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This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

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Re: This is not the future

#71

Post by ansc »

yawpitch wrote: post #57
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 is a living organism. Oh my, the shear number of philosophers, biologists, ethicists, and, for that matter, bacterium rotating in their graves. Life might be a technology… many technologies are not only not-living, they’re mutually contradictory with life.

A bit mean-spirited I think, but not unreasonable. organism: "a system or organization consisting of interdependent parts, compared to a living being". I removed the "living" part of it to allow for a bit more... abstract thinking.

Re: This is not the future

#73

Post by trgn »

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…

what i'm reading here then is that those 7.999999999B others are braindead morons.

OP is 100% correct. either you accept that the vast majority are mindless automatons (not hard to get onboard with that honestly, but still, seems an overestimate), or there's some kind of structural unbalance, an asymmetry that's actively harmful and not the passive outcome of a 8B independent actors.

Re: This is not the future

#75

Post by unformedelta »

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 on the level of individual humans is thinking about the coalitions that have a common interest to resist abusive technology.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory

Re: This is not the future

#76

Post by flawn »

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…

I do partly disagree because Game Theory is based on an economic, (and also mentioned) reductionist view of a human, namely homo oeconomicus that does have some bold assumptions of some single men in history that asserted that we all act only with pure egoism & zero altruism which is nowadays highly critiqued and can be challenged.

It is out of question that it is highly useful and simplifies it to an extent that we can mathematically model interactions between agents but only under our underlying assumptions. And these assumptions must not be true, matter of fact, there are studies on how models like the homo oeconomicus have led to a self-fulfilling reality by making people think in ways given by the model, adjusting to the model, and not otherwise, that the model ideally should approximate us. Hence, I don't think you can plainly limit or frame this reality as a product of game theory.

Re: This is not the future

#77

Post by nathan_compton »

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…

I think its hubris to believe that you can formulate the correct game theoretic model to make significant statements about what is and is not inevitable.

Re: This is not the future

#80

Post by raincole »

skybrian wrote: post #29
raincole wrote: post #26

I mean... of course it's not the future. It's the present. I have been seeing AI-generated posters and menus in real life on daily basis for about half a year. AI-upscale is completely normalized for average users. I don't know about other fields, but for graphic design we have well past this discussion.

It's similar to saying "everyone else is doing it" which is itself a bad argument for doing something badly.

It's not an argument. It's observation.

Just like TikTok. The author doesn't think TikTok is inevitable, and I fully agree with them! But in our real timeline TikTok exists. So TikTok is, unquestionably, the present. Wide adoption of gen-AI is present.

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