Ah, but if Trump manages to fund the "Golden Dome" it will have to be a distributed system, of approximately 100 separate defense systems. These will have to be coordinated in realtime, which is basically impossible using humans. Thus, it will entail an AI that will run the whole show. So -- and I agree completely with your substack post -- we'll get both the AI degradation of reality *and* we'll get something that may not be called "skynet" but which will basically be exactly that.
I agree, AI’s first use case, and maybe its most profitable one, is to sell us more stuff. This is why the people who own Google, Microsoft, Xitter, and facebook are the main players. They’re building an individual, massive database on each of us. It’s why they want us logged in all the time. Then they’ll use an AI to simulate us and predict what we’ll buy next. Massive privacy concerns and Orwellian, but pretty banal for most, because we’re mostly sheep. And you’re right, Paul, no one wants to talk about it.
If what they want to do is sell us more stuff then why are so many of the ads and recommendations I get of little to no interest to me. Just today I got an ad for breastfeeding moms, something I have never searched for or read about in years since I am in my mid seventies. Google’s AI search is also really frustrating. Book recommendations are frequently nowhere close to the kinds of books I read. Sci Fi recommendations, a genre I haven’t read since the 1960s.
“The relentless pursuit of a simulacrum of genuine human creativity and insight so the real thing can be hounded to the fringe” pretty much sums it up. I resent the fact that, as someone who hears the baying at my heels, I may have to wear the Luddite’s hair shirt as a disgruntled member not of the deficient side of the “have/have-nots,” but of the “will/will-nots.”
Wrong Tom Cruise movie. What the tech oligarchs envision is more like in Minority Report, where people are bombarded with “personalized” ads harvested from all the data they’ve collected from us.
And they just got a boast from DOGE digging through our social security data.
I am one of the few people who Forbin Experiment when it came out. I know of only one other person who saw it and he had the same reaction — that the premise was more disturbing than 2001.
My shoot-from-the-hip-before-reading snark aside, good post.
I just read a good not great novel that has a lot to do with this, which you and your readers who liked this post might like: "Going Zero" by Anthony McCarten. More about the surveillance aspect than the pure AI worries, but still, your post immediately made me think of that book.
I don't know how many nerds you're going to get, angrily demanding to know why you would mention Skynet in the title and then have a picture of HAL, but ...
Ah, but if Trump manages to fund the "Golden Dome" it will have to be a distributed system, of approximately 100 separate defense systems. These will have to be coordinated in realtime, which is basically impossible using humans. Thus, it will entail an AI that will run the whole show. So -- and I agree completely with your substack post -- we'll get both the AI degradation of reality *and* we'll get something that may not be called "skynet" but which will basically be exactly that.
So long, and thanks for all the fish...
I agree, AI’s first use case, and maybe its most profitable one, is to sell us more stuff. This is why the people who own Google, Microsoft, Xitter, and facebook are the main players. They’re building an individual, massive database on each of us. It’s why they want us logged in all the time. Then they’ll use an AI to simulate us and predict what we’ll buy next. Massive privacy concerns and Orwellian, but pretty banal for most, because we’re mostly sheep. And you’re right, Paul, no one wants to talk about it.
If what they want to do is sell us more stuff then why are so many of the ads and recommendations I get of little to no interest to me. Just today I got an ad for breastfeeding moms, something I have never searched for or read about in years since I am in my mid seventies. Google’s AI search is also really frustrating. Book recommendations are frequently nowhere close to the kinds of books I read. Sci Fi recommendations, a genre I haven’t read since the 1960s.
They’re not using AI yet at scale, and maybe you aren’t logged in to every device on which they track you
“The relentless pursuit of a simulacrum of genuine human creativity and insight so the real thing can be hounded to the fringe” pretty much sums it up. I resent the fact that, as someone who hears the baying at my heels, I may have to wear the Luddite’s hair shirt as a disgruntled member not of the deficient side of the “have/have-nots,” but of the “will/will-nots.”
Wrong Tom Cruise movie. What the tech oligarchs envision is more like in Minority Report, where people are bombarded with “personalized” ads harvested from all the data they’ve collected from us.
And they just got a boast from DOGE digging through our social security data.
https://youtu.be/7bXJ_obaiYQ
I am one of the few people who Forbin Experiment when it came out. I know of only one other person who saw it and he had the same reaction — that the premise was more disturbing than 2001.
My shoot-from-the-hip-before-reading snark aside, good post.
I just read a good not great novel that has a lot to do with this, which you and your readers who liked this post might like: "Going Zero" by Anthony McCarten. More about the surveillance aspect than the pure AI worries, but still, your post immediately made me think of that book.
I don't know how many nerds you're going to get, angrily demanding to know why you would mention Skynet in the title and then have a picture of HAL, but ...
... allow me to be the first.
;)