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This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

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Re: This is not the future

#141

Post by Sharlin »

nostrademons wrote: post #58
croes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. I doubt that. There is a reason the videos get longer again. So people could have ignored the short form from the beginning. And wasn’t the matching algorithm the teal killer feature that amazed people, not the length of the videos?

I've got a hypothesis that the reason short-form video like TikTok became dominant is because of the decline in reading instruction (eg. usage of whole-word instruction over phonics) that started in 1998-2000. The timing largely lines up: the rise of video content started around 2013, just as these kids were entering their teenage years. Media has significant economies of scale and network effects (i.e. it is much mo…

That’s ridiculously US-centric. TikTok is a global phenomenon initiated by a Chinese company. Nothing would be different in the grand scale if there were zero American TikTok users.

Re: This is not the future

#142

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

mason_mpls wrote: post #113
jgalecki wrote: post #94

This post rhymes with a great quote from Joseph Weizenbaum: "The myth of technological and political and social inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. Its service is to remove responsibility from the shoulders of everyone who truly believes in it. But, in fact, there are actors!"

Perhaps we need more collective action & coordination? I don’t see how we could politically undermine these systems, but we could all do more to contribute to open source workarounds. We could contribute more to smart tv/e-reader/phone & tablet jailbreak ecosystems. We could contribute more to the fediverse projects. We could all contribute more to make Linux more user friendly.

I admire volunteer work, but I don't think we should focus too hard on paths forward that summarize to "the volunteers need to work harder". If we like what they're doing we show find ways to make it more likely to happen.

For instance, we could forbid taxpayer money from being spent on proprietary software and on hardware that is insufficiently respectful of its user, and we could require that 50% of the money not spent on the now forbidden software instead be spent on sponsorships of open source contributors whose work is likely to improve the quality of whatever open alternatives are relevant.

Getting Microsoft and Google out of education would be huge re: denormalizing the practice of accepting eulas and letting strangers host things you rely on without understanding how they're leveraging that position against your interests.

France and Germany are investing in open source (https://chipp.in/news/france-and-germany-launch-docs-an-open...), though perhaps not as aggressively as I've proposed. Let's join them.

Re: This is not the future

#143

Post by everdrive »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

I think we're all just sick of having everything upended and forced on us by tech companies. This is true even if it is inevitable. It occurred to me lately that modern tech and the modern internet has sort of turned into something which is evil in the way that advertising is evil. (this is aside from the fact of course that the internet is riddled with ads)

Modern tech is 100% about trying to coerce you: you need to buy X, you need to be outraged by X, you must change X in your life or else fall behind.

I really don't want any of this, I'm sick of it. Even if it's inevitable I have no positive feelings about the development, and no positive feelings about anyone or any company pushing it. I don't just mean AI. I mean any of this dumb trash that is constantly being pushed on everyone.

Re: This is not the future

#144

Post by hyperadvanced »

rmah wrote: post #120
nostrademons wrote: post #38

I think a more accurate and more useful framing is: Game theory is inevitable . Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that y…

The statement "Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives." implies that the "actors" are humans. But that's not what game theory assumes. Game theory just provides a mathematical framework to analyze outcomes of decisions when parts of the system have different goals. Game theory does not claim to predict human behavior (humans make mistakes,…

Yes, game theory is not a predictive model but an explanatory/general one. Additionally not everything is a game, as in statistics, not everything has a probability curve. They can be applied speculatively to great effect, but they are ultimately abstract models.

Re: This is not the future

#145

Post by VikingCoder »

nostrademons wrote: post #38

I think a more accurate and more useful framing is: Game theory is inevitable . Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that y…

Hi, sure, you can say, "I will always view the world through the eyes of Game Theory."

But don't forget, we discovered Nash Equilibrium, which changed how people behaved, in many interesting scenarios.

Also, from a purely Game Theoretic standpoint... All kinds of atrocities are justifiable, if it propagates your genes...

Re: This is not the future

#146

Post by lesuorac »

oblio wrote: post #36
gorgoiler wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your top examples of could’ve-beens or near-misses?

There are a bunch, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_House_of_Brande... It had huge impact on world history: it indirectly lead to German unification, it possibly lead to both world wars in the form we know them, it probably impacted colonial wars and as a result the territory of many former colonies, and probably also not their current populations (by determining where colonists came from and…

> Oh, Japan attacking Pearl Harbor/the US. If the Japanese Army faction would have won the internal struggle and had tried to attack the Soviets again in 1941, the USSR would have probably been toast and the US would have probably intervened only slowly and indecisively.

Where's Japan getting the oil to fight USSR? The deposits are all too far east [1].

Even with the US out of the war we were denying them steel / oil but the US embargo is much less effective without a pacific navy.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/s1cbj6/a_1960s_map...

Re: This is not the future

#147

Post by empressplay »

_heimdall wrote: post #87
nostrademons wrote: post #38

I think a more accurate and more useful framing is: Game theory is inevitable . Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that y…

Game theory is not inevitable, neither is math. Both are attempts to understand the world around us and predict what is likely to happen next given a certain context. Weather predictions are just math, for example, and they are always wrong to some degree.

Because the models aren't sophisticated enough (yet). There's no voodoo here.

I'm always surprised how many 'logical' tech people shy away from simple determinism, given how obvious a deterministic universe becomes the more time you spend in computer science, and seem to insist there's some sort of metaphysical influence out there somewhere we'll never understand. There's not.

Math is almost the definition of inevitability. Logic doubly so.

Once there's a sophisticated enough human model to decipher our myriad of idiosyncrasies, we will all be relentlessly manipulated, because it is human nature to manipulate others. That future is absolutely inevitable.

Might as well fall into the abyss with open arms and a smile.

Re: This is not the future

#148

Post by groby_b »

unformedelta wrote: post #75
nostrademons wrote: post #38

I think a more accurate and more useful framing is: Game theory is inevitable . Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that y…

Perhaps you don't intend this, but I intuit that you imply that Game theory's inevitability leads to the inevitability of many claims the author's claims aren't inevitable. To me, this inevitability only is guaranteed if we assume a framing of non-cooperative game theory with idealized self-interested actors. I think cooperative game theory[1] better models the dynamics of the real world. More important than thinking…

I'll just take the very first example on the list, Internet-enabled beds.

Absolutely a cooperative game - nobody was forced to build them, nobody was forced to finance them, nobody was forced to buy them. this were all willing choices all going in the same direction. (Same goes for many of the other examples)

Re: This is not the future

#149

Post by nrclark »

nostrademons wrote: post #38

I think a more accurate and more useful framing is: Game theory is inevitable . Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that y…

Game theory is a model that's sometimes accurate. Game theorists often forget that humans are bags of thinking meat, and that our thinking is accomplished by goopy electrochemical processes

Brains can and do make straight-up mistakes all the time. Like "there was a transmission error"-type mistakes. They can't be modeled or predicted, and so humans can never truly be rational actors.

Humans also make irrational decisions all the time based on gut feeling and instinct. Sometimes with reasons that a brain backfills, sometimes not.

People can and do act against the own self interest all the time, and not for "oh, but they actually thought X" reasons. Brains make unexplainable mistakes. Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten what you went in there to do? That state isn't modelable with game theory, and it generalizes to every aspect of human behavior.

Re: This is not the future

#150

Post by terminalshort »

munificent wrote: post #127
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

> Like how does it matter? If I look at a piece of art that was made by a human who earned money for making that art, then it means an actual real human out there was able to put food on their table. If I look at a piece of "art" produced by a generative AI that was trained on billions of works from people in the previous paragraph, then I have wasted some electricity even further enriching a billionaire and encourag…

When you consider the inputs, human art uses much more electricity than the bit of inference that AI art takes.
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