here is an article that i read today, via the “decentralized social network” i’m using. it’s on substack and you need a subscription to read the whole thing; a free subscription will do:
it gives a pretty bleak outlook into what AI will do to our society; it’s one of the reasons i dislike artificial intelligence and, even though i know it does have very positive uses, refuse to work with it as far as possible.
i wish you’d take the trouble to read it, even if you have to get a free substack subscription. if that’s too much trouble i can upload the text i’ve pulled from the site, but that’s much less easy to read.
Great article. I have been musing like him also and coming to a similar conclusion, that, hopefully, the illusory world of AI will stimulate people to come into bhakti for the humasn, what to speak of, transcendent, experience. No AI can ever create Kirtan!
I have suggested our discussion of AI should be around three points:
How to respond to its effect on society
How to protect our own communities from the fakery and the mental, creative atrophy it can cause in us
How and when to use it productively for our mission.
But there aer bigger threats than the blurring of reality. That isd the incredible power that masters of AI could get to fight wars, dominate economies, surveill everybody, etc. And that’s if it doesn’t spiral out of control.
”While the possibility of recursive self-improvement leading to superintelligence reflects the hope of many frontier AI companies, there is not a shred of evidence that today’s glitchy AI agents are close to conducting AI research even at the level of a normal human technician. This means there is still plenty of time to address the problem of aligning superintelligence with values that make it safe for humans. “
i’m not afraid of artificial “intelligence” – i don’t even think it’s anything close to intelligent. what scares me is how it can and is being used to produce fakes of pretty much everything, in a quality that’s impossible to detect without specialized knowledge and tools. this type of fake material becomes cheaper and faster to generate until soon we won’t be able to trust anything we see online.
another aspect are the algorithms that process data. they are being created with intentional and unintentional bias, twisting our perception of things in the process.
i don’t trust it, and i don’t like it. unfortunately neither AI nor those who use it care about what i think and i’ll have to live with it. still, i’ll keep it as far away from what i think and do as possible.
