This is the best episode of TrueAnon since the The Game series, and the best interview relating to "AI" in its current form you'll find on any podcast.
They interview Douglas Rushkoff "to discuss what's real and what's fake about the AI publicity push, the next phase of the internet, and human connection in the oppressive techno-future."
Rushkoff is the perfect guest for this topic on this show. Brace and Liz are incredibly insightful on the issue.
Go listen to it. If someone has a non-patreon'd link, please do share.
I specifically can't get over Rushkoff's point about how "AI" as it's being used is - instead of allowing us to see the humanity behind the machine - is instead conforming us the actual people to be more machine-like, through things like auto-correct and auto-complete algorithms, we are being nudged and incentivized and prodded into thinking less, relying on the AI more, for the sake of endless efficiency, at the cost of creativity and any language beyond the most default efficient way of speaking or thinking.
"AI" isn't intelligent, or sentient, or sapient, but it may as well be, for how it only exists to - as a technology and concept - get human beings to shave themselves down for the sake of the AI's ease.
Every time we use it, we help it far more than it helps us, and it's not even really helping us...
GO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE, IT'S INCREDIBLE
I’ll have to give TrueAnon another go to listen to this. The notion of AI being a thought terminating device (excellent thread btw) resonates deeply with me - from playing with GPT4 at work, I find myself thinking less about what is right, to what I should be prompting the model to generate that feels right. And given the model can’t reason - it can only ever produce believable looking text - I’m trapped in a loop of trying to refine nonsense. Even using it as a sounding board to try and spark ideas from, it distracts from effectively writing cohesive, well reasoned prose for technical documentation.
When you consider the deleterious effects of GPS navigation on the hippocampus/spatial memory, the mind boggles as to what technology under capitalism is going to do to everyone’s brains in the next 30 years.
Unless something not yet factored in pleasantly surprises me, I fully expect "chatbot brain" to be a thing where people are expected to follow a narrow(er) comformist communication script at school, at work, even in their personal lives.![doomer doomer](https://www.hexbear.net/pictrs/image/e29727db-5b25-4c11-9d6a-46a0b389e114.png)
"Redditese" is already a thing offline and in the living world around me where people say Reddity shit like "it's almost as if"
at the start of sentences, out loud and without shame. ![debord-tired debord-tired](https://www.hexbear.net/pictrs/image/3bc736dc-1b61-4129-8009-a5fe1e6ecf18.png)
welp, time to buy an atlas and go back to the old way.
That's not necessarily a bad idea especially if T H E C L O U D continues to enshittify once-useful services.
Looking forward to my FALGSC great great grandchildren having mushy paste brains but also being much happier than me by every metric
yo i've seen that in all tomorrows