What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @[email protected] for this translation alternative: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
I think your point of view would be more relatable before AI happened. I don’t see how it addresses AI problem anyhow. “Societal progress” isn’t something that has self-worth. I see that as a tool of improving QoL, but if it’s not only stopped improving QoL but actually started making it worse, than it’s not something to pursue, and actually something to actively sabotage.
Well let me state this explicitly then, I don’t consider AI to be some kind of existential threat in terms of becoming sentient, or stealing all of our information and hoarding it away.
LLMs are powerful and have lots of use cases, but right now we are going through a really tiresome scifi novel delusion where tons of smart people are mistaking the current wave of LLM innovations as being somehow able to transport us to the singularity or whatever boring tech bros are calling it these days… instead of being a boring, lame regression into fuedalism.
yawn
longish response, no pressure to read
What scares me is the massive energy use of AI, it also doesn’t make money.
If some AI scrapes all my stuff on the fediverse, ok that sucks but honestly that LLM they train off my posts is going to be constantly complaining about corporations, going on off-topic rants about AI bullshit hype and centralization of corporate power… yeah you can sanitize the data, they can profile me… yeah I know.
I feel like that is already a threat enough and there is a tsunami like power that comes from reaching a public consensus through discussing things in public forums and putting our beliefs out there as a form of vulnerability. The more of us that do this, the more that people who disagree or agree can learn, the more we can establish conensus of shared values, the more we can build trust.
The metaphor for our current late stage capitalist society on the afterburners of surveillance capitalism/mass dragnet surveillane and censorhsip is clearly the panopitcon
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
If you suspect you are in a panopticon, or in an environment that is threatening to collapse into an authoritarian panopticon type situation, than the best defense, because lets be honest if you are in this position you don’t have much power realistically do you? is to publically have conversations, share opinions, discuss honestly with people in a way that floods whatever commons that are left, whatever equivalent of yelling chants out of the prison bars to other prisoners… however you want to map the metaphor here…
That is how we defend ourselves.
The relevant question is whether you are in a situation where you can safely do that, if you can’t than take care of yourself, hide. Adopt good digital hygeine and help others out in an unjudgemental way how to do so themselves.
If you feel at all that you can safely speak out, or honestly, if you feel like realistically you don’t have much to lose (because at the end of the day that is the position we are all existentially in, it is just a matter of who will suffer first and thus who has the right to want to delay that suffering the most) then the best defense here is to make as much as you can public through art, through any kind of discussion, because no matter how sophisticated and supercharged the methods of the oppressors are and no matter how overbearing the mazes of false-consensus become…
…they still can’t ever really win in a moment to moment interaction with any half decent artist, any half decent person who knows their worth, any person willing to be vulnerable and say it how it is, and indeed really anyone that is willing to extend solidarity to strangers not because of some emotional need or ideological sense of superiority, but because it is something they try to do out of principle (and of course are imperfect at, so what, society shouldn’t be reliant on people being ethically perfect in the same way safety regulations in society shouldn’t assume people aren’t going to behave like idiots, as frustrating as that is ).
The nice thing is, we are talking about snowball effects here. One of the best drugs in life is doing a small good thing that ripples into a slightly bigger good thing all by itself, that takes a little life of its own. I don’t claim to be any kind of altruist, or someone who constantly does selfless acts but that isn’t the point. Most people feel a basic pleasure when it is easy to help, to help so long as it is simple and direct how to do so. Some don’t, so what.
The power of computers, of software and of social media is that it allows us to help, share, educate, illimunate and reinforce one another in small, tiny ways with barely any effort, barely any energy usage, and we can reach across basically ever barrier humans can be thrust behind by the cruelty of chance to reach them and bring them into the conversation.
Hell yes, keep yelling out of those bars, keep telling it the way it is, keep being you if you can
While I agree with many of these takes, I believe there is more to this. For example, your point about defense from falling into panopticon by speaking publicly about things doesn’t actually require publicly speaking about anything other than politics. I mean, you can still hide all professional, creative or fun talk and still have the benefits you listed covered by only ever publicly talking about political issues. Another issue, is that publicity and interconnectedness of all discourses we have nowadays, increases a homogenuity of thinking patterns, in other words it hurts the diversity of the ways of thinking, that is also something that can be improved by more people going private and having closed interest groups in chats invisible to public web.
Where is your evidence of this?
It is a mistake to think pushing everybody to talk only in private will increase the diversity and quality of discourse. It will NOT, it will collapse conversations into simpler more reductive narratives.
Everywhere? Every decade humankind becomes more uniform worldwide, but especially last few decades.
I feel like over the last two decades everyone on the internet was pushed to talk only in public, even more so, on the few biggest platforms only.
What? Do you not listen to music? Or enjoy art? Do you not watch theater or tv? Do you not enjoy going to local craft shows and seeing local artists? No matter what happens in the 2000s, the 1900s will be remembered as one of the most artistically prolific, free and diverse periods of human expression and art. Yeah there is censorship, yes western culture is very conservative in ways it doesn’t want to admit sometimes, but in general the shear volume and variety of art created in the 1900s is immense.