people were connected than with prior internet technologies (which were always inherently somewhat social). The biggest negative associated with social media IMO has been organizations using the ease of creating accounts to fake social proof for political and monetary gain. Whether we li…
> AI makes it even easier to spin up fake personas to pretend to be human and advocate It's not only that. AI enables a never-before-seen level of individual targeting for political and commercial actors, campaigns of behavioral modification and radicalization, to the point where the entire intelectual foundations of democracy become questionable. When power actors addressed the people in traditional media they could…
This is also the reason the Soviets were ahead of the US in trying to train people like dogs (Pavlov's research) and why the communist forces ran brainwashing experiments on American POWs during the Korean War. If you look at what countries were willing to do back then it should make you concerned about what's coming.
For personalized targeting with psychological warfare, perhaps the closest analog is socialist East Germany's Zersetung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung
The main difference you get with LLMs is that it's cheaper to achieve these same goals Orwell was concerned about. You no longer have to make explicit and credible threats of violence. It's also easier to reach people in democracies and convince them that democracy is bad etc.
So for the sorts of concerns Orwell had, I think we're already seeing that. And Deepseek is one weapon in that war, since it has to comply with the Chinese regulations that LLMs must spread socialist core values.
How would you resist? I think a necessary precondition is that people continue to champion the importance of democracy and freedom of thought.
> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life. They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t understand how you u can’t worry about this. Like there’s a trend line of progress right? Ok so the thing isn’t effective now. But there’s a decade of upward progress and that projection line point to a future where a better AI exists. Trend-lines don’t point to an exact future just a most probable future. It is unwise to discount the most probable future.
But the current systems are about as good as they'll get: we can make them a bit better in fields where we can cheaply generate synthetic data, but human communication is not one of them. (And even where you can generate synthetic data, your efforts would usually be better spent assembling a purpose-built system.) Sure, I probably could make something more effective, using non-LLM technologies (given a large enough b…
Did you not notice a trendline of technological improvement of AI?
> Sure, I probably could make something more effective, using non-LLM technologies (given a large enough budget), but… why would I, or anyone else, do that when it'd be obviously harmful, with no benefit?
Technology will improve. The likelihood of you being part of that progress is nearly zero. So what you say here is categorically wrong. You are not able to make anything better. Humanity collectively will make something better and we don’t know who will be the one to do it.
People are willing to pay for companionship so there’s huge profitability in this area. Profit and self interest often at the expense of everything else is what drives progress.
But it's not gonna solve loneliness. Machines can't replace human contact. It can be a weak substitute like doom scrolling or media consumption is for feeling your own feelings, but it's not gonna replace human contact in all it's entirety and is a bad solution to an important problem. Are people who think and write this so alienated from their own race that they don't know what that all entails? The hormones, the co…
That will have none of the 'connection' you mention aside from a compassionate voice.
And, if you are one of those unfortunate people, that voice will be enough.
It will have to be.
We've seen some of this with social media. Social media rose to prominence with ubiquitous always-on internet. That means that more people were connected than with prior internet technologies (which were always inherently somewhat social). The biggest negative associated with social media IMO has been organizations using the ease of creating accounts to fake social proof for political and monetary gain. Whether we li…
> AI makes it even easier to spin up fake personas to pretend to be human and advocate It's not only that. AI enables a never-before-seen level of individual targeting for political and commercial actors, campaigns of behavioral modification and radicalization, to the point where the entire intelectual foundations of democracy become questionable. When power actors addressed the people in traditional media they could…
Education is part of the answer, but I fear it isn't enough.
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There’s also doomscrolling. I genuinely think a large portion of Gen Z would rather stay in bed watching Instagram reels than go out to a bar or club. I’ve been wondering recently what impact banning social media would have on birth rates. I’m confident it would be positive but I’m not sure on what magnitude.
> I’ve been wondering recently what impact banning social media would have on birth rates. I’m confident it would be positive The obsession with their birth rates is one of the creepy reasons why young people don't want to go out.