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This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

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Re: This is not the future

#341

Post by otterley »

nunez wrote: post #340

I sympathize with this so deeply: > "Requiring a smartphone to exist in society is not inevitable." Seeing smartphones morph from super neat computer/camera/music players in our pockets to unfiltered digital nicotine is depressing to think about. Notifications abuse is _entirely_ to blame, IMO. Every app that you think of when you think of "addictive" apps heavily relies on the notifications funnel (badges, toasts, d…

> Notifications abuse is _entirely_ to blame, IMO.

You do know you can disable notifications on a per-app basis, or even entirely, right?

Re: This is not the future

#342

Post by JuniperMesos »

trinsic2 wrote: post #111
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…

One person has more impact than you think. Many times it's one person that is speaking what's on the mind of many and that speaking out can bring the courage to do what needs to be done for many people that sitting on the fence. The Andor TV series really taught me that. I'm working on a presentation of surveillance capitalism that I plan to show to my community. It's going to be an interesting future. Some will side…

You realize surveillance capitalism is what caused the Andor TV show (and more broadly the entire Star Wars franchise) to exist at all, right? Gigantic corporate entities have made a lot of money from monetizing the Star Wars franchise.

I'll say frankly that I personally object to Star Wars on an aesthetic level - it is ultimately an artistically-flawed media franchise even if it has some genuinely compelling ideas sometimes. But what really bothers me is that Star Wars in its capacity as a modern culturally-important story cycle is also intellectual property owned by the Disney corporation.

The idea that the problems of the world map neatly to a confict between an evil empire and a plucky rebellion is also basically propagandistic (and also boring). It's a popular storytelling frame - that's why George Lucas wrote the original Star Wars movies that way. But I really don't like seeing someone watch a TV series using the Star Wars intellectual property package and then using the story the writers chose to write - writers ultimately funded by Disney - as a basis for how they see themselves in the world poltically.

Re: This is not the future

#343

Post by 8note »

javier123454321 wrote: post #238
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I'm misinterpreting the word "influence", but low-effort internet memes have a lot more cultural impact than a lot of high-effort art. Also there's botnets, which influence political voting behaviour.

> low-effort internet memes have a lot more cultural impact than a lot of high-effort art. Memes only have impact in aggregate due to emergent properties in a Mcluhanian sense. An individual meme has little to no impact compared to (some) works of art.

said works of art dont on their own really have that impact either.

its the hype oyher people make for them, fairly typically after the artist has died that makes the impact.

stealing the mona lisa is what gave it its impact, rather than than brush strokes

Re: This is not the future

#344

Post by alwa »

nostrademons wrote: post #308
aanet wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. Now let's do the same to AI slop, what many (including Haidt and co., Australia, etc) have done to lessen kids social media usage. FWIW, I gave up on FB/Twttr crap a while ago... Unfortunately, I'm still stuck with WhatsApp and LI (both big blights) for now. YMMV

AI slop is self-limiting. The new game-theoretic equilibrium is that nobody trusts anything they read online, at which point it will no longer be profitable to put AI slop out there because nobody will read it. Unfortunately, it's going to destroy the Internet (and possibly society) in the process.

That’s my sense too. I wonder where the new foca are starting to form, as far as where people will look to serve the purposes that this slop’s infiltrating. What the inevitable alternatives to the New Inevitable start to look like.

At the risk of dorm-room philosophizing: My instincts are all situated in the past, and I don’t know whether that’s my failure of imagination or whether it’s where everybody else is ending up too.

Do the new information-gathering Schelling points look like the past—trust in specific individual thinkers, words’ age as a signal of their reliability, private-first discussions, web of trust, known-human-edited corpora, apprenticeship, personal practice and experience?

Is there instead no meaningful replacement, and the future looks like people’s “real” lives shrinking back to human scale? Does our Tower of Babel just collapse for a while with no real replacement in sight? Was it all much more illusory than it felt all along, and the slop is just forcing us to see that more clearly?

Did the Cronkite-era-television—>cable transition feel this way to people before us?

Re: This is not the future

#345

Post by [deleted] »

dbspin wrote: post #274
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 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. Running this paragraph through Gemini, returns a list of the fallacies employed, including - Attacking the Motive - "Even if the artists are motivated by self-interest, this does not aut…

[deleted]

Re: This is not the future

#346

Post by rng-concern »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #248
rng-concern wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment: Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level. Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperati…

No doubt, but if your Starcraft experience against AI was "somehow" exactly same with AI, gave you the same joy, and you cannot even say whether it was AI or other players, does that matter? I get this is kind of Truman Show-ish scenario, but does it really matter? If the end results are same, does it still matter? If it does, why? I get the emotional aspect of it, but in practice you wouldn't even know. Now is AI at…

I have to say this sort of thing is hard to think about, as it's pretty hypothetical right now. But I can't imagine how the current iteration of AI could give me the same joy? Me and my friend were roommates. We played other games together, including dnd. We struggled with another friend to build a LAN so we could play these games together.

I can't imagine having the same shared experience with an AI. Even if I could, knowing there is no consciousness there does changes things (if we can know such thing).

This reminds me of solipsism. I have no way of knowing if others are conscious, but it seems quite lonely to me if that were true. Even though it's the exact same thing to the outside. It's not?

Re: This is not the future

#347

Post by jrowen »

kahmeal wrote: post #321
jrowen wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Billboards and other such ads, which were once commonplace are now solely the domain of ambulance chasing lawyers and car dealerships. TV ads are no better, production value has tanked, they look cheaper and shittier than ever, and the products are solely geared to the boomers because they're the only ones still watching broadcast TV. This actually strikes me as a good thing. The more we can get big dumb ads out of…

> I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I get a lot more value out of targeted social media ads than I ever did billboards or TV commercials. They actually...show me niche things that are relevant to my interests, that I didn't know about. It's much closer to the underlying real value of advertising than the Coca-Cola billboard model is. You are describing two different advertising strategies that have differ…

Yes, I'm saying, as a consumer, I much prefer the latter, and I get more value from it. And it's only enabled by modern individualized data collection.

Re: This is not the future

#348

Post by nunez »

otterley wrote: post #341
nunez wrote: post #340

I sympathize with this so deeply: > "Requiring a smartphone to exist in society is not inevitable." Seeing smartphones morph from super neat computer/camera/music players in our pockets to unfiltered digital nicotine is depressing to think about. Notifications abuse is _entirely_ to blame, IMO. Every app that you think of when you think of "addictive" apps heavily relies on the notifications funnel (badges, toasts, d…

> Notifications abuse is _entirely_ to blame, IMO. You do know you can disable notifications on a per-app basis, or even entirely, right?

Yes, and I do that aggressively. But that's an opt-in behavior, and like most things that are opt-in, people can't be bothered, and companies know that.

Re: This is not the future

#349

Post by terminalshort »

bcrl wrote: post #322
terminalshort wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who build, maintain, and own the datacenters. The people who work at and own the companies that make the hardware in the datacenters. The people who work to build new power plants to power the data centers. The truck drivers that transport all the supplies to build the data centers and power plants. These are all real people.

I would be fine if data centers paid the full cost of their existence, but that isn't what happens in our world. Instead the cost of pollution is externalised and placed on the backs of humanity's children. That includes the pollution created by those datacentres running off fossil fuel generators because it was cheaper to use gas in the short term than to invest in solar capacity and storage that pays back over the…

Given that data centers use less energy than the alternative human labor they replace, they actually improve pollution. Replacing those GPUs with more efficient models also improves pollution because those replacements use less electricity for the same workload than the units they replaced.

Re: This is not the future

#350

Post by ansc »

layer8 wrote: post #101
ansc wrote: post #39

Maybe I am misunderstanding, but I disagree a whole lot. The whole problem is that is it inevitable. Technology is an enormous organism. It does not care about the ethical or moral considerations of it. It's a tug-of-war who can use most technique to succeed -- if you do not use it, you fall behind. Individuals absolutely can not shape the future of technology. States can attempt, but as they make use of technology f…

Technology does nothing without humans enacting it, and humans do care about its ethical and moral considerations. Or at least some do, and everyone should. Individuals do collectively shape the future of technology.

I wish that was true. Not adopting technology carries penalties. Almost always enough for it to be a requirement.

Even so, "humans do care about its ethical and moral considerations": whose ethics? enforced how? measured how? you're going to fight efficiency and functionality? good luck.

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