This is phenomenal and so true. Greetings from the Las Vegas DMV where, like lot of government offices in Phuket also, the people working inside can readily confirm that I am not AI. I laughed a lot at the evolution of a real flesh and blood into the necromancers: "Imagine a would-be influencer, a woman of mediocre talents, but great ambition, or at least greed, and a total lack of moral scruples or shame." This is already happening. My facebook page is inundated with scammers, including a few actual flesh and blood ladies I went to high school with who were trying to recruit me into some CashApp scam. All I needed to get paid was to pay them a processing fee first and/or provide my real flesh and blood ID details to join into the scam! The devolution of facebook is a case in point: at one time I hd a rule that I would only accept friend requests from people who I had met at least once in real life, with a few exceptions made for my half brothers and my employers. Those are the ones I track and actual verifiably human engagement on the site is down at least 60% or so. It's just a newsfeed of AI driven tiny home and nature pictures curated just for me.
My high school senior daughter has a similar rule in her discord private group chats: every new member must be known in person by at least one member of the group. They meet up in person as circumstances allow it such as a bowling excursion I took a few of them to in January.
Here at the DMV, which provides much better people watching opportunities than I have at home while staring at a screen reading this essay and responding to it, device engagement is down. There are some people engaging in conversations who appeaar to be total strangers to each other aand only about 50% or so are staring at screens. I think everything I've done online and off for the last few decades has been to ensure that my story is verifiably real, human and cannot be mimicked...
Connectivity can be made less bad by having an interface which doesn't have infinite scrolling, pop-up notifications, ads, or suggested clickbait. See https://conntects.net
But whether a paid service can keep the spammers at bay is indeed an interesting question. There WILL be armies of programmers working on the problem. There has been such armies for quite a few years, going back to the Bayesian filters to block spammers.
To some degree, the Internet has been partially dead for decades. Once upon a time, the Internet was an exclusive domain of high IQ humans. USENET was amazing. When HTML was invented, there was till the filter of people smart enough to learn HTML and get hosting set up. Once Blogger and Wordpress democratized the Internet, the density of interesting content dropped. I still pause and look around whenever I come across a site that is clearly hand-crafted.
Google has been battling splogs for a long time. They had to scrap their original algorithm in favor of AI and extra dependence on "official/credible" sites to avoid manipulation. This is one reason why Google's algorithm has become more woke over the past few years. There are just not that many true news sites that aren't woke. An actual news network which actually lived Fox News' "We report; you decide" slogan could sway things back. Instead, we had the once credible yet conservative Forbes open its site to sploggers in an attempt to boost revenues.
Maybe with AI, the sploggers will finally win and paper books and real meetings will become the norm again. But as this war has been going on a long time, I won't write off the online certifiers yet.
Thorough, and thoroughly entertaining, John, as always.
My thoughts dovetail with yours re: the inevitable bounce-back into the real, particularly in the realm of art. From my essay, Art vs. AI -- Bring it on, ChatGPT:
"Eventually, though, we will tire of it. We will want something different, and in this case, “different” will mean “real.” We will hunger for words labored over by human beings the way the body craves homemade soup after too many gummy bears.
Even now, we still want to experience human artistry in person. We still go to the theatre, even after movies and dvds and live streaming all said theatre was dead. We still go to sporting events, music concerts, yoga classes, and outdoor festivals.
Last weekend I strolled around Localtopia, one such festival in St. Petersburg, Florida, and took in the infinite variety of human arts on display: kids and adults covering an entire school bus with every paint color imaginable; tote bags made out of leather book covers from the 50s; hula-hoop dancing lessons under shady oaks.
I turned a corner and came upon a curly-headed guy seated at an old typewriter, clacking away.
Seated off to the side was a woman, watching as he occasionally stopped, lifted his eyes to some unseen muse above, then went back at it, pounding those keys with assurance.
The sign draped over his tiny table read,
'Gio's Typos, Poet-for-Hire.
Pick a Topic, Receive a Poem.'
The woman sitting next to Gio waited patiently for her poem, the one he was drawing out of the ether at that moment in time, just for her, on that street filled with the kaleidoscope of humanity.
Behind her was a line of others, chatting while they awaited their turn to hand him $20 and tell him their names, their loves, their griefs, their stories — all unique.
All of those people could have created their own HIGH QUALITY POEMS IN SECONDS, but instead, they chose to wait for the guy who types poetry on a vintage Hermes 3000 typewriter onto the back of old National Geographic maps."
AI may one day replicate human experiences, but it cannot replace human interaction. It may one day be spliced into neurons, but it cannot be intertwined with the human heart. It may one day be able to speak in my voice, but it will never speak from my soul.
"It’s just a rat’s nest of algorithms, coldly and unsympathetically studying your responses in order to refine its model, with the sole objective of manoeuvring you with inhuman patience towards some predefined ideological or commercial goal."
John Carter, I'm guessing you don't have any children. :-)
About twenty years ago, I got this idea in my head to try to read a book while going for a walk. I probably picked it up from some book or other about olden days, when it wasn't too uncommon a practice.
After a wobbly start, which included consciously training my peripheral vision to recognise the side of curbs and crossing marks and such (as I lived in a city then), I found to my delight that it was trivial, provided the book wasn't some 'Lord of the Rings' in one band kind of thing.
As this was before the proliferation of prtable computers+screens with a telephone-function built into them, I sometimes got comments that it looked weird or goofy. Nothing unkind, just people remarking on an oddity of behaviour. Funnily enough, middle-easterners were the most accepting ones. Perhaps walking and reading is more common in some areas there?
To this day, people who see nothing strange in zombie-ing about with their portable telescreens still raise their eyebrows at a man pulling out a soft-cover novel while walking through town or waiting on the bus. No particular point to this ramble but I have to wonder, is there a cognitive difference in what is happening in the brain? I suspect so, but have no proof. Reading a novel does not give that dopamine kick social media triggers, nor does it work to wreck your attention span or ability to focus; rather the opposite in fact.
Do not, should you try it, do so while riding a bike.
When it comes to AI/robot intelligence, the closest to it is human autistics of the variety with normal to above normal general IQ. Not that they lack conscience or emotion the way a machine does, that's not what I mean - no, what I mean is this:
To many of them, emotions et cetera are just another factor to be consciously weighed regarding the issue at hand. This is what makes them seem cold to others: if emotion(ality) or similar isn't part of the situation, they will not display it or take it into account. Getting them to understand and accept that almost all humans they will ever interact with do not, indeed cannot in the case of many, separate emotion from logic or fact is difficult at best, nigh-on impossible at worst. Sadly, many of the often retreat behind an emotionless shell for lack of ability to handle their own emotional responses.
I think perhaps developers of AI would do well to study human autistics, because the only intelligence we can compare AI to is ourselves and emotion(ality) is part of human intelligence.
"Mostly they’re conspiring about nothing of any particular interest to anyone, just as friends gathered in someone’s apartment aren’t likely to be doing anything more remarkable than shooting the shit while drinking a few beers."--John Carter
If your friends are not doing things that could get them arrested, you need new friends.
Suggesting a use for NFTs? Now I know you're a crypto shill-bot.
In all seriousness, another great essay. I used to wonder what technology my kids would master that I'd have no idea how to use; now I think they'll look upon my smartphone use the same way I look at my parents' Facebook use: a blend of concern and pity. I actually hope that's the case - or, better yet, that I use screens infrequently enough that they don't have to worry!
"Say you’re a foreign government, and you want to undermine an adversary."
I'd restate as, 'say you're our domestic government, and you want to undermine your enemies, the peasants.'
===
"Initially, the LLMs are there to agree with their targets, ingratiating themselves by saying interesting things that constructively build on whatever point the target is making in the discourse, supporting them in arguments with others, and so on. Over time, trust is built up. Then, gradually, the shillbot starts trying to vector the target."
This is exactly what the Assassins did, and is the real reason they were able to earn their moniker: trusted servants deciding the way to paradise lay in obedience to the Old Man of the Mountain even if no chance of escape. Perhaps MKUltra is about to be replaced with something much more reliable.
===
If our side ever decides to get political, gaining local and state power in order to control a region, we'll most likely have to go back to a literal whistle-stop campaign, so everyone can see that our leaders are actual people.
A foundational ideology for the belief that AI will eventually equal and surpass human intelligence is that intelligence consists in the manipulation of bits. A deeper and more sinister idea is that reality is fully quantifiable; that only the measurable is real, and that everything real is measurable. Granting these assumptions, a perfect simulation is possible in principle. (Brains-in-vats theories also depend on this.)
Paradise is to be achieved by corralling all of matter into one huge data set. Then we can engineer the social and physical world to perfection by treating it as a giant min-max problem.
We’ve come quite far already. The hideous architecture you speak of accomplishes one thing admirably: It maximizes some quantity (such as floor space) per dollar. More generally, we live in a society of obscene quantitative excess and grievous qualitative poverty.
Such is the result of what I call “the cult of quantity.”
I wonder what you would say about what looks like a contradiction: on the one hand, rejecting that intelligence can be captured through data engineering, yet on the other hand accepting quantitative measures of human intelligence as evidence that some racial groups are more intelligent than others. If true intelligence is embodied, analog, then some aspect of it will escape any quantitative test. Part of the cult of quantity is the veneration of a certain type of intelligence: the ability to manipulate symbols and operate in abstraction. It is systemically recognized and economically rewarded (hedge fund quants do exactly that, manipulate symbols).
"It’s emotionally impossible to place any value on the output of an algorithmic engine."
Yet somehow artists who are known to use autotune and formulaic song writing are still very popular. My counter to your article is that you are projecting yourself onto the normies. No matter how fake and gay the internet gets, a large majority of people will still thinks its great. You can't say this isn't true when you realize that 'Wheel of Fortune' has been on the air for over 40 years.
A few of us will be disconnecting in ever greater ways, but there will be few of us, with much geographic distance between us.
On the point about the importance of asking questions, and having worked in the education field, I concur. It has been quite a while since I concluded that the lack of knowledge or education among the general public is not due to a lack of resources or lack of opportunity, but a lack of curiosity. The problem is not that they don't know but that they don't WANT to know.
Curiosity is, I'm afraid, a very rare characteristic exhibited by very few people. For most, they want enough education or knowledge to be able to do their jobs and operate a dishwasher. Beyond that, they may as well be bots themselves. They are completely empty.
With the proper illustration, this could be a very successful coffee mug. A good phrase, worth developing and re-using.
If showing a buff physique is a prerequisite to being invited into dissident right clandestine circles, I am, to use the traditional term, shit out of luck. Old, forgetful and flabby is no way to go through life, son, what's left of it! I will carry on as a solo performer, shunned by the beefcake yet brainy young men who will build and operate the future. You guys will do just fine, I'm sure.
Great article and the one thing I took from it is hope. Hope that the mindless screen gazing I see going on around me will be replaced with human interaction again.
On this mild spring day with the window open, a cool breeze coming in, my mind drifts to thoughts of going outside and leaving the work on my computer for another day.
This is phenomenal and so true. Greetings from the Las Vegas DMV where, like lot of government offices in Phuket also, the people working inside can readily confirm that I am not AI. I laughed a lot at the evolution of a real flesh and blood into the necromancers: "Imagine a would-be influencer, a woman of mediocre talents, but great ambition, or at least greed, and a total lack of moral scruples or shame." This is already happening. My facebook page is inundated with scammers, including a few actual flesh and blood ladies I went to high school with who were trying to recruit me into some CashApp scam. All I needed to get paid was to pay them a processing fee first and/or provide my real flesh and blood ID details to join into the scam! The devolution of facebook is a case in point: at one time I hd a rule that I would only accept friend requests from people who I had met at least once in real life, with a few exceptions made for my half brothers and my employers. Those are the ones I track and actual verifiably human engagement on the site is down at least 60% or so. It's just a newsfeed of AI driven tiny home and nature pictures curated just for me.
My high school senior daughter has a similar rule in her discord private group chats: every new member must be known in person by at least one member of the group. They meet up in person as circumstances allow it such as a bowling excursion I took a few of them to in January.
Here at the DMV, which provides much better people watching opportunities than I have at home while staring at a screen reading this essay and responding to it, device engagement is down. There are some people engaging in conversations who appeaar to be total strangers to each other aand only about 50% or so are staring at screens. I think everything I've done online and off for the last few decades has been to ensure that my story is verifiably real, human and cannot be mimicked...
Connectivity can be made less bad by having an interface which doesn't have infinite scrolling, pop-up notifications, ads, or suggested clickbait. See https://conntects.net
But whether a paid service can keep the spammers at bay is indeed an interesting question. There WILL be armies of programmers working on the problem. There has been such armies for quite a few years, going back to the Bayesian filters to block spammers.
To some degree, the Internet has been partially dead for decades. Once upon a time, the Internet was an exclusive domain of high IQ humans. USENET was amazing. When HTML was invented, there was till the filter of people smart enough to learn HTML and get hosting set up. Once Blogger and Wordpress democratized the Internet, the density of interesting content dropped. I still pause and look around whenever I come across a site that is clearly hand-crafted.
Google has been battling splogs for a long time. They had to scrap their original algorithm in favor of AI and extra dependence on "official/credible" sites to avoid manipulation. This is one reason why Google's algorithm has become more woke over the past few years. There are just not that many true news sites that aren't woke. An actual news network which actually lived Fox News' "We report; you decide" slogan could sway things back. Instead, we had the once credible yet conservative Forbes open its site to sploggers in an attempt to boost revenues.
Maybe with AI, the sploggers will finally win and paper books and real meetings will become the norm again. But as this war has been going on a long time, I won't write off the online certifiers yet.
Thorough, and thoroughly entertaining, John, as always.
My thoughts dovetail with yours re: the inevitable bounce-back into the real, particularly in the realm of art. From my essay, Art vs. AI -- Bring it on, ChatGPT:
"Eventually, though, we will tire of it. We will want something different, and in this case, “different” will mean “real.” We will hunger for words labored over by human beings the way the body craves homemade soup after too many gummy bears.
Even now, we still want to experience human artistry in person. We still go to the theatre, even after movies and dvds and live streaming all said theatre was dead. We still go to sporting events, music concerts, yoga classes, and outdoor festivals.
Last weekend I strolled around Localtopia, one such festival in St. Petersburg, Florida, and took in the infinite variety of human arts on display: kids and adults covering an entire school bus with every paint color imaginable; tote bags made out of leather book covers from the 50s; hula-hoop dancing lessons under shady oaks.
I turned a corner and came upon a curly-headed guy seated at an old typewriter, clacking away.
Seated off to the side was a woman, watching as he occasionally stopped, lifted his eyes to some unseen muse above, then went back at it, pounding those keys with assurance.
The sign draped over his tiny table read,
'Gio's Typos, Poet-for-Hire.
Pick a Topic, Receive a Poem.'
The woman sitting next to Gio waited patiently for her poem, the one he was drawing out of the ether at that moment in time, just for her, on that street filled with the kaleidoscope of humanity.
Behind her was a line of others, chatting while they awaited their turn to hand him $20 and tell him their names, their loves, their griefs, their stories — all unique.
All of those people could have created their own HIGH QUALITY POEMS IN SECONDS, but instead, they chose to wait for the guy who types poetry on a vintage Hermes 3000 typewriter onto the back of old National Geographic maps."
AI may one day replicate human experiences, but it cannot replace human interaction. It may one day be spliced into neurons, but it cannot be intertwined with the human heart. It may one day be able to speak in my voice, but it will never speak from my soul.
https://marypoindextermclaughlin.substack.com/p/art-vs-ai
"It’s just a rat’s nest of algorithms, coldly and unsympathetically studying your responses in order to refine its model, with the sole objective of manoeuvring you with inhuman patience towards some predefined ideological or commercial goal."
John Carter, I'm guessing you don't have any children. :-)
We interrupt the reading to bring you the following comment:
> But a human is required to set that chain in motion in the first place.
That awkward moment when you're ONE STEP AWAY from the old Medieval proofs for God. xD
About twenty years ago, I got this idea in my head to try to read a book while going for a walk. I probably picked it up from some book or other about olden days, when it wasn't too uncommon a practice.
After a wobbly start, which included consciously training my peripheral vision to recognise the side of curbs and crossing marks and such (as I lived in a city then), I found to my delight that it was trivial, provided the book wasn't some 'Lord of the Rings' in one band kind of thing.
As this was before the proliferation of prtable computers+screens with a telephone-function built into them, I sometimes got comments that it looked weird or goofy. Nothing unkind, just people remarking on an oddity of behaviour. Funnily enough, middle-easterners were the most accepting ones. Perhaps walking and reading is more common in some areas there?
To this day, people who see nothing strange in zombie-ing about with their portable telescreens still raise their eyebrows at a man pulling out a soft-cover novel while walking through town or waiting on the bus. No particular point to this ramble but I have to wonder, is there a cognitive difference in what is happening in the brain? I suspect so, but have no proof. Reading a novel does not give that dopamine kick social media triggers, nor does it work to wreck your attention span or ability to focus; rather the opposite in fact.
Do not, should you try it, do so while riding a bike.
When it comes to AI/robot intelligence, the closest to it is human autistics of the variety with normal to above normal general IQ. Not that they lack conscience or emotion the way a machine does, that's not what I mean - no, what I mean is this:
To many of them, emotions et cetera are just another factor to be consciously weighed regarding the issue at hand. This is what makes them seem cold to others: if emotion(ality) or similar isn't part of the situation, they will not display it or take it into account. Getting them to understand and accept that almost all humans they will ever interact with do not, indeed cannot in the case of many, separate emotion from logic or fact is difficult at best, nigh-on impossible at worst. Sadly, many of the often retreat behind an emotionless shell for lack of ability to handle their own emotional responses.
I think perhaps developers of AI would do well to study human autistics, because the only intelligence we can compare AI to is ourselves and emotion(ality) is part of human intelligence.
"Mostly they’re conspiring about nothing of any particular interest to anyone, just as friends gathered in someone’s apartment aren’t likely to be doing anything more remarkable than shooting the shit while drinking a few beers."--John Carter
If your friends are not doing things that could get them arrested, you need new friends.
Suggesting a use for NFTs? Now I know you're a crypto shill-bot.
In all seriousness, another great essay. I used to wonder what technology my kids would master that I'd have no idea how to use; now I think they'll look upon my smartphone use the same way I look at my parents' Facebook use: a blend of concern and pity. I actually hope that's the case - or, better yet, that I use screens infrequently enough that they don't have to worry!
Our bodies are decaying. Our food is poison.
Until we fix this, nothing else matters. We are first and foremost physical creatures.
"Say you’re a foreign government, and you want to undermine an adversary."
I'd restate as, 'say you're our domestic government, and you want to undermine your enemies, the peasants.'
===
"Initially, the LLMs are there to agree with their targets, ingratiating themselves by saying interesting things that constructively build on whatever point the target is making in the discourse, supporting them in arguments with others, and so on. Over time, trust is built up. Then, gradually, the shillbot starts trying to vector the target."
This is exactly what the Assassins did, and is the real reason they were able to earn their moniker: trusted servants deciding the way to paradise lay in obedience to the Old Man of the Mountain even if no chance of escape. Perhaps MKUltra is about to be replaced with something much more reliable.
===
If our side ever decides to get political, gaining local and state power in order to control a region, we'll most likely have to go back to a literal whistle-stop campaign, so everyone can see that our leaders are actual people.
Terrific essay!
A foundational ideology for the belief that AI will eventually equal and surpass human intelligence is that intelligence consists in the manipulation of bits. A deeper and more sinister idea is that reality is fully quantifiable; that only the measurable is real, and that everything real is measurable. Granting these assumptions, a perfect simulation is possible in principle. (Brains-in-vats theories also depend on this.)
Paradise is to be achieved by corralling all of matter into one huge data set. Then we can engineer the social and physical world to perfection by treating it as a giant min-max problem.
We’ve come quite far already. The hideous architecture you speak of accomplishes one thing admirably: It maximizes some quantity (such as floor space) per dollar. More generally, we live in a society of obscene quantitative excess and grievous qualitative poverty.
Such is the result of what I call “the cult of quantity.”
I treated many of the ideas in this essay (though with less acumen and verve) in a few articles in the past year. Most recently this one: https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/machines-will-not-replace-us.
I write on LibreOffice too.
I wonder what you would say about what looks like a contradiction: on the one hand, rejecting that intelligence can be captured through data engineering, yet on the other hand accepting quantitative measures of human intelligence as evidence that some racial groups are more intelligent than others. If true intelligence is embodied, analog, then some aspect of it will escape any quantitative test. Part of the cult of quantity is the veneration of a certain type of intelligence: the ability to manipulate symbols and operate in abstraction. It is systemically recognized and economically rewarded (hedge fund quants do exactly that, manipulate symbols).
"It’s emotionally impossible to place any value on the output of an algorithmic engine."
Yet somehow artists who are known to use autotune and formulaic song writing are still very popular. My counter to your article is that you are projecting yourself onto the normies. No matter how fake and gay the internet gets, a large majority of people will still thinks its great. You can't say this isn't true when you realize that 'Wheel of Fortune' has been on the air for over 40 years.
A few of us will be disconnecting in ever greater ways, but there will be few of us, with much geographic distance between us.
On the point about the importance of asking questions, and having worked in the education field, I concur. It has been quite a while since I concluded that the lack of knowledge or education among the general public is not due to a lack of resources or lack of opportunity, but a lack of curiosity. The problem is not that they don't know but that they don't WANT to know.
Curiosity is, I'm afraid, a very rare characteristic exhibited by very few people. For most, they want enough education or knowledge to be able to do their jobs and operate a dishwasher. Beyond that, they may as well be bots themselves. They are completely empty.
“Permaculture farming stands out as an obvious possibility.”
It would be, except for the fact that governments are trying to make farming illegal, and the skies are being sprayed daily.
It all feels so hopeless sometimes. They (whoever “they” are) are literally blocking the sunlight from reaching the earth.
And it’s hard to talk about it; to most people it sounds insane.
And if we can’t even acknowledge that it’s happening, how can we do anything about it?
Good post.
"... a soft Butlerian Jihad ..."
With the proper illustration, this could be a very successful coffee mug. A good phrase, worth developing and re-using.
If showing a buff physique is a prerequisite to being invited into dissident right clandestine circles, I am, to use the traditional term, shit out of luck. Old, forgetful and flabby is no way to go through life, son, what's left of it! I will carry on as a solo performer, shunned by the beefcake yet brainy young men who will build and operate the future. You guys will do just fine, I'm sure.
Great article and the one thing I took from it is hope. Hope that the mindless screen gazing I see going on around me will be replaced with human interaction again.
On this mild spring day with the window open, a cool breeze coming in, my mind drifts to thoughts of going outside and leaving the work on my computer for another day.