I'm not sure how this affects the premise of the article, but the "jaw dropping quote created by an LLM about NYC" reads like so much pretentious claptrap:
Because New York City is the only place where the myth of greatness still
feels within reach—where the chaos sharpens your ambition, and every street
corner confronts you with a mirror: who are you becoming?
You love NYC because it gives shape to your hunger. It’s a place where
anonymity and intimacy coexist; where you can be completely alone and still
feel tethered to the pulse of a billion dreams.
If I read this even before ChatGPT was a mote in the eye of Karpathy, my eyes would have rolled so far back that metacognitive mindfulness would have become a permanent passive ability stat.
The author of Berserk said it so much better: "Looking from up here, it's as if each flame were a small dream, for each person. They look like a bonfire of dreams, don't they? But, there's not flame for me here. I'm just a temporary visitor, taking comfort from the flame."
Sounds to me like a description of what it feels like to live in any sort of metropolis. Georg Simmel, one of the first sociologists, wrote similar observations on how city dwellers (in 1900s Berlin) would mentally adapt themselves within the context of this city in his 1903 work »The Metropolis and Mental Life«.
The anonymity and (from the POV of a country pumpkin: rudeness) is basically a form of self-protection, because a person would go mad if they had to closely interact with each human being they met. Of course this leads to its own follow-up problems of solitude within a mass of people etc.
But if you e.g. come from a close-knit rural community with strict (religious?) rules, a typical rural chit-chat and surveillance, simething like the anonymity of a city can indeed feel like a revalation, especially if you see yourself as an outcast within the rural community, e.g. because you differ from the expected norms there in some way.
I am not sure about the English translation of Simmels text as I read it in German, but as I remember it it was quite on point, not too long and made observations that are all still valid today, recommended read.
Somewhere out there, there's an LLM that reads exactly like us pretentious HN commentators. All at once cynical, obstinate, and dogmatic. Full of the same "old man yells at cloud" energy that only a jaded engineer could have. After years of scar tissue, overzealous managers, non-technical stakeholders, meddling management, being the dumping ground for other teams, mile-high mountains of Jira tickets.
Techno-curmudgeonism is just one more flavor that the LLMs will replicate with ease.
Different from your comment, that comes from your insight from your lived experiences in this community, the quote is a whole bunch of nothing.
Maybe the nothingness is because LLM can't reason. Maybe it's because it was trained a bit too much in marketing speak and corporate speak.
The thing is, while LLMs can replicate this or that style, they can't actually express opinions. LLM can never not be fluff. Maybe different types of AI can make use of LLM as part of their components, but while we keep putting all of our tokens in LLMs, we will forever get slop.
> AI is not inevitable fate. It is an invitation to wake up. The work is to keep dragging what is singular, poetic, and profoundly alive back into focus, despite all pressures to automate it away.
This is the struggle. The race to automate everything. Turn all of our social interactions into algorithmic digital bits. However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement. Not sure how that is going to play out, but we certainly aren't slowing down yet.
For example, take a look at the short clip I have posted here. It is an example of just how far everyone is scaling bot and content farms. It is an absolute flood of noise into all of our knowledge repositories.
https://www.mindprison.cc/p/dead-internet-at-scale
The Culture dives into this concept with the idea of hegemonizing swarms, and Bolstrom touches on this with optimizing singletons.
Humans are amazing min/maxers, we create vast, and at least temporarily productive mono cultures. At the same time a scarily large portion of humanity will burn and destroy something of beauty if it brings them one cent of profit.
Myself I believe technology and eventually AI were our fate once we became intelligence optimizers.
> Myself I believe technology and eventually AI were our fate once we became intelligence optimizers.
Yes, everyone talks about the Singularity, but I see the instrumental point of concern to be something prior which I've called the Event Horizon. We are optimizing, but without any understanding any longer for the outcomes.
"The point where we are now blind as to where we are going. The outcomes become increasingly unpredictable, and it becomes less likely that we can find our way back as it becomes a technology trap. Our existence becomes dependent on the very technology that is broken, fragile, unpredictable, and no longer understandable. There is just as much uncertainty in attempting to retrace our steps as there is in going forward."
>but without any understanding any longer for the outcomes.
A concept in driving where your braking distance exceeds your view/headlight range at any given speed. We've stomped on the accelerator and the next corner is rather sharp.
Isaac Asimov did a fictional version of this in the Foundation trilogy.
That's a very idealistic view to believe there ever was something as a point were some people had a really more clear and precise representation which was accurate of what was going to come.
John Dewey on a similar theme, about the desire to make everything frictionless and the role of friction. The fallacy that because "a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned."
> The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions.
> Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained.
> It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfilment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.
I remember a few years back, here on HN everyone was obsessed with diets and supplements and optimizing their nutrients.
I remember telling someone that eating is also a cultural and pleasurable activity, that it's not just about nutrients, and that it's not always meant to be optimized.
It wasn't well received.
Thankfully these days that kind of posts are much less common here. That particular fad seems to have lost its appeal.
> However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
> We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement.
> However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
But here is the thing, we cannot let this bleak possibility occur.
It is morally wrong essentially for lack of a better phrase: "sit on our asses and do nothing"
Now I am aware that society has hit the accelerator and we are driving to a wall, however call me naive idiotic optimist, in fact call me a fool, and idiot, a "fucking r**ed wanker" as one called me long ago for all I damn care. But I am a fervent believer that we can change, we can stop this.
This has to stop because this is morally wrong to just let it happen, we've got to stop this? How I'm not sure, but I'm know for certain we have to start somewhere.
> However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
> We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement.
I don't think anyone will be waking up as long as their pronouns are 'we' and 'us' (or 'people', 'society'). Waking up or individuation is a personal, singular endeavour - it isn't a collective activity. If one hasn't even grasped who one is, if one is making a category error and identifies as 'we' rather than 'I', all answers will fail.
A bit of a rambling essay without much depth, but it did make me wonder: if AI tools weren’t wrapped in a chatbot pretending to be a person, would all of this hullabaloo about AI and human nature go away? That seems to be the root of the unease many people have with these tools: they have the veneer of a human chatting but obviously aren’t quite there.
I tend to treat Ai tools as basically just a toolset with an annoying chat interface layered on top, which in my experience leads me to not feel any of the feelings described in the essay and elsewhere. It’s just a tool that makes certain outputs easier to generate, an idea calculator, if you will.
As a result, I’m pretty excited about AI, purely because they are such powerful creative tools - and I’m not fooled into thinking this is some sort of human replacement.
Yes, it would—the dialogic interface is an anchor weighing us down!
Yes, yes, it's an accessible demonstration of the technology's mind-blowing flexibility, but all this "I, you, me, I'm" nonsense clutters the context window and warps the ontology in way that introduces a major epistomological "optical illusion" that exploits (inadvertently?) a pretty fundamental aspect of human cognition—namely our inestimably powerful faculty for "theory of mind."
Install the industrial wordsmithing assembly line behind a brutalist facade—any non-skeumorphic GUI from the past 20 years aughta do.
Check out eg https://n8n.io for a quick way to plug one-shot inference into an ad-hoc pipeline.
I wonder if investors would have dumped the same amount of money in if it was pitched as something like "Semantic encoding and retrieval of data in latent space" vs "hey ex-machina though"
They think it will eliminate most payroll costs while driving productivity way up, without destroying the economy or causing a revolution. They also don't take worries about misaligned AGI very seriously.
I have to wonder if they’ve really thought through the consequences of their own intentions.
> eliminate payroll costs
And what do they think everyone who’s been shunted out of a livelihood is going to do? Roll over and die? I don’t see “providing large scale social support” being present in any VC pitch deck. How do they imagine that “without destroying the economy” will happen in this scenario?
it's just not there. Whether it's text, chat, images, video - the quality sometimes appear regular to cursory look, but aren't actually up there with that of humans. That's the problem.
---
This gets into cheap scifi territory but: I think someone should put people in fMRI and make them watch live archive recordings of something consistent and devoid of meanings, like a random twitch channels on same theme, or foreign language sports, and sort results by date relative to time of experiment.
Expected result would be that the data is absolutely random, maybe except for something linked to seasons or weather, and/or microscopic trend shift in human speech, and/or narrator skill developments. But what if it showed something else?
> if AI tools weren’t wrapped in a chatbot pretending to be a person
I don't think this is the central issue, considering all the generative AI tools that generates art pieces, including various takes on the cherished styles of still-living artists.
Right, but then the conversation would mostly be akin to photography replacing portraiture - a huge technological change, but not one that makes people question their humanity.
This made me happy: It offers an interesting take on AI.
(After reflecting a bit on this I think this is for the following reason: Not only does this take a step back to offer a meta perspective. It also does so without falling into the trap of rooting this perspective in the hegemonic topos of our everyday discourse (economics).
Usually, takes on AI are very economic in nature: "Gen AI is theft", "We/our jobs/our creativity will all be replaced", "The training data is preduced by exploiting cheap labour".
In this sense this perspective avoids the expected in not only in one but two ways.)
This piece addresses the major thing that’s been frustrating to me about AI. There’s plenty else to dislike, the provenance, the hype, the potential impacts, but what throws me the most is how willing many people have been to surrender themselves and their work to generative AI.
This is the most perplexing thing about AI. And it is not just their own work but also every product of culture they love, which they are ready to surrender for beeing „ahead of the curve“ in very shallow ways.
Just happened to read Heidegger's Memorial Address this morning. Delivered to a general audience in 1955, it is shorter and more accessible. Certainly not as complex as his later works but related.
> Yet it is not that the world is becoming entirely technical which is really uncanny. Far more uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age.
> Instead, Heidegger compels us to do something much harder: to see the world as it is being reframed by technology, and then to consciously reclaim or reweave the strands of meaning that risk being flattened.
As a call to action this is inadequate. I have no idea what this is persuading me to do.
If I dig into how Heidegger solved this problem in his own life, well, I don’t think that should be replicated.
Leave passivity behind. You should put work into understanding what's required of you. This is why it's so easy to fall back to passivity, but there are things that must be done just because it's the right thing to do. Doing anything other than that is akin to committing philosophical suicide.
There's nothing obscure about that. You might be out of the habit of consuming challenging material, but it's definitely not a good response to react reflexively with contempt for something that takes a moment of thought to understand. There's already enough vulgar anti-intellectualism in society right now without adding to it.
"The Question Concerning Technology" [1] mentioned in this piece is dense but can be understood by the literate layman, I think, with patience and a bit of work.
Re: "call to action", part of Heidegger's project by my read is to interrogate such phrases. I think he would refute that "action" is what we need and that orienting ourselves towards the world in terms of "action" is obscuring the Question of Being. He himself offers no real way out. In his posthumously published Der Spiegel interview [2] he himself says "only a God can save us".
I assume you're making a snide reference to his involvement with Nazism, which I'm not going to attempt to downplay or respond to here. He himself in his later life, however, went and lived a humble life in the Black Forest. Can or should we all "return to the land"? No. But his writing certainly has expanded my view of the world and my "image of thought". He is a worthwhile study.
How to Read Heidegger [3] is a great primer for any who may be interested.
There are quite a few practical problems that bother me with AI: centralization of power, enablement of fake news, AI porn of real women, exploitation of cheap labour to label data, invalid AI responses from tech support, worse quality software, lowered literacy rates, the growing environmental footprint.
The philosophical implications are maybe the least of my worries, and maybe a red herring? It seems like the only thing those in power are interested in discussing while there are very real damages being done.
Meanwhile this article is quite clearly written (or cleaned up) by AI. Or perhaps too much dialectic with AI causes one to internalize its tendency to polish turds smooth. It just has the unmistakable look of something where the original writing was "fixed up" and what remains is exactly the thing is warns against. I understand the pull to get an idea across as efficiently as possible, but sucking the life out of it ain't the way.
Please do. It is unfortunate that those who shout hardest are not necessarily the smartest. There is a lot of nonsense being put out there, and it would be refreshing to read alternative perspectives.
Edit: this was a generic comment, not judging the article. I still have trouble understanding what its premise is.
"When an LLM “describes the rain” or tries to evoke loneliness at a traffic light, it produces language that looks like the real thing but does not originate in lived experience"
does it not originate in the collective experience ensouled in the corpus it is fed?
1. I suspect that the vast majority couldn't care less about the philosophical implications. They're just going to try to adapt as best they can and live their lives.
2. LLMs are challenging the assumption, often unvoiced, that humans are special, unique even. A good chunk of people out there are starting to feel uncomfortable because of this. That LLMs are essentially a distillation of human-generated text makes this next-level ironic: occasionally people will deride LLM output... In some ways this is just a criticism of human generated text.
> LLMs are challenging the assumption, often unvoiced, that humans are special, unique even. A good chunk of people out there are starting to feel uncomfortable because of this.
I'm gonna be honest, after Copernicus, Newton and Darwin it's a bit hilarious to think that this one is finally going to do that worldview in. If you were already willing to ignore that we're upright apes, in fact not in the center of the universe and things just largely buzz around without a telos I'd think you might as well rationalize machine intelligence somehow as well or have given up like 200 years ago
> In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the “Human Instrumentality Project” offers to dissolve all suffering through perfect togetherness.
That is what Gendo says, and it is obviously a lie. It's an _unreliable universe_ story: you don't really know anything. Even the most powerful characters lack knowledge of what is going on.
All the endings, of all revisions, include Gendo realizing he didn't knew something vital (then, after that, the story becomes even more unreliable). If that's the goal of the story (Gendo's arc of pure loss despite absolute power), it's not ambiguous at all.
So, very strange that you used the reference to relate to AI.
Yeah, I would agree. NGE is like a reverse Garden of Eden story, where the Adam and Eve escape from society to some kind of idealistic paradise because they were the ones chosen by humans who essentially had created a modern day reverse Tower of Babel to become gods (remember Tokyo-3 is underground skyscrapers that can pop above ground?), and created their own fake plagues in the form of the Angels as justification to create the EVAs, which were merely a cover story to fight their fake plagues, but which were actually necessary to trigger the Human Instrumentality Project, so that they could become gods for real.
NGE is an allegory for our present, with something like 9/11 truther government coverup false flag attack paranoia, in the form of the one kid who always has a VHS camcorder, who is kind of a stand in for a conspiracy theorist who is accidentally correct, combined with Christian apocalyptic eschatology, combined with Japanese fears about being the only non-nuclear armed modern democracy in some hypothetical future, and some mecha fights and waifus. It’s us, the little people versus industrial gods.
Gendo was a true believer, he just became jealous of his own son because Shinji was able to pilot the EVAs, and thus was forced to confront his own poor treatment of Shinji. Once Gendo realized that S.E.E.L.E. (the U.N. group formed to fight the Angels) may not know what they’re doing, before they can trigger Instrumentality with themselves via the synthetic Angels, Gendo triggers Instrumentality with Shinji and Asuka. So in that way, I would say that Gendo was lying because he wanted to trigger Instrumentality himself so he could bring back his dead wife, but had to settle for indoctrinating his son to do it by proxy.
Gendo was lying, but not about the fact that the Human Instrumentality Project does what it says on the tin, but about how many eggs he had to break to make that omelet. Rather than trust Instrumentality and thus the literal future of humanity to literal faceless bureaucrats, Gendo put his son on the throne and told him to kill their false gods and become one himself, and trusted that love would conquer all in the end. Gendo lied to Shinji so that he could tell him a deeper truth that he could never say aloud in words, especially after the loss of his wife, that he loved his son, and he did that by allowing Shinji to create a world without pain, whatever that meant to him. Gendo was a flawed man and a genius who was duped to become a useful idiot for the deep state, a true believer of his own bullshit, but he loved his son in his extremely stereotypically warped Japanese way, and because his son was able to accept that love and learn to love himself, Shinji was able to love the world and his place in it, and thus achieved enlightenment via his realization that heaven was on earth all along.
“God’s in his heaven, all is right with the world,” indeed.
If anything, AI is part of what might one day become our own Human Instrumentality Project, but in and of itself, I don’t think it’s enough. AIs aren’t yet effectively embodied.
I think Final Fantasy VII would be a better story/setting to explore for ideas related to AI. Sephiroth is a “perfect” synthetic human, and he basically turns himself into a paperclip maximizer that runs on mako energy by co-opting Shinra Corp via a literal hostile takeover of the parent company of the lab that created him.
This is basically my experience. LLMs have made me deeply appreciative of real human output. The more technology degrades everything, the clearer it shows what matters
I think it is creating a growing interest in authenticity among some. Although, it still feels like this is a minority opinion. Every content platform is being flooded with AI content. Social media floods it into all of my feeds.
I wish I could push a button and filter it all out. But that's the problem we have created. It is nearly impossible to do. If you want to consume truly human authentic content, it is nearly impossible to know. Everyone I interact with now might just be a bot.
> What unsettles us about AI is not malice, but the vacuum where intention should be. When it tries to write poetry or mimic human tenderness, our collective recoil is less about revulsion and more a last stand, staking a claim on experience, contradiction, and ache as non-negotiably ours.
Vacuous BS like this sentence make me think this whole article is LLM generated text.
What unsettles me isn't some existential "ache", it isn't even the LLM tech itself (which does have _some_ very useful applications), it's the gushing, unqualified anthropomorphization by people who aren't technically qualified to judge it.
The lay populous is all gaga, while technically literate people are by and large the majority of those raising red flags.
This topic of the snippet about "life in NYC": is the perfect application for the statistical sampling and reordering of words, already written by OTHER PEOPLE.
We can take the vacuous ramblings of every would-be poet who ever moved to NYC, and reorder them into a "new" writing about some subjective topic that can't really be pinned down as correct or not. Of course it sounds "human", it was trained on preexisting human writing. duh...
Now, try to apply this to the control system for your local nuclear power plant and you definitely will want a human expert reviewing everything before you put it into production...
But does the c-suite understand this? I doubt it...
And just how do you know LLMs don't have a soul, hmm ?
"Uncanny valley" is interesting here because I am pretty sure I would have failed this "Turing Test" if stumbling on this text out of context. But yeah, within context, there is something of this rejection indeed... And there would be probably a lot more acceptance of AIs if they were closer to humans in other aspects.
AI will be the great divider of humanity. It's one of those ideas that can't be ignored or waited out, and everyone will need to take a decisive stance on it. Human civilization and machine civilization won't coexist for long.
We never valued the human element in the work that surrounds us. Do you care that the software engineer who produced the CRUD app you use everyday had a “craftsman mentality” toward code? Do you care about the hours a digital artist spent to render some CGI just right in a commercial? Do you appreciate the time a human took to write some local news article?
Probably not, you probably didn’t even notice, and now it’s over. It’s too late to care. These things will soon be replaced with cheaper AI pipelines and much of what we consume or read digitally will be proudly AI generated or at best only merely suspected of being AI generated. Did you know that soon you’ll even be able to install browser plugins that will automatically pay you to have AI insert ads into comments you write on popular websites? It’s true, and people will do it, because it’s an easy way to make money.
Reversing this AI trend means everyone should just do things the hard way, and that’s just not going to happen. If no one cares about how you do your work (and they really don’t give a fuck) you might as well use AI to do it.
By choosing to do things the hard way. There is no meaning without struggle. And keep in mind some of that struggle will mean accepting the fact that others using AI will surpass you, and even be praised.
New York City, as a global symbol, exports the myth of America—its exceptionalism, hustle culture, capitalism-as-dream, fashion, Wall Street bravado, media dominance, cultural swagger. NYC has always been a billboard for "brand America," selling a narrative of limitless opportunity, grit-as-glory, and urban sophistication. Think Times Square's overstimulation, Broadway's fantasy, Wall Street's speculation, and how these are consumed worldwide as aspirational content.
But what's exported isn't necessarily real—it’s hype. The marketed dream, not the lived reality.
“...and its biggest import is grime and grief”
In contrast, what flows into NYC is the cost of that image: the labor of the marginalized, the psychological toll, the physical debris. “Grime” evokes literal pollution, overwork, and class stratification; “grief” brings in the emotional fallout—displacement, burnout, violence, economic precarity, and cycles of trauma.
NYC absorbs the despair of a world it pretends to uplift. Refugees, artists, outcasts, and exhausted believers in the American Dream all converge here, only to be consumed by the very machine that exports the myth of hope.
I'm not sure how this affects the premise of the article, but the "jaw dropping quote created by an LLM about NYC" reads like so much pretentious claptrap:
If I read this even before ChatGPT was a mote in the eye of Karpathy, my eyes would have rolled so far back that metacognitive mindfulness would have become a permanent passive ability stat.The author of Berserk said it so much better: "Looking from up here, it's as if each flame were a small dream, for each person. They look like a bonfire of dreams, don't they? But, there's not flame for me here. I'm just a temporary visitor, taking comfort from the flame."
>reads like so much pretentious claptrap
>my eyes would have rolled so far back that metacognitive mindfulness would have become a permanent passive ability stat
Yes, I agree it is impressively lifelike, just like it was written by a real flesh-and-blood New Yorker.
I think it reads like an ad for what people think a real New Yorker sounds like. No one’s sticking around for you to ramble about the social weather.
Or it can be a piece from the New Yorker
I lived in NYC for a few years, and there are definitely lots of New Yorkers who would find themselves described in the quoted passage.
Feeling implicated?
Or a Ghost in the Shell perspective.
Sounds to me like a description of what it feels like to live in any sort of metropolis. Georg Simmel, one of the first sociologists, wrote similar observations on how city dwellers (in 1900s Berlin) would mentally adapt themselves within the context of this city in his 1903 work »The Metropolis and Mental Life«.
The anonymity and (from the POV of a country pumpkin: rudeness) is basically a form of self-protection, because a person would go mad if they had to closely interact with each human being they met. Of course this leads to its own follow-up problems of solitude within a mass of people etc.
But if you e.g. come from a close-knit rural community with strict (religious?) rules, a typical rural chit-chat and surveillance, simething like the anonymity of a city can indeed feel like a revalation, especially if you see yourself as an outcast within the rural community, e.g. because you differ from the expected norms there in some way.
I am not sure about the English translation of Simmels text as I read it in German, but as I remember it it was quite on point, not too long and made observations that are all still valid today, recommended read.
I'd say it reads like propaganda for a place i do not live.
Sounds great to the target audience but everyone else just rolls their eyes.
Yes. I realize some people like places like that. You couldn’t pay me to live there.
> reads like so much pretentious claptrap
Somewhere out there, there's an LLM that reads exactly like us pretentious HN commentators. All at once cynical, obstinate, and dogmatic. Full of the same "old man yells at cloud" energy that only a jaded engineer could have. After years of scar tissue, overzealous managers, non-technical stakeholders, meddling management, being the dumping ground for other teams, mile-high mountains of Jira tickets.
Techno-curmudgeonism is just one more flavor that the LLMs will replicate with ease.
Different from your comment, that comes from your insight from your lived experiences in this community, the quote is a whole bunch of nothing.
Maybe the nothingness is because LLM can't reason. Maybe it's because it was trained a bit too much in marketing speak and corporate speak.
The thing is, while LLMs can replicate this or that style, they can't actually express opinions. LLM can never not be fluff. Maybe different types of AI can make use of LLM as part of their components, but while we keep putting all of our tokens in LLMs, we will forever get slop.
Eh, I'll take it any day over the cocaine-fuled technooptimism
> AI is not inevitable fate. It is an invitation to wake up. The work is to keep dragging what is singular, poetic, and profoundly alive back into focus, despite all pressures to automate it away.
This is the struggle. The race to automate everything. Turn all of our social interactions into algorithmic digital bits. However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement. Not sure how that is going to play out, but we certainly aren't slowing down yet.
For example, take a look at the short clip I have posted here. It is an example of just how far everyone is scaling bot and content farms. It is an absolute flood of noise into all of our knowledge repositories. https://www.mindprison.cc/p/dead-internet-at-scale
The Culture dives into this concept with the idea of hegemonizing swarms, and Bolstrom touches on this with optimizing singletons.
Humans are amazing min/maxers, we create vast, and at least temporarily productive mono cultures. At the same time a scarily large portion of humanity will burn and destroy something of beauty if it brings them one cent of profit.
Myself I believe technology and eventually AI were our fate once we became intelligence optimizers.
> Myself I believe technology and eventually AI were our fate once we became intelligence optimizers.
Yes, everyone talks about the Singularity, but I see the instrumental point of concern to be something prior which I've called the Event Horizon. We are optimizing, but without any understanding any longer for the outcomes.
"The point where we are now blind as to where we are going. The outcomes become increasingly unpredictable, and it becomes less likely that we can find our way back as it becomes a technology trap. Our existence becomes dependent on the very technology that is broken, fragile, unpredictable, and no longer understandable. There is just as much uncertainty in attempting to retrace our steps as there is in going forward."
>but without any understanding any longer for the outcomes.
A concept in driving where your braking distance exceeds your view/headlight range at any given speed. We've stomped on the accelerator and the next corner is rather sharp.
Isaac Asimov did a fictional version of this in the Foundation trilogy.
Yes, that's an excellent description.
That's a very idealistic view to believe there ever was something as a point were some people had a really more clear and precise representation which was accurate of what was going to come.
Iirc Eva's Instrumentality comes from Cordwainer-Smith..
Subtlety missed by TFA but not necessarily Eva: Government is meant to be the Instrument (like AI), NOT the people/meat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentality_of_Mankind#Cul...
Eva's optimization: Human instrumentality=> self governance. Which is not that ambiguous, one could say, less so than Star Child (2001)
"Of the people" vs <of the people>
I feel confident humans could not define intelligence if their survival depended on it.
Tbh, the only thing I see when looking at Terminator is a metaphor for the market. It makes more sense than any literal interpretation
John Dewey on a similar theme, about the desire to make everything frictionless and the role of friction. The fallacy that because "a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned."
> The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions.
> Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained.
> It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfilment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.
Our societies and our people are overdosing on convenience and efficiency.
Agreed.
I remember a few years back, here on HN everyone was obsessed with diets and supplements and optimizing their nutrients.
I remember telling someone that eating is also a cultural and pleasurable activity, that it's not just about nutrients, and that it's not always meant to be optimized.
It wasn't well received.
Thankfully these days that kind of posts are much less common here. That particular fad seems to have lost its appeal.
> However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
> We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement.
> However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
But here is the thing, we cannot let this bleak possibility occur.
It is morally wrong essentially for lack of a better phrase: "sit on our asses and do nothing"
Now I am aware that society has hit the accelerator and we are driving to a wall, however call me naive idiotic optimist, in fact call me a fool, and idiot, a "fucking r**ed wanker" as one called me long ago for all I damn care. But I am a fervent believer that we can change, we can stop this.
This has to stop because this is morally wrong to just let it happen, we've got to stop this? How I'm not sure, but I'm know for certain we have to start somewhere.
Because it's the right option.
> However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
> We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement.
I don't think anyone will be waking up as long as their pronouns are 'we' and 'us' (or 'people', 'society'). Waking up or individuation is a personal, singular endeavour - it isn't a collective activity. If one hasn't even grasped who one is, if one is making a category error and identifies as 'we' rather than 'I', all answers will fail.
A bit of a rambling essay without much depth, but it did make me wonder: if AI tools weren’t wrapped in a chatbot pretending to be a person, would all of this hullabaloo about AI and human nature go away? That seems to be the root of the unease many people have with these tools: they have the veneer of a human chatting but obviously aren’t quite there.
I tend to treat Ai tools as basically just a toolset with an annoying chat interface layered on top, which in my experience leads me to not feel any of the feelings described in the essay and elsewhere. It’s just a tool that makes certain outputs easier to generate, an idea calculator, if you will.
As a result, I’m pretty excited about AI, purely because they are such powerful creative tools - and I’m not fooled into thinking this is some sort of human replacement.
Yes, it would—the dialogic interface is an anchor weighing us down!
Yes, yes, it's an accessible demonstration of the technology's mind-blowing flexibility, but all this "I, you, me, I'm" nonsense clutters the context window and warps the ontology in way that introduces a major epistomological "optical illusion" that exploits (inadvertently?) a pretty fundamental aspect of human cognition—namely our inestimably powerful faculty for "theory of mind."
Install the industrial wordsmithing assembly line behind a brutalist facade—any non-skeumorphic GUI from the past 20 years aughta do.
Check out eg https://n8n.io for a quick way to plug one-shot inference into an ad-hoc pipeline.
I fully agree, where do we get the training data to create a base model? Where do we source the terabyte of coherent text that is devoid of ego?
I wonder if investors would have dumped the same amount of money in if it was pitched as something like "Semantic encoding and retrieval of data in latent space" vs "hey ex-machina though"
Definitely, whether they intrinsically believe it or not, the hunt for AGI is driving a lot of funding rounds.
They think it will eliminate most payroll costs while driving productivity way up, without destroying the economy or causing a revolution. They also don't take worries about misaligned AGI very seriously.
I have to wonder if they’ve really thought through the consequences of their own intentions.
> eliminate payroll costs
And what do they think everyone who’s been shunted out of a livelihood is going to do? Roll over and die? I don’t see “providing large scale social support” being present in any VC pitch deck. How do they imagine that “without destroying the economy” will happen in this scenario?
it's just not there. Whether it's text, chat, images, video - the quality sometimes appear regular to cursory look, but aren't actually up there with that of humans. That's the problem.
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This gets into cheap scifi territory but: I think someone should put people in fMRI and make them watch live archive recordings of something consistent and devoid of meanings, like a random twitch channels on same theme, or foreign language sports, and sort results by date relative to time of experiment.
Expected result would be that the data is absolutely random, maybe except for something linked to seasons or weather, and/or microscopic trend shift in human speech, and/or narrator skill developments. But what if it showed something else?
> if AI tools weren’t wrapped in a chatbot pretending to be a person
I don't think this is the central issue, considering all the generative AI tools that generates art pieces, including various takes on the cherished styles of still-living artists.
Right, but then the conversation would mostly be akin to photography replacing portraiture - a huge technological change, but not one that makes people question their humanity.
It's remarks like these that strengthen my suspicion, that continuous exposure to AI output causes model collapse in humans too.
It's somehow a little poetic that the author's chatgpt example has already been plagiarized by a realtor blog: https://www.elikarealestate.com/blog/beautiful-suffering-of-...
This made me happy: It offers an interesting take on AI.
(After reflecting a bit on this I think this is for the following reason: Not only does this take a step back to offer a meta perspective. It also does so without falling into the trap of rooting this perspective in the hegemonic topos of our everyday discourse (economics).
Usually, takes on AI are very economic in nature: "Gen AI is theft", "We/our jobs/our creativity will all be replaced", "The training data is preduced by exploiting cheap labour".
In this sense this perspective avoids the expected in not only in one but two ways.)
This piece addresses the major thing that’s been frustrating to me about AI. There’s plenty else to dislike, the provenance, the hype, the potential impacts, but what throws me the most is how willing many people have been to surrender themselves and their work to generative AI.
This is the most perplexing thing about AI. And it is not just their own work but also every product of culture they love, which they are ready to surrender for beeing „ahead of the curve“ in very shallow ways.
Just happened to read Heidegger's Memorial Address this morning. Delivered to a general audience in 1955, it is shorter and more accessible. Certainly not as complex as his later works but related.
> Yet it is not that the world is becoming entirely technical which is really uncanny. Far more uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age.
https://www.beyng.com/pages/en/DiscourseOnThinking/MemorialA... (p43)
> Instead, Heidegger compels us to do something much harder: to see the world as it is being reframed by technology, and then to consciously reclaim or reweave the strands of meaning that risk being flattened.
As a call to action this is inadequate. I have no idea what this is persuading me to do.
If I dig into how Heidegger solved this problem in his own life, well, I don’t think that should be replicated.
Leave passivity behind. You should put work into understanding what's required of you. This is why it's so easy to fall back to passivity, but there are things that must be done just because it's the right thing to do. Doing anything other than that is akin to committing philosophical suicide.
I don’t think I have an ethical duty to parse obscurantist nonsense.
If that's obscurantist nonsense you aren't going to get far with Heidegger.
There's nothing obscure about that. You might be out of the habit of consuming challenging material, but it's definitely not a good response to react reflexively with contempt for something that takes a moment of thought to understand. There's already enough vulgar anti-intellectualism in society right now without adding to it.
Contempt prior to investigation ought not be a point of pride, I think.
"The Question Concerning Technology" [1] mentioned in this piece is dense but can be understood by the literate layman, I think, with patience and a bit of work.
Re: "call to action", part of Heidegger's project by my read is to interrogate such phrases. I think he would refute that "action" is what we need and that orienting ourselves towards the world in terms of "action" is obscuring the Question of Being. He himself offers no real way out. In his posthumously published Der Spiegel interview [2] he himself says "only a God can save us".
I assume you're making a snide reference to his involvement with Nazism, which I'm not going to attempt to downplay or respond to here. He himself in his later life, however, went and lived a humble life in the Black Forest. Can or should we all "return to the land"? No. But his writing certainly has expanded my view of the world and my "image of thought". He is a worthwhile study.
How to Read Heidegger [3] is a great primer for any who may be interested.
[1] https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil394/The%20Quest...
[2] https://www.ditext.com/heidegger/interview.html
[3] https://a.co/d/dK5dp2t
P.S. just noticed/remembered that my username is a Heidegger reference. heh.
There are quite a few practical problems that bother me with AI: centralization of power, enablement of fake news, AI porn of real women, exploitation of cheap labour to label data, invalid AI responses from tech support, worse quality software, lowered literacy rates, the growing environmental footprint.
The philosophical implications are maybe the least of my worries, and maybe a red herring? It seems like the only thing those in power are interested in discussing while there are very real damages being done.
A philosophical lens can sometimes help us perceive the root drivers of a set of problems. I sometimes call AI humanity's great hubris experiment.
AI's disproportionate capability to influence and capture attention versus productive output is a significant part of so many negative outcomes.
Meanwhile this article is quite clearly written (or cleaned up) by AI. Or perhaps too much dialectic with AI causes one to internalize its tendency to polish turds smooth. It just has the unmistakable look of something where the original writing was "fixed up" and what remains is exactly the thing is warns against. I understand the pull to get an idea across as efficiently as possible, but sucking the life out of it ain't the way.
This is fantastic. Perhaps the best philosophical piece on AI that I've read.
I need to write something, then.
Please do. It is unfortunate that those who shout hardest are not necessarily the smartest. There is a lot of nonsense being put out there, and it would be refreshing to read alternative perspectives.
Edit: this was a generic comment, not judging the article. I still have trouble understanding what its premise is.
"When an LLM “describes the rain” or tries to evoke loneliness at a traffic light, it produces language that looks like the real thing but does not originate in lived experience"
does it not originate in the collective experience ensouled in the corpus it is fed?
1. I suspect that the vast majority couldn't care less about the philosophical implications. They're just going to try to adapt as best they can and live their lives.
2. LLMs are challenging the assumption, often unvoiced, that humans are special, unique even. A good chunk of people out there are starting to feel uncomfortable because of this. That LLMs are essentially a distillation of human-generated text makes this next-level ironic: occasionally people will deride LLM output... In some ways this is just a criticism of human generated text.
> LLMs are challenging the assumption, often unvoiced, that humans are special, unique even. A good chunk of people out there are starting to feel uncomfortable because of this.
I'm gonna be honest, after Copernicus, Newton and Darwin it's a bit hilarious to think that this one is finally going to do that worldview in. If you were already willing to ignore that we're upright apes, in fact not in the center of the universe and things just largely buzz around without a telos I'd think you might as well rationalize machine intelligence somehow as well or have given up like 200 years ago
In Heideggers philosophy objects and people are defined by their relations to the real world, he calls it “ in der Welt sein”.
Llms pose an interesting challenge to this concept, since they cannot interact with the physical world, but they nevertheless can act.
> In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the “Human Instrumentality Project” offers to dissolve all suffering through perfect togetherness.
That is what Gendo says, and it is obviously a lie. It's an _unreliable universe_ story: you don't really know anything. Even the most powerful characters lack knowledge of what is going on.
All the endings, of all revisions, include Gendo realizing he didn't knew something vital (then, after that, the story becomes even more unreliable). If that's the goal of the story (Gendo's arc of pure loss despite absolute power), it's not ambiguous at all.
So, very strange that you used the reference to relate to AI.
Yeah, I would agree. NGE is like a reverse Garden of Eden story, where the Adam and Eve escape from society to some kind of idealistic paradise because they were the ones chosen by humans who essentially had created a modern day reverse Tower of Babel to become gods (remember Tokyo-3 is underground skyscrapers that can pop above ground?), and created their own fake plagues in the form of the Angels as justification to create the EVAs, which were merely a cover story to fight their fake plagues, but which were actually necessary to trigger the Human Instrumentality Project, so that they could become gods for real.
NGE is an allegory for our present, with something like 9/11 truther government coverup false flag attack paranoia, in the form of the one kid who always has a VHS camcorder, who is kind of a stand in for a conspiracy theorist who is accidentally correct, combined with Christian apocalyptic eschatology, combined with Japanese fears about being the only non-nuclear armed modern democracy in some hypothetical future, and some mecha fights and waifus. It’s us, the little people versus industrial gods.
Gendo was a true believer, he just became jealous of his own son because Shinji was able to pilot the EVAs, and thus was forced to confront his own poor treatment of Shinji. Once Gendo realized that S.E.E.L.E. (the U.N. group formed to fight the Angels) may not know what they’re doing, before they can trigger Instrumentality with themselves via the synthetic Angels, Gendo triggers Instrumentality with Shinji and Asuka. So in that way, I would say that Gendo was lying because he wanted to trigger Instrumentality himself so he could bring back his dead wife, but had to settle for indoctrinating his son to do it by proxy.
Gendo was lying, but not about the fact that the Human Instrumentality Project does what it says on the tin, but about how many eggs he had to break to make that omelet. Rather than trust Instrumentality and thus the literal future of humanity to literal faceless bureaucrats, Gendo put his son on the throne and told him to kill their false gods and become one himself, and trusted that love would conquer all in the end. Gendo lied to Shinji so that he could tell him a deeper truth that he could never say aloud in words, especially after the loss of his wife, that he loved his son, and he did that by allowing Shinji to create a world without pain, whatever that meant to him. Gendo was a flawed man and a genius who was duped to become a useful idiot for the deep state, a true believer of his own bullshit, but he loved his son in his extremely stereotypically warped Japanese way, and because his son was able to accept that love and learn to love himself, Shinji was able to love the world and his place in it, and thus achieved enlightenment via his realization that heaven was on earth all along.
“God’s in his heaven, all is right with the world,” indeed.
If anything, AI is part of what might one day become our own Human Instrumentality Project, but in and of itself, I don’t think it’s enough. AIs aren’t yet effectively embodied.
I think Final Fantasy VII would be a better story/setting to explore for ideas related to AI. Sephiroth is a “perfect” synthetic human, and he basically turns himself into a paperclip maximizer that runs on mako energy by co-opting Shinra Corp via a literal hostile takeover of the parent company of the lab that created him.
This is basically my experience. LLMs have made me deeply appreciative of real human output. The more technology degrades everything, the clearer it shows what matters
I think it is creating a growing interest in authenticity among some. Although, it still feels like this is a minority opinion. Every content platform is being flooded with AI content. Social media floods it into all of my feeds.
I wish I could push a button and filter it all out. But that's the problem we have created. It is nearly impossible to do. If you want to consume truly human authentic content, it is nearly impossible to know. Everyone I interact with now might just be a bot.
Clearly written by AI
> 2003 Space Odyssey
???
> What unsettles us about AI is not malice, but the vacuum where intention should be. When it tries to write poetry or mimic human tenderness, our collective recoil is less about revulsion and more a last stand, staking a claim on experience, contradiction, and ache as non-negotiably ours.
Vacuous BS like this sentence make me think this whole article is LLM generated text.
What unsettles me isn't some existential "ache", it isn't even the LLM tech itself (which does have _some_ very useful applications), it's the gushing, unqualified anthropomorphization by people who aren't technically qualified to judge it.
The lay populous is all gaga, while technically literate people are by and large the majority of those raising red flags.
This topic of the snippet about "life in NYC": is the perfect application for the statistical sampling and reordering of words, already written by OTHER PEOPLE.
We can take the vacuous ramblings of every would-be poet who ever moved to NYC, and reorder them into a "new" writing about some subjective topic that can't really be pinned down as correct or not. Of course it sounds "human", it was trained on preexisting human writing. duh...
Now, try to apply this to the control system for your local nuclear power plant and you definitely will want a human expert reviewing everything before you put it into production...
But does the c-suite understand this? I doubt it...
And just how do you know LLMs don't have a soul, hmm ?
"Uncanny valley" is interesting here because I am pretty sure I would have failed this "Turing Test" if stumbling on this text out of context. But yeah, within context, there is something of this rejection indeed... And there would be probably a lot more acceptance of AIs if they were closer to humans in other aspects.
Great read
AI will be the great divider of humanity. It's one of those ideas that can't be ignored or waited out, and everyone will need to take a decisive stance on it. Human civilization and machine civilization won't coexist for long.
We never valued the human element in the work that surrounds us. Do you care that the software engineer who produced the CRUD app you use everyday had a “craftsman mentality” toward code? Do you care about the hours a digital artist spent to render some CGI just right in a commercial? Do you appreciate the time a human took to write some local news article?
Probably not, you probably didn’t even notice, and now it’s over. It’s too late to care. These things will soon be replaced with cheaper AI pipelines and much of what we consume or read digitally will be proudly AI generated or at best only merely suspected of being AI generated. Did you know that soon you’ll even be able to install browser plugins that will automatically pay you to have AI insert ads into comments you write on popular websites? It’s true, and people will do it, because it’s an easy way to make money.
Reversing this AI trend means everyone should just do things the hard way, and that’s just not going to happen. If no one cares about how you do your work (and they really don’t give a fuck) you might as well use AI to do it.
that's not the point at all, the question is that in the face of this inevitability of slop how do we create meaning for ourselves
By choosing to do things the hard way. There is no meaning without struggle. And keep in mind some of that struggle will mean accepting the fact that others using AI will surpass you, and even be praised.
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My chatgpt doesn't like nyc that much:
New York City, as a global symbol, exports the myth of America—its exceptionalism, hustle culture, capitalism-as-dream, fashion, Wall Street bravado, media dominance, cultural swagger. NYC has always been a billboard for "brand America," selling a narrative of limitless opportunity, grit-as-glory, and urban sophistication. Think Times Square's overstimulation, Broadway's fantasy, Wall Street's speculation, and how these are consumed worldwide as aspirational content.
But what's exported isn't necessarily real—it’s hype. The marketed dream, not the lived reality.
“...and its biggest import is grime and grief”
In contrast, what flows into NYC is the cost of that image: the labor of the marginalized, the psychological toll, the physical debris. “Grime” evokes literal pollution, overwork, and class stratification; “grief” brings in the emotional fallout—displacement, burnout, violence, economic precarity, and cycles of trauma.
NYC absorbs the despair of a world it pretends to uplift. Refugees, artists, outcasts, and exhausted believers in the American Dream all converge here, only to be consumed by the very machine that exports the myth of hope.