[6DM]

I don't think AI is the cause, it's merely the mechanism that is speeding up what has already been happening.

Social media was already isolating people. It is being sped up by the use of AI bots (see dead internet theory). These bots are being used to create chaos in society for political purposes, but overall it's increasingly radicalizing people and as a result further isolating everyone.

AI isn't eroding college institutions, they were already becoming a money grab and a glorified jobs program. Interpersonal relationships (i.e. connections) are still present, I don't see how AI changes that in this scenario.

I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.

The article does highlight one thing that I do attribute to AI and that is the lack of critical thinking. People are thinking less with the use of AI. Instead of spending time evaluating, exploring and trying to think creatively. We are collectively offloading that to AI.

[Angostura]

I rather disagree with this position.

To risk an analogy, if I throw petrol onto an already smouldering pile of leaves, I may mot have ‘caused’ the forest fire, but I have accelerated it so rapidly that the situation becomes unrecognisable.

There may already have been cracks in the edifice, but they were fixable. AI takes a wrecking ball to the whole structure

[ajb]

This is fair as a criticism of the leading AI companies, but there's a catch.

When you attribute blame to technologies, you make it difficult to use technologies in the construction of a more ethical alternative. There are lots of people who think that in order to act ethically you have to do things in an artisanal way; whether it's growing food, making products, services, or whatever. The problem with this is that it's outcompeted by scalable solutions, and in many cases our population is too big to apply artisanal solutions. We can't replace the incumbents with just a lot of hyper-local boutique businesses, no matter how much easier it is to run them ethically. We have to solve how to enable accountability in big institutions.

There's a natural bias among people who are actually productive and conscientious, which is that an output can only be ethical if it's the result of personal attention. But while conscientiousness is a virtue in us as workers, it's not a substance that is somehow imbued in a product, if the same product is delivered with less personal attention then it's just as good - and much cheaper and therefore available to more people, which is the product is good for them, makes it more ethical and not less.

(I'm making a general point here. It's not actually obvious to me that AI is an essential part of the solution either)

[mock-possum]

I suppose to belabor the analogy, its still not the petrol’s fault - the same fuel is also used to transport firefighting resources, in fact, a controlled burn might have effectively mitigated the risk of a forest fire in the first place. Who left those leaves to smolder in the first place, anyway? Why’d you throw petrol on the pile?

You just have to be careful not to say “this is AI’s” fault - it’s far more accurate, and constructive, to say “this is our fault, this is a problem with the way some people choose to use LLMs, we need to design institutions that aren’t so fragile that a chatbot is all it takes to break them.”

[booleandilemma]

I agree with this. We've made existing problems 100x worse overnight. I just read the curl project is discontinuing bug bounties. We're losing so much with the rise of AI.

[gosub100]

or, having a glass of wine with dinner or a few beers on the weekend is fine. but drinking a 6-pack per day or slamming shots every night is reckless and will lead to health consequences.

[basilgohar]

I agree and disagree with parts of what you said.

AI may have caused a distinct trajectory of the problem, but the old system was already broken and collapsing. If the building falls over or collapses in place doesn't change that the building was already at its end.

I think the fact that AI is allowed to go as far as it has is part of the same issue, namely, our profit-at-all-costs methodology of late-stage capitalism. This has lead to the accelerated destruction of many institutions. AI is just one of those tools that lets us sink more and more resources into the grifting faster.

(Edit: Fixing typos.)

[palmotea]

> I don't think AI is the cause, it's merely the mechanism that is speeding up what has already been happening.

I think the technical term is "throwing gas on the fire." It's usually considered a really bad thing to do.

> I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.

If someone throws gas on a fire, you can totally blame them for the fire getting out of control. After all, they made it much worse! Like: "we used to have smouldering brush fire that we could put out, but since you dumped all that gas on it, now we will die because we have a forest fire raging all around us."

[nautilus12]

I don't think this argument makes much sense. If you are running down hill towards a cliff then saying that adding a cart to speed up the process doesn't give the cart moral blameworthiness is an unhelpful observation. You can still chose to stop running down the hill or to not get on the cart.

[sodapopcan]

Exactly! Was going to make a similar comment if I didn't already see one. People keep saying things like this and drives me fuckin' nuts. It's not that there are no positives but I don't see how the positives outweigh the negatives.

[greenavocado]

Dead internet theory original post: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...

[mock-possum]

Man I had forgotten how batshit conspiracy theory that was

[jrjeksjd8d]

Capitalism is destroying institutions. Any new technology must be employed in service of "number go up". In this system externalities have to be priced in with taxes, but it's cheaper to buy off legislators than to actually consider the externalities.

This is how we get food that has fewer nutrients but ships better, free next-day delivery of plastic trash from across the world that doesn't work, schools that exist to extract money rather than teach, social media that exists primarily to shove ads in your face and trick you into spending more time on it.

In the next 4 years we will see the end of the American experiment, as shareholder capitalism completely consumes itself and produces an economy that can only extort and exploit but not make anything of value.

[vixen99]

I'll focus just on food here: people do have a choice. I don't live in the US but is it impossible to buy basic ingredients, fruit, vegetables, grains, meat whatever etc., and actually cook something? Eating this kind of food you can even stack your life chances more in your favor. Huge amounts of information abound as to the how you can do that. Consumers, if they are free to choose, determine value and entrepreneurs will respond. It can be profoundly distorted, that's true but at base, capitalism is doing something that someone else finds of value or not.

[pas]

That's not capitalism. That's human nature. We want a better future.

Capitalism assigns a price to this, makes it more efficient. (By allowing people to buy/rent productive things (land, machines) hire people, and buy unproductive setups, improve it, and earn a profit on the effect of the improvement itself.)

If you think "shareholder capitalism" overplayed this, well, maybe, but it seems that manufacturing is getting fucked by tariffs, construction is getting fucked by NIMBYism, and ultimately the world is getting fucked by lack of improvements, by standing still, by regressing to a past that never was despite the costs, and not because people want to make number go up!

Of course there's a ton of problems with power concentration everywhere, but market liberalism correlates with liberty and well-being, and the solution is not USSR-style denial of markets (and in general, behavioral-, and micro- and macroeconomics), it's understanding them, and using taxes to help people to participate in them.

[syawaworht]

I think the wrong lesson to draw for this is that it's just a systems problem. Somehow if we do a different song and dance, the outcome will be different. I've been thinking that the end state of capitalism and communism are not that different - what is the difference between wealth that you can't spend in a million lifetimes and "no" wealth at all? The endpoint is the same, the game becomes about relative power over others, in service of an unending hunger.

Capitalism is the manifestation of the aggregate human psyche. We've agreed that this part of our selves that desires to possess things and the part that feels better when having even more, is essential. This is the root we need to question, but have not yet dared to question. Because if we follow this path of questioning, and continue to shed each of our grasping neuroticisms, the final notion we may need to shed is that we are people, individual agents, instead of nonseparate natural phenomena.

We will have to confront that question eventually because we will always have to face the truth.

[jongjong]

It's not capitalism, it's the monetary system that's the problem. It's not a level playing field. Capitalism requires a fair monetary system as a precondition. Though I can agree that communism would be better than whatever perverse system we have now.

[PlatoIsADisease]

>Capitalism is destroying institutions.

What year do you think was the first year of capitalism? Depending on your starting point, it caused the American Revolution and French Revolution.

It caused destruction of monarchy.

[pyeri]

If bots are being used to create chaos in society, it really isn't possible that the platforms themselves are just innocent bystanders here. It is technically possible and quite easy for the platforms to block bots if they really wanted to, in fact it's actually in their best interest to have human only organic activity as it increases the platform's credibility and reduces network cost. If they're still letting bots operate and actually post content on their platforms, they're likely in cahoots with the politicians.

[johnnyanmac]

>I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.

I'll use a rather extreme example here, but this sounds a bit like "Heroin addiction is just speeding up aspects that society already does. It's so easy to get addicted to smoking cigarettes".

Sometimes the catalyst is the problem, even if it's not the only problem. In this case I think placing some guardrail on both social media and AI is worthwhile.

[echelon]

100% correct in the first part, though I'd like to think there's a bimodal effect with AI users and usage.

Hard working expert users, leveraging AI as an exoskeleton and who carefully review the outputs, are getting way more done and are stronger humans. This is true with code, writing, and media.

People using AI as an easy button are becoming weaker. They're becoming less involved, less attentive, weaker critical thinkers.

I have to think that over some time span this is going to matter immensely. Expert AI users are going to displace non-AI users, and poor AI users are going to be filtered at the bottom. So long as these systems require humans, anyway.

Personally speaking:

My output in code has easily doubled. I carefully review everything and still write most stuff by hand. I'm a serious engineer who built and maintained billion dollar transaction volume systems. Distributed systems, active active, five+ nines SLA. I'm finding these tools immensely valuable.

My output in design is 100% net new. I wasn't able to do this before. Now I can spin up websites and marketing graphics. That's insane.

I made films and media the old fashioned way as a hobby. Now I'm making lots of it and constantly. It's 30x'd my output.

I'm also making 3D characters and rigging them for previz and as stand-ins. I could never do that before either.

I'm still not using LLMs to help my writing, but eventually I might. I do use it as a thesaurus occasionally or to look up better idioms on rare occasion.

[nathan_compton]

I have observed this with students. Some use AI to really extend their capabilities and learn more, others become lazy and end up learning less than if they hadn't used AI.

[godelski]

While I agree with a lot of what you said, your comment implies catalysts and accelerants don't matter.

The roots of the problem are very real and very complex but forcing them to be addressed quickly throws people into panic mode and frankly that leads to sloppy solutions that are going to cause the cycle to repeat (though will temporarily solve some problems, and this is far better than nothing).

  > We are collectively offloading that to AI.

Frankly, this is happening because so many are already in that panicked stressed mode (due to many factors, not just social media). It's well know people can't think critically under high stress. AI isn't the cause of that stress but it sure is amplifying many of them

[anonymars]

Honestly, I know I'm going to sound off my rocker but thinking of e.g. Mass Effect or The Matrix, are we watching ourselves getting evolved/replaced in real time?

All of existence has been a to-and-fro of larger organisms emerging by connecting and subsuming smaller ones. Organelles, cells, organisms... Are we creating the instruments of our own ascension (fancy calculators) or are we doomed to watch AI and the internet manipulate and supersede us?

[raw_anon_1111]

A government related alignment may lead to increased truth?? Have you been paying attention in the last year where the government is cleansing government websites of any facts that don’t support its narrative

[acdha]

> Universities have pushed post-modernism since the 60s which is the precursor for the deprecation of truth.

This is wildly overstating the influence of post-modernists or universities in general. There is a war on objective reality but it grew out of religious (creationism, anti-feminism/LGBTQ) and industrial (pollution) sources, not a bunch of French intellectuals in parts of some universities, and that started long before post modernism. Even if you think they’re equivalent, there’s simply no comparison for the number of people reached by mass media versus famously opaque writings discussed by many orders of magnitude fewer people.

[duskdozer]

What kind of left populism are you talking about, and how has it contributed to the destruction of the state?

[hall0ween]

> Universities have pushed post-modernism since the 60s which is the precursor for the deprecation of truth.

Call me crazy, but the situation may be more nuanced than this (and your next statement). For example, all universities embraced post-modernism? Also, universities are the arbiter for truth? If so, which universities and which truths? Or is it the transcendental Truth all universities gave out? Lastly, post-modernist ideas on media or some other part of culture?

[mock-possum]

Complaining about post modernism in universities reads like a dog whistle

[jongjong]

Yes of course AI is just a symptom. The cause is the fiat monetary system. In all history, no fiat monetary system has ever lasted. There have been hundreds. They always fail eventually and lead to the collapse of nations and empires.