I was writing about something similar about 20 years ago (not that anyone read it), not in the context of AI but recommendation algorithms. Even before current generation of “AI” people were relying on algorithms more and more to decide what movie to watch, what music listen to, where to go on holiday, what to eat, what to buy, whom to date. I was imagining those algorithms and optimizations slowly taking over and making decisions automatically for people. “The algorithm” would automatically apply for a new job for you, rent you a new apartment, book your holidays and people would just trust that those are in fact the best decisions for them. It looks like with AI we’ve taken another step in that direction.
Literally just put down your phone and go outside. There’s no AI out there. It’s all in the cloud.
Yes there are AI cameras and stuff, but they can very easily be disabled. It’s trivial. This is not a doomsday scenario.
*dies by AI military drone*Not saying you’re wrong, but we gotta keep the blame on the people doing evil shit. Blaming the people who use their services [for not going outside] doesn’t go anywhere. The services are too frictionless to use, while not using them can often times feel like swimming upstream. The result is statistical: people will use it; a lot of people will use it.
The other day I needed to get home and my phone was nearly dead. Uber, out of the blue, required my ID in order to request a ride. Wasn’t happening…
My only other alternative was an 8 hour walk in the middle of a work night, or download Lyft. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to before my phone died, so I contemplated my choices… it wasn’t hard to see how many people would just upload their ID.
I decided I’d buy a charger at a gas station if need be, find somewhere to use it… luckily I got the Lyft ordered before the phone died.
There’s also ignorance. Kids can be ignorant regarding their privacy; should we let our capitalist society punish them for it? How about the mentally disabled?
I think it’s better that we hold the issue to the people who create it, rather than act like we can just walk away from it. Some people can’t just walk away, which could be you one day.
That’s as helpful as Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” campaign. People are addicted, yo. Everyone.
There are so many AI generated images everywhere even in the real world. Especially in advertisements. But yeah, AI itself is not there I guess. Not yet.
You know, except for AI powered drones and whatnot.
this reeks of abstinence-only education
also, what does the article have to do with the AI cameras?
tl;dr: agentic AI.
If you don’t know what that is, read the article. IMO it is right, clickbait title phrasing excused.
not nearly as good an encapsulation as “gradual disempowerment”
Sharing CBS News articles isn’t helping.
Ok, big plot hole here—and what is really troubling me about AI rise up. We have dead internet theory. When everyone is a bot on the internet, then every single human on the internet is isolated, and as we become more isolated we drop the internet. Until finally, the internet is nothing more than an empty hall filled with bots talking to bots and no human inside. Which begs the question, why even bother having it in the first place? as it is plainly dead.
The problem with this gradual disempowerment is two-fold. If, and it is a big IF, robot and AI take up all of the economy. The example given here is making hammers. Then, when every single labor is substituted with a robot, this will inevitably include the companies that acquire hammers for their human workers. As human workers are replaced, the demand for hammer makers will collapse. Leaving the robotic hammer makers no one to sell their hammers to. Which in turns collapses other markets, etc. Until all of the economy collapses for there are no human beings to acquire the commodities.
Instead we got robotic and AI companies producing and acquiring products for other robotic AI companies, who in turn have no human customers. Then, what is it all for? Why bother keeping such an economy rolling when nothing of value is created? It is a dead economy, that serves no one and provides no profits for any of the owners.
Of course, the endgame for the top 1% is the collapse of civilization and the implementation of a post-apocalyptic feudal slavery system. But speaking against that is leftist thinking and that is apparently the worst crime that the technopedo class can imagine.
They money spent on AI doesn’t go into nothing. It’s paid out to construction workers, taxes, employees salaries, etc to make the rollout happen. That’s separate from it being useful and making money itself. The making money part usually comes after, but in this case it’s not making any money. The trillions of dollars spent so far make the economy look good, remember Biden’s 2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill - how big that was. AI is bigger, and moving trillions of dollars around in an economy keeps up the performance that everything is okay. It’s only after datacenters stop being constructed and financed will the costs start to appear. We’re rolling in printed money being spent on products that won’t make any money. The meta is to keep this build-out going for as long as possible to forestall the crash that comes after it. Anything that keeps it in the zeitgeist is good for the status quo. I don’t think the articles about fake math papers, and AI hacking things are a coincidence. So long as we’re still talking about it, the rollout can just continue behind another farce. It sounds like the new farce is AI is such a threat, you’ll need AI to protect you from AI. Trump would probably also make great use of it as an American surveillance tool, he may bail it out all by himself for this purpose. So far as I see it, despite our desires, the people in charge can’t see AI as a failure, because they’re all in bed with it. They’ll try everything in their power to keep it from crashing, some legal, some borderline, some not, and then there’s what trump will do.
@dustyData @technology I’d like to challenge a basic assumption here: is the “dead internet” a bad outcome? This question likely devolves to another question: is unfiltered access to the internet as it currently exists healthy for humans? It may be that the internet is a net negative, and using personal ai agents as filters for the rampant toxicity may provide us the benefits of the net without the negatives (note by “personal ai agents” I mean agents under full personal control, not the garbage that Meta and Grok are pushing, which represent a worse-that-status-quo outcome)
I’m in my 50s and my entire career has been based on the internet. We’ll be fine, people will form local mesh nets, we’ll stop learning about every bad thing that’s happening everywhere, trust will become local again.
I thought this was a thing everyone was concerned about…
We’ve already seen a similar phenomenon happen with social media. It made everyone more stupider. Everyone uses social media so individually one person can opt out but the whole world is revolving around it.
a treacherous path for humankind, one where bots take more and more off our plate until all that’s left is an empty vessel, and we human users become nothing more than thoughtless “approvers.”
