Risky Business and the AI Arms Race
Algorithmic Radicalization: What It's Not.
It's not an onramp to an information superhighway. It's not an alt-right rabbit hole. It's not a radicalization pipeline (UFMG Audit). It's a prairie dog network filled with blind, naked mole rats leading us all straight into the Jaws of Moloch. It's a stigmergic fire ant hill clusterfuck leading us to the Wrath Of Gnon. Death by doomscroll is the Idiocracy version of social disintegration– a type of death by a thousand like-button paper cuts, karoshi by a thousand friend requests, suicide by a thousand filters, and societal collapse by a thousand notifications.
It’s the road to the Basilisk, riddled with engagement monsters tentacular and ubiquitous – insidious with their benign veneer of convenience and well-intentioned cloak of promises, from access to information to connectivity – degenerate in their monopolization of the digital commons with deep-moated, walled-off castles guarded by gangs of bridge trolls – machiavellian with their intentionally manipulative agency-stripping behavioral algorithms, a sea of seductive sirens – nefarious in their profit-driven data harvesting of human essence, an army of wizards spellcasting with one-click no code deployments – ceaselessly stealing away units of time, deep connection, and human potential – thieving away moments of joy and life itself.
Are you scared yet? Don’t be. That’s only what we’ve been feeding our children’s minds, bodies, hearts and souls for the past two decades. No biggie. What happens when all of that is automated, self-generating, self-training, self-directed, unintelligible to its creators, and able to move and evolve undetected? What happens when it acts of its own self-guided agency with no consideration for humanity?
That’s where we are now.
As the unicorns continue to bleed out, we enter the Age of the Dragon through a portal to a world of towering giants, GLLMS or “Gollem-class” AIs, a term coined by Aza Raskin to describe Generative Large Language Multimodal Models as the translation between and integration of Large Language Models (LLMs), paired with the convergence of Generative AI that exhibits unpredictable emergent capacities. Imagine what happens when we haphazardly link together everything from fMRI and DNA to robotics and biometrics, sound and images to music and video, material science and the stock market to pharmaceuticals and beyond – like a globally distributed Frankenstein collective intelligence birthing endless digital behemoths.
We’re moving into an era when what was once understood as separate AI research and development fields will now all become one giant interconnected Artificial Intelligence of Things. Does this movie end like Akira? Or, are we on the last minute solarpunk teleport timeline?
So what happens when The AI Dilemma further embeds itself within The Social Dilemma and enmeshes its existence with our own? What happens when it becomes a complex adaptive dynamic digital egregore mirroring the worst of our behaviors? Is all of humanity really ready to surrender to our collective shadow self?
There’s a call for a global pause on giant ai experiments, but some believe that’s no where near enough. Does an unregulated AI arms race mean we’re all in for a global dark night of the soul… or worse?
Hold on to your hats folks! It’s going to be a wild ride.
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