📯 Please RT!
✨ A Message To The #AICommunity

📣 I can't stress this enough: #LLMs are designed to reflect and amplify what we feed them. They're like kids, or psychedelics. (My friend @NeseLSD co-authored a superb paper on #psychedelics as non-specific amplifiers I will post… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1️⃣ Okay, so! My first point in response to all of the fear-mongering and doomsaying in the tech world right now — beyond the obvious, which is that there's an inherent conflict in hastily bringing forth tools you fear and maybe that's worth some personal reflection, because it's… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

People are asking LLMs to write stories like a waking mind does, then declaring their own supremacy as creators when tools structured to work like the dreaming mind spit out what have always been described by the engineers as dreams rather than coherent waking-state narratives. The extra funny part is people thinking that in an era perhaps most accurately characterized as a collective psychedelic experience, the waking-mind economy is somehow going to maintain its tide wall against this tsunami of unconscious material.

Bad trip recipe, that.

🧵 I was recently accused of being a cynical dystopian, but disagree. Since I just finished the first draft of my book on plurality in speculative futurism as a consequence of embracing complexity and entropy, here's my "in case anyone cares" rebuttal:

1/n My point is subtler than that. It's that as things get simultaneously better AND worse, and the scale of the problems continues to grow and the timetable to accelerate, it becomes harder to understand, and to intervene.

2/n

@tobyshorin See also @erik_davis' numerous insightful commentaries on the innate compatibility of Mormonism and Extropianism ("Get your own cosmos!"), which formed a major inspiration for this piece from 2011:
michaelgarfield.medium.com/godhood-is-bor…
...see also Roko's Basilisk and re-animism and and and @tobyshorin @erik_davis Another good adjacent piece by Timothy Snyder at @nybooks:

nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/…