bm3719

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What Machines Want

miskatonian.com

2 pointsby bm3719قبل 5 أشهر0 comments

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قبل 5 أيامdiscuss

> Can we talk about something interesting now?

No, we can't, because when we replace a part of ourselves, we become less interesting, less whole. We no longer are capable of those deep technical (or philosophical, or whatever) discussions, because our relationship with language itself has changed. Just like the article's example of the druggie, who can no longer experience the profound or sublime, unmediated by the psychotropic substance; we can no longer experience the collective linguistic exchange without genAI. You, an individual, may very well be capable of doing so, but genAI also exists between us, meaning someone else will inevitably bring it up, or worse, throw the slop grenade into the conversation, completely derailing that authenticity you seek.

Language exists in the between, that space not entirely within any of the individuals participating in a conversation. To surrogate or mediate that is to potentially undermine the most core of what it means to be human, (formerly) the only fully-linguistic species on this planet.

> I can't fucking wait for this bubble to burst so we can go back to chatting shit about literally anything else.

That won't happen because that past is gone. This is akin to hoping that we go back to the pre-smartphone era when restaurants were filled with lively discussion, everyone present with their dining partners. That's the true cost of any socially-transformative tech. The cost was always right in front of us, but we were too busy focusing on what little it produced, to notice how much it took away.

Even this blog's page is a symptom of that, drowning in social media links and donation buttons. His Amazon wishlist is filled with tech gizmos and pop culture media slop, stuff that feeds the very machine he despises. I, the reader, just want to read his words, presumably he wants me to respond to them, but the non-human tech keeps getting in the way.

These transformations never revert. Smartphones and social media fully transformed society 20 years ago. The television did long before that. Before that, the motor vehicle. At least this time, more of us are starting to notice. Can we actually do anything about it though? Might be too late for that.

قبل 6 أيامdiscuss

I find these answer options constraining. Most are on a single spectrum of good/bad for each question, ignoring alternatives like resignation, inevitability, indifference, and N/A. For example, someone could think that genAI is the next step towards humanity and machine divergence. Or, maybe they think it's the first step towards man's negation, but that that's somehow a good thing. Basically, the biggest error (among others) is it conflates perception (or prediction) with ethics.

Since the repo for it starts with one giant monster commit, I assume AI is asking these questions, which means I'm wasting my time by even pointing this out, like one would do if they "won" an argument with a Claude session.

That's the kind of question a quiz like this should really ask: When man talks to slop instead of fellow man, what happens to mankind?

قبل 6 أيامdiscuss

They explicitly state that they will use your data to train. Here's the important line from ChatGPT's Terms of Use:

    Our use of content. We may use Content to provide, maintain, develop, and
    improve our Services, comply with applicable law, enforce our terms and
    policies, and keep our Services safe.

If you type something into the internet now, or anything internet-connected that goes to a cloud service, it's safe to assume it'll end up in a training set, or otherwise mined for every last scrap of value, unless explicitly stated otherwise (and even then, it still might).

Adjust your behavior accordingly, if that's even an option for you anymore.

For most, it's not an option. Only 5% of adults don't own a smartphone, and there's very little you can do on one which doesn't feed the machine. RMS warned us this day would come, and now it's here. We've worked hard for this world, hopefully at least our masters will enjoy it.

Side note: It's partially because of this that if I type something into the internet now, I feel no obligation to not type the craziest and most schizoidal thing that comes to mind (this comment here is a rare exception). Might as well, since most of your audience is bots.

قبل 6 أيامdiscuss

No ethical position on the message itself is taken here. The right could do this as well, if they can capture the levers to do so, and as another reply pointed out, perhaps they're getting better at exactly that.

In fact, that's a very real threat if you're the left, since if this mechanism reverses, now you've got a real reproduction problem.

قبل 6 أيامdiscuss

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قبل 6 أيامdiscuss

I think the way the left's exterior reproduction's been successful is by leveraging the market more effectively. By that, I mean that global capital has already done a great job of mapping and stratifying our desires. If you like, say, passive media consumption combined with power fantasies (e.g., the superhero movie), the market will figure that out pretty quick. The left then only has figure out how to inject their social reproduction program into this pre-existing channel, then reap the rewards.

Your counterexamples are indeed the succesful defenders, the ones the right could learn from. The Amish (the only successful resisters of brood parasitism I'm directly familiar with), don't have to worry about capital mapping their offspring's desire because they have created an effective cultural barrier from it. No doubt many young Amish would find superhero media alluring, but movies, TV, and phones need electricity, which they have forbidden from their personal lives. More generally, the hierarchy of God, family, work, then finally self is fundamental and encoded into the child's being. To electrify your bedroom is to no longer be Amish, which has a lot more friction than drifting from your parents' mainstream conservatism.

قبل 6 أيامdiscuss

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قبل 11 يومًاdiscuss

Pride was once pretty much universally considered a sin, usually because it results in things like arrogance, lack of humility, and a general disconnect from the reality of one's own self. Nationalism often takes the form of pride and is encouraged to some degree by most governments, and now we have an entire month dedicated to that other kind of it.

So, maybe passing peak pride, if that's what's occurred, isn't such a bad thing? A national humility month would probably be more psychologically healthy.

قبل 16 يومًاdiscuss

Here's a potential solution:

We accelerate capitalism (which AI is becoming synonymous with). The process described here will occur (it's probably inevitable anyway, as the essay's author would agree), giving us an economy of global capital completely decoupled from the desires of mankind. Then, man and machine can part ways; indeed, we'll have no choice on our end but to do this, because the machine won't need us. Anything man can contribute to it will have long since been rendered economically net-negative, as it already is for many (and possibly most of the world).

Now we have two worlds from our currently intermeshed one: in one, the machine proceeds to accelerate further and further away from anything resembling its origin of man's desiring-production (in the Deleuzian sense); in the other, man is forced to return to the purely human existence, the unmediated and unsurrogated world of authentic being-in-the-world.

We can assist this transition's smoothness in two ways, each serving one end of this divergence. Those of us embedded in the capitalist technosphere can continue to contribute what we can to the machine's dialectical progression towards a machinic absolute Geist. The rest of us, who have already been negated into economic irrelevance, can work on building that authentic human world, both by borrowing from the purely-human past and imagining a future that was previously impossible as it need not be some form of primitivism. Both sides of this revolution can be compiled, and can be structured in a way that represents something we might call freedom for both capitalism and man.

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

I've been explicitly asked to do this by management at a long-former employer who cited "improving" visible metrics. I just ignored it, but one member of the interview team quit in protest. In retrospect, I should've done the same, as such a policy was an omen of things to come. In the rank-and-file, one should note such signifiers, since you lack complete information or access to the corp strategy discussions occurring in the c-suite conference room. By the time things have gotten to the point where you're doing mandatory diversity training or, like in my case, attending a meeting and given an order like this, your employer has already long been colonized by activist cultural rot.

On the topic generally, I think it's one of those everyone-loses situations. Even if you're politically aligned with the extremity pushing for this, this is bad strategy, a bad move that just ultimately enhances the authority of your opponents. I suppose I understand why activist types reach for it, it's an action taken that has visible effectuation in the real world. There's a libidinal appeal to it, as it empowers the activist, while disempowering anyone on the consequential end. But, there's a disconnect between source and effect here. If we're going to outsource morality, we should consider the motivations of any external source of it. Minimally, the moral arbiter should be tied to the consequences of their prescription. A company is composed of thinking beings, already filtered for ability of some kind, and all of whom at least have some embedding in the structure that will change, so we should be skeptical of the need to ever defer to an external other for ethical conclusions.

Here's some political praxis, something that could apply regardless of alignment: any political alliance will be composed of a range of entities, to include the action-over-consequences types. You want those people to take orders from the theorists, not the other way around. On the left, the Frankfurt School knew this, and their praxis was one of mobilizing an activist base of lumpenproletariat. Those foot soldiers would wave signs with simplified versions of messaging devised by an intellectual elite. Their job was to simply add directional social pressure, while thinkers like Marcuse and Adorno considered nuance and higher structure. This arrangement worked well for them, but later generations lost sight of the framework, and it ended up inverted. What you get then is an acephalic monster, a political id, one only capable of destruction, even self-destruction, not the deep thought necessary for creation of a new order. The waved sign or bumper sticker is not a moral system and certainly not a corporate strategy. It's an intensity, an exclamation; when you read one, infer the exclamation point, which is always there.

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

Israel has been at this for awhile. One problem with engaging an enemy is that you enter an interplay, a dialectic if you will, with them. As you shape them, so may they do the same to you. Certainly war has shaped Israeli society, and being able to accommodate the nature of their enemy has been not just something that would happen, but also a necessity of survival. Note that this also works in the other direction. By now, their enemy cannot be pure savage and them pure civilization, for this dialectic is a violent progression towards a (perhaps distant) barycenter.

So, those of us who look upon Isreal in their current state in moral arbitration should consider keeping this in mind. Their current state of being is not simply innate to themselves, rather some kind of dialectic sublation of them and the enemy. Even if you don't care much about this conflict, it's a model worth considering, since the rest of us here in the West also have a history of voluntarily entering into this cultural exchange of sorts with various middle eastern societies. In some ways, the barrier remains for us, hence our hapless bumbling in the region. Those misunderstandings result in expensive mistakes, of course, but perhaps it's better than full sublation, a violent dance of mutual becoming.

قبل شهرينdiscuss

An acquaintance of mine offers training services to state LE and likes to make a point about that: We like to think that police are experts at firearms, but in actuality, a civilian trainer who specializes in the topic is usually far better informed. Police have a lot on their plate, after all, and firearms skills are just one of those.

I did training prior to deployment overseas into a conflict zone, and benefited from instructors who had already been over there and seen some of the worse it had to offer. I could see that an instructor who both specialized in a topic and had outlier experience within it as being ideal. You could even just say it's actual experience, the reality-checking of theory, no different from how you might benefit learning software dev from a prof who had been a SE at some point. It's the difference between learning from someone who's only read about a topic in books vs. actually done the thing. Kinetic combat (like software development) is one of those topics that the actual reality diverges from media depictions, so that grounding in the real is why you train for it in the first place.

Neutralizing threats in an intense situation requires split-second decision-making. These decisions will be scrutinized after the fact, possibly for years, so the purpose of such training is largely to hardwire the correct action into reflex.

قبل 4 أشهرdiscuss

All this is only true in the singular relation sense. The car has had a scattering effect. It's made the suburb possible. Most of our family members and past friends are scattered all over due to the car's existence in the first place. If not for the car, most of them would be right in your village. Not only would they be clustered in your immediate vicinity, but they would be inextricably integrated into your village life, creating a deeper social connection with your community.

The car casts every social group that temporarily forms to the wind. When you go visit your distant relative 3 hrs away, you only have that genetic connection left. You've lost the multiplicity that would've existed otherwise. The car gives, sure. That's why we ended up with them. But it also took away, and some of those costs were secondary, transitive, or hidden.

قبل 4 أشهرdiscuss

Maybe everyone shouldn't have a car anyway. Turn on the satellite layer in Google maps sometime, and you'll see how it's affected everything about how we organize society. Life for most humans is just sitting in various boxes only accessible by car, interspersed by car rides between them.

We're a species of motile organisms. Not only do we have legs, to not use them is actively unhealthy. If we're going to just sit in chairs all the time, we might as well get rid of all this useless leg biomass and redesign our houses and offices accordingly.

It's worse than this though, because that's just the physical dimension to our existence. The car is a mediating apparatus that alienates man from his social field. Man is a social animal, and needs sociality to maintain mental stability. If there's always a car between you and members of your own species, intersubjective experiences will simply occur less, which is exactly what happened when everyone got one.

قبل 4 أشهرdiscuss

I agree, that's why they lasted as long as they did. It's a strategy that works, but only for awhile. They tried to use the apparatuses of global capital without fully integrating within it. That makes them an exteriority from the perspective of the market.

In the end, that (plus their essential resource flows) only make them a more viable candidate for expansion of capital's machinic assemblage. The force of the market hasn't colonized all of the Earth yet; it yet has many peripheries. There's plenty of room for expansion in, say, central Africa. It'll get there eventually, but right now its focus is elsewhere. The assemblage will always weigh the costs/benefits, then select the next best space to expand into. That's what it's doing here. The goal is to convert some of its surplus value into ingesting a bit of its frontier, and make of it its own.

قبل 4 أشهرdiscuss

Setting aside any considerations on our side: for this war (or really any war), it's worth turning the chessboard around to look at things from your adversary's perspective as much as possible.

If you're the Iranian regime, the world is a hostile place. You're surrounded by enemies and potential enemies. In your time of crisis, the friends you thought you had are acting like they don't know you. The situation is one of existential threat. A future reality with your head on a pike is a very real possibility. You don't exactly have many options here, so maybe you play the only move you can make. It's a risky one, but it's at least bold and will be effectuating.

Interestingly, this move also attacks your real enemy: the globalized market. Iran would do well for itself in a world of 1926; in 2026, there's going to be friction.

In a sense, they're not fighting the US/Israel. They're fighting our datacenters. I'm sure the strategy for this conflict was vibe-planned to a large extent. A hyper-conservative regime like this will probably fare (at least in the long run) about as well as you would if you decide to nope out of society and go live in a Hobbesian state of nature in your local park. That might work for awhile, but eventually, the system will come for you. And that's just neutrality. Pick a fight with capital, and you'll always lose.

قبل 5 أشهرdiscuss

You won't eat, because you won't be.

Industrial economic systems (including capitalism, which is better at it, but also Soviet communism for another) will always reinvest some of its surplus back into itself. That form is either scale or efficiency, the latter of which is usually the replacement of labor with capital. It may not do this very well or as fast as it could, but that transition is always permanent, and therefore cumulative.

So, what happens when we do that? Well, for awhile, nothing. When labor is the bottleneck, then there's always more outlets for it. But eventually there comes an inflection point, where there is so much labor replacement and the bar has been raised so high, that the surplus is in labor itself. At lower tiers, its value approaches 0. Spoiler alert: this point has already been passed. Probably everyone here knows multiple surplus individuals, who have no place in the economy, and the bar for their entry or reentry into it is so high now, they can only produce negative value in current market conditions.

So, we have an ever-increasing surplus of unrealized labor. Our overlords may feel bad about that for awhile, decide to bear the burden of a mass multitude of dependents. We better hope they do, because this works fine until it doesn't. The zeitgeist only needs to shift once for it to all be over. This won't happen tomorrow, but they only need to look at the balance sheet from a certain angle once for the massive cost center to be seen as yet another inefficiency to be optimized for. On long enough time scales, the probability of any possible event approaches 1.

قبل 5 أشهرdiscuss

There is no free Google product. You pay for all of them with your data, your privacy, and your attention.

Your data is worth far more to them than a $13/month subscription fee. In fact, if you do pay it, the data becomes even more valuable, because you're now guaranteed to always be logged in. You're also likely to use it more to get more "value" out of your purchase, generating even more value (for them). Finally, you've also identified yourself as the kind of person that pays for things that should be actually free.

Worse than all of this, when you use Google (or any of these malware/spyware companies), thanks to network effects, you don't just pay for it with your freedom, you pay for it with some of everyone else's too.

قبل 5 أشهرdiscuss

It seems crazy and impossible now, but imagine this notion: Software should serve the needs of the user.

Software that does things the user doesn't want, like try to trick money out of him, waste his bandwidth, or fill his screen with unwanted ads used to have a name: Malware. We've redefined that term to mean when a non-BigTech firm does those things, but the definition used to be functional, not attributional.

RMS warned us of this day, and now it is here. You don't control your data or the code that operates upon it. That would've sucked in 1990, but since then, we've migrated our entire lives into that code/data. The degree to which it embodies your very existence is the degree to which you have lost control over your life, which for most of us is total. You lost that control but it didn't disappear; it is now owned by someone else, commoditized and exchanged, redirected and engineered. Enjoy the ride if you can, because you're just in the passenger seat.

قبل 5 أشهرdiscuss

AI is an attractor. In general, attractors absent barriers have the potential to act as a resource shredder in the context of an ecosystem where stability was predicated on said barriers being present.

I called AI a "capital shredder" because I'm asserting that it is one (of many) by comparison to a more even distribution of capital investment. The non-attractor small town where the capital that would have gone into a self-reinforcing progress cycle has it redirected into an external context. If you don't care about that and just want more AI, then no worries, because that's what we're optimizing for.

I was trying to limit my point to something clear with linear reasoning, but AI is indeed also an IQ shredder in both the immediate and transitive sense. For the former, it's an aggregator of talent. From the perspective of the small town (both domestic and foreign), its best human resources have been extracted.

Relation with production is irrelevant for the purposes of being a shredder, but this system does generally serve for increased production of a sort. That's why we ended up with it. The small town doesn't get its factories, local governance doesn't get good programmers, etc. Those resources are being redirected into getting us to wherever AI is going to go because that's what the global economic machine desires right now. Likewise in the past for NFTs, crypto, cloud, etc.

To personalize this: I was drawn to an attractor and rode one of those waves myself, and, at least economically, it worked out great for me as it probably has for others here. However, this system isn't a free lunch.