I have to be honest and say that my faith in the capacity of people to think in a free speech totally open environment was severely tested over the past 5-10 years. Things like Qanon, flat Earth, antivax hysteria, the meme-driven return of both "right" and "left" totalitarian ideologies from the early 20th century that should be completely discredited, and so on have made me wonder if most people simply can't handle exposure to unregulated content as they lack the ability to think critically. I've actually wondered if most people might not need to be protected from unregulated content in the same way that people need to be protected from exposure to lead, radon gas, etc.
The human brain simply didn't evolve in this environment. Throughout 99.9% of human history a person's ideas came from the tribe or neighborhood and came with the context of culture, social relationships, and physical body language cues. The brain did not evolve to process a context-free meme stream connected to an algorithm trying to keep you "engaged."
If only a few people had fallen for this nonsense that would be one thing, but I witnessed mass conversions of millions of people to ideas that are more absurd than the craziest conspiracy bullshit I read on Usenet in the 1990s. This is stuff the people who are crazy think is crazy.
It goes beyond shockingly bad ideas too. I've seen an alarming rise of discourse that resembles word salad spewed out by a primitive Markov chain text generator. It's terrifying. It almost looks like exposure to open discourse is causing brain damage in some susceptible fraction of the population. Some subset of people seem to have lost the ability to process or generate a coherent narrative or structured system of ideas. They just spew memes in random order. It's less coherent than classic new age babble or Orwellian "newspeak."
I still lean in the free speech direction pretty hard, but my faith is shaken to the core. I honestly and non-hyperbolically wonder if the right carefully crafted AI-powered social media boosted propaganda campaign couldn't convert double digit percentages of the population into homicidal maniacs or cause a mass suicide wave killing millions.
BTW this and not "Skynet" is the scary thing about AI. The most terrifying AI scenario I can think of is AI-assisted demagoguery or mass stochastic terrorism powered by big data. Think "adversarial attacks against the human neocortex."
Attacks only get better.
The human brain simply didn't evolve in this environment. Throughout 99.9% of human history a person's ideas came from the tribe or neighborhood and came with the context of culture, social relationships, and physical body language cues. The brain did not evolve to process a context-free meme stream connected to an algorithm trying to keep you "engaged."
If only a few people had fallen for this nonsense that would be one thing, but I witnessed mass conversions of millions of people to ideas that are more absurd than the craziest conspiracy bullshit I read on Usenet in the 1990s. This is stuff the people who are crazy think is crazy.
It goes beyond shockingly bad ideas too. I've seen an alarming rise of discourse that resembles word salad spewed out by a primitive Markov chain text generator. It's terrifying. It almost looks like exposure to open discourse is causing brain damage in some susceptible fraction of the population. Some subset of people seem to have lost the ability to process or generate a coherent narrative or structured system of ideas. They just spew memes in random order. It's less coherent than classic new age babble or Orwellian "newspeak."
I still lean in the free speech direction pretty hard, but my faith is shaken to the core. I honestly and non-hyperbolically wonder if the right carefully crafted AI-powered social media boosted propaganda campaign couldn't convert double digit percentages of the population into homicidal maniacs or cause a mass suicide wave killing millions.
BTW this and not "Skynet" is the scary thing about AI. The most terrifying AI scenario I can think of is AI-assisted demagoguery or mass stochastic terrorism powered by big data. Think "adversarial attacks against the human neocortex."
Attacks only get better.