[dead]
We remain alive also in a dead internet
51–60 of 78 posts
Re: We remain alive also in a dead internet
#52I didn't have Žižek on substack and HN on my bingo card.. As always, there are good bits connected with mediocre glue. The point about automating the unpleasant parts of activity and losing the very point of the exercise (automatic dildo and automatic vagina, but automatic research papers too!) is a good one. But damn Slavoj, please use some headings, sections and the like. Work with your thoughts more as you claim i…
I'm also losing my ability to tolerate prose without headings, but I think that's symptomatic of this bigger issue.
I usually scroll a page to see how many headings it has, but I'm looking for the opposite. Too many headings is one of the quickest aesthetic clues that I'm looking at slop, as it doesn't require me to read any of the text. (Emojis and over-usage of bullet point lists are the others I can think of in this category.)
Re: We remain alive also in a dead internet
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just a machine. Being able to distinguish real life from a television show is important.
Are you so sure that you are not "just a machine"?
Yes. Being clear on categories of real things is important for being able to make informed choices and actions.
Re: We remain alive also in a dead internet
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdNy3mGwDLc > I'm not convinced that the human race is the most important thing in the world and I think you know we can't control what's going to happen in the future. We want things to be good but on the other hand we aren't so good ourselves. We're no angels. If there were creatures that were more moral and more good than us, wouldn't we wish them to have the future rather than us?…
Congratulations, This is the most vile ideology I've ever encountered
Is speciesism more defensible than racism?
Re: We remain alive also in a dead internet
#55Re: We remain alive also in a dead internet
#56All right, I get it. The driving impulse for why our societies and civilizations exist is the fact that we are complex beings with desires, emotions, and so on. A machine facsimile built to imitate these things will have no such drive to 'expand' so to speak.
The bots talking to bots world is a problem only because the objective is finally for a human to observe the bot-bot conversation and have their objectives changed in some way. It's 'advertising' of some concept. Bot-bot conversations of the form currently possible have no purpose in a world without humans. There is no one to convince.
I think it's an interesting idea, certainly, but there is no reason to write it like this. The bits about call centre scamming etc. are sort of pointless. In general, I like when the complexity of a representation of an idea is required because the territory being mapped is complex.
I know he's a famous philosopher and all that, but the complexity of his text appears to be sort of like older segmentation models. You ask it to extract a circle from a background and it produces an almost fractally-complex circle-approximation. "What is the object in the foreground?", you ask, and the machine (and here the philosopher) responds "It is a strange approximation of a circle with a billion jagged edges". No, it's a circle.
Re: We remain alive also in a dead internet
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm already assuming we will see a creepy AI service emerge that will take the contents of a recently deceased person's cellphone and let you carry on texting them as if they were still alive, if it hasn't already (I haven't seen one yet). For many of us a cellphone has incredibly detailed records of who we were and how we spoke, going back decades now. I have already left a note in my will instructing that all my co…
The data has copies, on servers. Eventually, it will all be digested and the probabilistically most likely state vector of your mother's memories, personality and values will be reconstructed from lossy correlations along with everybody else who has died in the industrialised world in the last few decades. Ghosts and clones and zombies will be sorted into tranches of expected yield based on the size of the error bars…
In the early 2000 I ran into an outgrowth of patents that described all variations of the seamless replacement of humans in phone calls. Years later I got a telemarketing call where a young lady introduced her employer so enegetically and it was so beautifuly articulated that my alarm bells went off. (I know what it is like to crank out a thousand calls) I asked a question, and after a static click the same voice continued, only now she sounded like she lost the will to live. The patent art never covered that angle.
Since they didn't have llms it described pressing buttons to elaborately explain all angles of a product. The operator was to monitor multiple calls as text logs and jump in at the right time or if overwhelmed press the please hold + $excuses button.
The entire automation was designed to preserve the illusion of human contact. Selling stuff only made it to second place.
Re: We remain alive also in a dead internet
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you so sure that you are not "just a machine"?
It doesn't matter if I'm just a machine or not I'm human, human rights should apply to humans, not synthetics and the creation of synthetic life should be punishable by death. I'm not exaggerating, either. I believe that building AI systems that replace all humans should be considered a crime against humanity. It is almost certainly a precursor to such crimes. It's bad enough trying to fight for a place in society as…
On the contrary, it is the creation of synthetic life that reaffirms humanity and what it means to be human. Don't blame the mirror for what you see (or don't see).
Re: We remain alive also in a dead internet
#59I didn't have Žižek on substack and HN on my bingo card.. As always, there are good bits connected with mediocre glue. The point about automating the unpleasant parts of activity and losing the very point of the exercise (automatic dildo and automatic vagina, but automatic research papers too!) is a good one. But damn Slavoj, please use some headings, sections and the like. Work with your thoughts more as you claim i…
It's barely six pages of text. It doesn't need headings. When is the last time you read a book?
I've read lots of Zizek as a high schooler. This doesn't even come close to how dense some of his writing can be, I'm sitting here drunk on a few beers and it was a simple read. I think lots of people are actually illiterate.
Re: We remain alive also in a dead internet
#60Is it bad that I ended up just using chatgpt to summarize that text? Is it possible that this is to a large degree utterly pointless textual wankery?
Yes. Also yes, but imho it isn't. Zizek is verbose because he aims to be precise. Sometimes his long-winded sentences generate a reaction of 'so what, everyone knows that' but ime he's often trying to point out something that 'everyone knows' but few have fully thought through.