Ask A Genius 890: The Twitter Cesspool
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/04
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So, regarding Twitter’s turning into a cesspool, you and I have been talking, and it’s more than just talking. It’s not just chatting; it’s trying to develop stuff and discuss stuff, and we’ve been doing this for nine years.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That’s a significant amount of time.
Rosner: Yeah, and we’ve generated hundreds of thousands of words on all sorts of things, but the stuff that I’m most proud of is the informational cosmology, the universe as likely conscious information processor and its strong analogies to what happens to information in the brain. We’ve talked about the future or at least implied what the future might look like a lot over the past nine years, and a lot of what we’ve been talking about, the informational nature of the universe and the direction that we think that civilization will go in towards more information processing the world worldwide thought cloud just that more and more of civilization will be based on information processing. Since we’ve started talking about it, it looks more and more inevitable based on what’s been going on over the past couple of years with the rise of AI, which is what will happen. Shockingly, the hockey stick of it all has materialized. It was shocking, but it was also in the direction we were talking about, so I feel like we were right. We missed the rise of social media abetted fascism; we didn’t predict that at all, I don’t think. Do you remember us talking about that at all?
Jacobsen: No.
Rosner: Alright, we completely missed that. We probably touched on the fact that it would be increasingly challenging for humans as entities and aggregations of information processors become more intelligent than humans. They’re not yet, but social media, as financed by Putin and other Bad actors, is powerful enough to make hundreds of millions of people around the world and tens of millions of people in America half-crazy, which points in the direction of information processing entities, making humans their bitch. So, we got that; we just didn’t get the fascism.
And, we could talk about whether fascism is an accident of history or whether it’s to be expected if you ran this the last decade or so over again. If you could, minus Trump and Putin, would you still get fascism as a consequence of the power of social media manipulation and the Russian firehose model of propaganda? Anyway, I guess the point is, for semi-anticipating a lot of aspects of the world that we live in now and that we will increasingly live in, though if you believe Cory Doctorow, we’re in an AI bubble where people are way more impressed with AI than they should be and that AI is way more expensive than it should be to return profits. So, there will be a crash of the AI bubble, and I believe that. It’s similar to the.com bubble of 2000. Also, the internet rose again after costing people a ton of money in 2000, and we now all live online. Even if an AI crash costs people a ton of money now, we’ll be swimming in more powerful AI in two, five years or seven years. Any comments?
Jacobsen: No, that seems alright. Right now, we’re using early functional toys. These are not groundbreaking. It seems surprising because this is the first recognizable phase change since maybe computers, cell phones, or the first social media, came online. It’s not just the scribes to Papyrus to the printing press. It’s not that big of a change; we will come to that change when they start becoming more…
Rosner: What makes it so impressive is that a lot of the products of current AI can briefly pass a Turing test, that at first glance and even at a second and third glance, the written products of ChatGPT and the like and the graphic products of Del and other art-making AIs look like human products or it looks as good as human products. So, you could say that what Turing got wrong wasn’t wrong; he threw the Turing test out there, which is like an easily understood test for the potentiality of human thought in a nonhuman computational entity. I haven’t read everything he wrote about the Turing test. Still, I don’t know if he anticipated or not that you could get stuff that could pass the Turing test or even what he considered passing the test to be because right now, we have products that can pass a written like you could send notes back and forth between you and ChatGPT or a human and not be able to distinguish them in 10 minutes of typing back and forth. Still, if you had an hour or two or half a day, you could probably figure out which is the ChatGPT at that time.
No, but as far as I know, Turing didn’t expand on his test. So, I don’t know that we can fault him for making people think that if something can pass a Turing test, it must be conscious or have humanlike thought because we now have stuff that can briefly withstand Turing scrutiny without really having humanlike thought.
[Recording End]
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