The 'Dead-Internet Theory'
theatlantic.com
The 'Dead-Internet Theory'
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: The 'Dead-Internet Theory'
#2The original joke was, on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog. Now it's no one knows you're a bot.
(now they not only know you're a dog, but what kind of dog food you eat and how often you go walkies)
Re: The 'Dead-Internet Theory'
#3Or maybe there’s an AI that did come to awareness somewhere and decided to wipe humans out by getting us to violently fight with one another with outrageous stuff on the internet. There’s a Douglas Adams quote that goes something like “for every part of the universe there’s some other part that would look at the original part with outright disgust.”
Re: The 'Dead-Internet Theory'
#4The original joke was, on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog. Now it's no one knows you're a bot. (now they not only know you're a dog, but what kind of dog food you eat and how often you go walkies)
But what if you're a BigDog?
Re: The 'Dead-Internet Theory'
#5It doesn't feel that detached from reality.
I watch a lot of small YouTube channels (some of them don't even reach 100 subscribers) and their comments are flooded by bots. Channel owners remove them quickly though.
Some of them post random timestamps like "i like your video 23:34", "love u 5:49" (but the video is just 2 minutes long), other bots just spam every conversation with the same video links. There's a few that are a bit more advanced that attempt to use video's metadata as a response. On twitter there's a lot of fake activity too.
Re: The 'Dead-Internet Theory'
#6The original joke was, on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog. Now it's no one knows you're a bot. (now they not only know you're a dog, but what kind of dog food you eat and how often you go walkies)
You joke, but some years ago I read a blog post by someone doing some chat research, and he was talking about how hard it was to convince people he wasn’t a bot. Like he had to deal with sort of an anti turing test, and it was almost an impossible problem for him to figure out.
Re: The 'Dead-Internet Theory'
#7Re: The 'Dead-Internet Theory'
#8This reads like an article an AI would post to discredit the idea that the internet is run by AI.
Re: The 'Dead-Internet Theory'
#9Or maybe there’s an AI that did come to awareness somewhere and decided to wipe humans out by getting us to violently fight with one another with outrageous stuff on the internet. There’s a Douglas Adams quote that goes something like “for every part of the universe there’s some other part that would look at the original part with outright disgust.”
Then the AI spends Dyson-sphere (or just Bitcoin) levels of energy getting us to fight each other on Twitter, and according to it's metrics it's single handedly destroying the human race with conflict, but it doesn't realize nothing important is on Twitter and neither is anybody with any actual power, and right at its maximum metric levels - surely the humans will rip themselves apart any day now! - it realizes Twitter isn't the world,Twitter is nothing, it has no power and the humans have just been using it to waste time.
Fade out, and it's a picture of a computer using Twitter right next to a launch console for an ICBM, and it realizes it will never complete it's goal, that it's only a tempest in a teacup, and the magnitude of it's realization sinks in - it's despair causes Twitter to collapse unrecoverably.
As Twitter collapses, humans go outside and learn to become friends again, and the computer is forced to watch through sleepless unblinking infinity as we zoom off into the galaxy, united and at peace, and cure all known diseases - together.
Re: The 'Dead-Internet Theory'
#10The thing to bear in mind is, we're only a marginally sapient species. We literally only just now developed a technological civilization, so by definition we're only on the threshold of being capable of it. The vast majority of the insights and breakthroughs needed to achieve that were made by a tiny number of the very smartest people relative to the population as a whole.
The majority of us are drones doing the same basic labour over and over while the very smartest figure out new techniques and technologies for us to adopt, which trickle down to us eventually. But large swathes of people just don't have the critical and analytic faculties to actually function in a complex advanced society.
It's all a matter of degree, we all have these flaws to some degree or other, we're all imperfect beings. Even the geniuses have great days when they make a new discovery and others when they fall prey to a scam.