Was PoC right, accidentally?

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Netherlands Goodspeed
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Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Goodspeed »

About democracy being trash?

Big tech creating LLM AIs to compete for our attention is going to break democracy to such an extent that having an authoritarian government might actually start to look like the better option, since such a government at least has slightly less destructive incentives than big corporations.

Discuss?
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by callentournies »

No, but it burdens the electorate unlike before, to be incorruptible by false and misleading info. Corp's can (in theory) be regulated, an authoritarian cannot. Corps under an authoritarian cannot.

There is no idyllic benevolent dictator in practice. It is not a chance that can be gambled on over time. You have to take what democracy offers: not the best leadership, but not the worst (in theory). Smooth out the dangers, for harm reduction. Democracy is harm reduction.

Democracy until I die imo, or more people are more bad than redeemable, in which case, there's isn't a question worth answering. But we ask a bunch of questions we think are worth answering. It's another debate how best to represent a democracy.
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by fightinfrenchman »

Goodspeed wrote: ↑
20 Apr 2023, 20:12
since such a government at least has slightly less destructive incentives than big corporations.

Discuss?
I strongly disagree with this tbh, I feel like big corporations are much more likely to care about my interests than a hypothetical authoritarian government
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Netherlands Goodspeed
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Goodspeed »

A government wants you to not revolt. A company wants to make money. For the government, your happiness is a much more direct existential concern.

On top of this, corporations will be the only ones who can actually afford to deploy this tech at scale, which means whoever is in power will be incentivized to regulate them. In a democracy, that will be the corporations themselves.
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Cometk »

i think a mistake with that syllogism is that it doesn't acknowledge that the government's desire for the populace to not revolt is a particular function of preserving the economic predicament, that is, the company's profit interests. the company has a vested interest in keeping its workers "happy" (placid and ignorant also work here) so that they don't perform revolutionary action, what comes in the form of unionization and collective bargaining, mass action of the proletariat for the betterment of conditions and wages. such revolutionary struggle would be in direct contradiction with the capital owner's interests, the profits, the company's interests; these are all synonymous. the government operates on behalf of a particular economic modality, for its preservation - most often, for the preservation of profits

however i agree with your general sentiment that in a (liberal) democracy (abetted by a bourgeois state apparatus) the corporations will be the arbiters of regulation etc.
Goodspeed wrote: ↑
20 Apr 2023, 20:12
Big tech creating LLM AIs to compete for our attention is going to break democracy to such an extent that having an authoritarian government might actually start to look like the better option, since such a government at least has slightly less destructive incentives than big corporations.
not sure what this means btw
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Latvia harcha
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by harcha »

@gs silly thread.
He was always right all along. From beginning to forever. How could one even think otherwise?
princeofcarthage wrote: ↑
06 Apr 2021, 10:41
... remember Prince warned about it years ago.
princeofcarthage wrote: ↑
25 Feb 2022, 09:56
Also as an objective third party, and near 100% accuracy of giving correct information, I would say my opinions are more reliable than yours.
princeofcarthage wrote: ↑
13 Apr 2022, 06:59
Also I most likely know a whole lot more than you. You probably know some revisionist western propaganda history.
POC wrote:Also I most likely know a whole lot more than you.
POC wrote:Also as an objective third party, and near 100% accuracy of giving correct information, I would say my opinions are more reliable than yours.
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Netherlands Goodspeed
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Goodspeed »

Cometk wrote:
Goodspeed wrote: ↑
20 Apr 2023, 20:12
Big tech creating LLM AIs to compete for our attention is going to break democracy to such an extent that having an authoritarian government might actually start to look like the better option, since such a government at least has slightly less destructive incentives than big corporations.
not sure what this means btw
It means AI is going to change the world in a way that basically fucks democracy, even harder than social media did. Democratic governments are already lame and unrepresentative, but it's about to get much much worse. AKA the actual topic of the thread
i think a mistake with that syllogism is that it doesn't acknowledge that the government's desire for the populace to not revolt is a particular function of preserving the economic predicament, that is, the company's profit interests. the company has a vested interest in keeping its workers "happy" (placid and ignorant also work here) so that they don't perform revolutionary action, what comes in the form of unionization and collective bargaining, mass action of the proletariat for the betterment of conditions and wages.
Big tech companies don't need you to work for them. They just need you to have an intimate relationship with their AI. Which you will have, regardless.
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Cometk »

Goodspeed wrote: ↑
21 Apr 2023, 11:29
Cometk wrote:
Goodspeed wrote: ↑
20 Apr 2023, 20:12
Big tech creating LLM AIs to compete for our attention is going to break democracy to such an extent that having an authoritarian government might actually start to look like the better option, since such a government at least has slightly less destructive incentives than big corporations.
not sure what this means btw
It means AI is going to change the world in a way that basically fucks democracy, even harder than social media did. Democratic governments are already lame and unrepresentative, but it's about to get much much worse. AKA the actual topic of the thread
why does llm ai break democracy? how did social media break it as well? when you say democractic governments are already lame and unrepresentative, do you mean this to apply generally, or to a particular time and place, and if the latter, for what reason do you figure so?

furthermore, if the contemporary democratic governments are lame and unrepresentative, are they not already authoritarian? then begs the question, authoritarian on behalf of whom and for why?
i think a mistake with that syllogism is that it doesn't acknowledge that the government's desire for the populace to not revolt is a particular function of preserving the economic predicament, that is, the company's profit interests. the company has a vested interest in keeping its workers "happy" (placid and ignorant also work here) so that they don't perform revolutionary action, what comes in the form of unionization and collective bargaining, mass action of the proletariat for the betterment of conditions and wages.
Big tech companies don't need you to work for them. They just need you to have an intimate relationship with their AI. Which you will have, regardless.
idk, the way i understand this, are the contradictions of the ways social media companies vie for the attention economy that different from the ways toilet paper manufacturers vie for the butthole economy? a key difference i imagine is that social media companies seek to increase the amount of time people spend on their apps (attention is a finite and calculable resource), whereas toilet paper companies, to my knowledge, don't seek to increase the amount of shits people take (# of shits taken per day is also a finite and calculable resource). is this where the observed insidiousness of social media comes from, from their capital desire to transform civic life away from all other activities and to their apps? or why else has social media changed the world in a way that breaks democracy? because even though society has evolved in a way that is now inextricable from social media tech, so have we evolved in a way that is inextricable from toilet paper
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Netherlands Goodspeed
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Goodspeed »

The issue is with people's relationship with reality
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Goodspeed »

Another concern is democratic governments' often rather slow response to new developments. It's by design but not necessarily what you want when a crisis is looming and correct and swift lawmaking is needed to prevent it. Many such cases can be imagined in the near future. For one, from this or next year and on, we won't know if digital content is real anymore. For another, a complete overhaul of taxation systems is needed (quickly) when people start losing their jobs by the millions. These are the mild examples.
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Cometk »

Goodspeed wrote: ↑
21 Apr 2023, 12:11
The issue is with people's relationship with reality
sorry if i'm catching you before an edit or some more writing, but if i may ask, what is reality? (sincere question.) is "reality" here intended to mean literacy and the ability to analyze and comprehend "truth"? then i might be curious as to what we should define as truth
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Goodspeed »

I mean what people consider to be the truth versus the actual truth. Social media widened the gap and it's going to get wider
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Dolan »

You're only noticing this now, when you see the potential that this turbo-search-engine called AI could plant whatever version of facts corporations want based on the datasets on which they were trained and the "corrections" they applied to make sure the answers are in line with the goody-two-shoes moralistic Anglophone mindset, which is so prevalent in Silicon Valley, that will embed these tools in their "free" online services.

I've been saying for years that democracy has a big problem with giving the same voice or decisional weight (one vote) to one individual no matter how knowledgeable or clueless he is about what he votes. So you end up having the votes of people who are economically knowledgeable (let's say 50.000 in a population of 2 millions voters) completely cancelled by the votes of the economically clueless (1.950.000 votes). The great majority will never vote things that feel detrimental to them, although economic adjustments might be needed. Case in point, France right now, where "the people" are revolting against raising the retirement age from 62 to 65. Who is right here? The people, aka democracy, or the few and knowledgeable, who know that the country's pension system is unsustainable. The irony of what happens in France right now is that the current government only reverts to how things were before 1981, when socialist Miterrand made such a gift of cutting retirement age. The people didn't revolt against what made their life more comfortable, even though this was likely to create problems ahead. Who cares, the masses don't care, they don't think ahead, they don't think they're responsible for that stuff, let the big wigs handle that. But if they dare bring it back to how it was, revolution now! Down with their heads! Why don't they take more money from billionaires?! That's how the clueless masses are when it comes to voting responsibly. They tend to vote themselves gifts, consequences be damned.
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Goodspeed »

turbo-search-engine called AI
You are hilariously wrong about this. Let's talk in 5 years
I've been saying for years that democracy has a big problem with giving the same voice or decisional weight (one vote) to one individual no matter how knowledgeable or clueless he is about what he votes.
Yeah this has always been an issue but it's not that bad when everyone is at least somewhat informed
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Dolan »

Goodspeed wrote: ↑
21 Apr 2023, 14:28
Yeah this has always been an issue but it's not that bad when everyone is at least somewhat informed
More like their opinion was fabricated by a big brain they saw on TV or an influential family member who 'knows a lot about politics'.
People form their opinions on politics like they follow e-celebs and IG influencers. They call that exercising their freedom.
But most of them are actually NPC followers.
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Dolan »

So the AI fabricating "the best and most correct" political opinions to have would be nothing new. It might put some political pundits out of work. And it might make this phenomenon I've been describing for some years more obvious, when the agent is just one entity, instead of a myriad of pundits, media outlets, blogs, Twitter celebs, etc. The AI could replace this opinion-shaping Twittosphere, or partly so. "The people" might still follow e-celebs to get their "freely chosen" political opinions just because they enjoy watching their favourite Youtube celeb who turns political debate into a funny skit with memes about 'owning the libs' or 'exposing the nazis'.
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Goodspeed »

Yes which is an existential threat to any democracy
More like their opinion was fabricated by a big brain they saw on TV or an influential family member who 'knows a lot about politics'.
Like I said, social media already corroded people's relationships with reality. This isn't really anything new, it's just making an existing issue worse
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Dolan »

You know what, actually I think the AI might not have a chance, because its opinions will be boring fact-checking crap, instead of funny memes and cracking jokes about libs and nazis.
Who would want to read boring paragraphs written by AI in a chatbox, when we can watch our favourite Youtube debater who always gives us a hearty chortle when he shits on the libs/nazis.
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by RefluxSemantic »

You make many enormous leaps in logic without a solid basis here. Youre doing some extreme extrapolation here, not sure how correct any of this is. Its also pretty hard to even follow the logic.

The premise of the entire thread is also strange, do you want to discuss the democracy vs authocracy or do you actually want to discuss your central thesis that AI will break democracy? It seems like the latter is what you truly want to discuss, so why the strange clickbait formatting?
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Dolan »

If you want to worry about the effect of AI on politics, I think a good place to start is how AI getting embedded in lots of tools will make people lose skills.
Idiocracy never looked more likely than now. I already see people on social media cheering for tech making that hard-to-acquire skill unnecessary now because "AI will solve this".
They're already enthusiastic about the prospect of becoming dependent on tools that will make developing skills obsolete.
One power blackout and the NPCs won't even know how to cook without AI telling them what to do step by step.
Or how to find their location on a map without cell tower signal and google maps.

This kind of dependence on technology is making people more complacent and dumber and they're even proud of it (expect The :ear: to reply to this).
Corporations are rejoicing, basically being human won't be possible without having online access to the latest AI iteration.
What will being human even mean when AI will do that and even more, according to AI worshippers.
Maybe defined as an AI terminal.
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by RefluxSemantic »

Are you not also dependent on the current technology? I do not have the skills to survive out in the wild. I need my grocery store and my refridgerator. A power outage already puts society on hold as is.
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Dolan »

Yeah and that's a problem. I've always been interested in learning how to do metalworking, for example, because of this. If there's a social collapse most of us won't even know how to restore things to the neolithic stage, let alone the iron age.
Superspecialisation has made people dependent on a super-technologised society, so once they're locked into this system (hello Ted K), they tolerate any kind of serfdom (political, consumerist, psychological) just because they know they could not simply break free from the system they're embedded in.

In this respect, I think my country could survive better such a potential collapse, as about half of the country are peasants who still live in the countryside and lots of them still do subsistence farming, so for them an urban collapse would be a huge windfall, as food prices would explode and their potato farms would become the new Big Tech corporations.
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by RefluxSemantic »

In terms of misinformation:

I think most people's knowledge is filled with information. On almost any subject, we merely have some vague approximation of the truth. There are very few topics where I think I really know and understand the truth. Even professionally, my knowledge is mostly approximate and inaccurate.

This is an older phenomenon. Even Socrates discusses it. We have build a scientific community that can guide us in determining truths. But that community is very much fallable, and unfortunately it seems like most people dont care much about their truths anyways.

I think people are typically not aware of how big their lack of knowledge is. Some smarter people have a better grasp on the gaps in their knowledge, but even they end up bullshitting quite often.

So how will AI truly change this? Our knowledge is mostly inaccurate, so the few extra inaccuracies that AI will add wont change the trend much. Smarter people will figure out that these AIs are not super reliable, and the dumb guys out there are already completely misinformed anyways.
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by fightinfrenchman »

Dolan wrote: ↑
21 Apr 2023, 14:17
I've been saying for years that democracy has a big problem with giving the same voice or decisional weight (one vote) to one individual no matter how knowledgeable or clueless he is about what he votes
Damn I wish shit worked like this
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Re: Was PoC right, accidentally?

Post by Goodspeed »

RefluxSemantic wrote: ↑
21 Apr 2023, 15:29
You make many enormous leaps in logic without a solid basis here. Youre doing some extreme extrapolation here, not sure how correct any of this is. Its also pretty hard to even follow the logic.

The premise of the entire thread is also strange, do you want to discuss the democracy vs authocracy or do you actually want to discuss your central thesis that AI will break democracy? It seems like the latter is what you truly want to discuss, so why the strange clickbait formatting?
It's a showerthought thread

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