Ambition, Part II

This is more or less a continuation or a simplification of what I wrote earlier here. Maybe you could see this as a distillation of sorts, been brewing and stewing for a while, figuratively speaking. It's just some thoughts that have occurred to me, some unanswered questions. Stream of consciousness-style, as per the usual.

Starting off, if carrying guns is controlled, then why aren't powerful GPUs similarly controlled? Granted, the danger is not exactly the same, but expect to see a growing number of scams and all kinds of porn with you as the performer otherwise. The same question could extend to powerful CPUs with minor caveats. You see, I've been pondering this because of the problem of increasing scams and defamation, and it seems people just aren't taking this stuff very seriously at all. And so far, I'm not particularly convinced that there's any way of definitively knowing whether a particular video or audio was made completely artificially, so to speak. I think some very bright people are working on it, but I'm just not convinced.

Not to mention it's not like you controlled all the platforms.

Besides, although proper career academics talk about things like detecting whether a video was made artificially, in the sense that it's not merely recorded but generated, it couldn't possibly matter after the damage has already been done. Any control measures are susceptible to overshooting anyway, and they do not account for actual, ethical uses for generated video or audio either.

A much better and more efficient means of controlling what people can do with AI and generative algorithms is actually to slow their internet download bandwidth down. And I don't mean throttle downloads or something, I mean slow that fucker down completely. That way, it becomes more infeasible to download a truly good generative model over the web; threat prevention becomes a matter of physically preventing people from sharing large deep learning models via external drives and such; and, it becomes a matter of time before hardware eventually breaks down and the capacity for scams becomes lower. Or, it becomes tedious enough in order to not be quite worth it anymore. Indeed, you could decimate illegal downloads with that same move. Maybe even resuscitate the movie rental shops and theaters too. But to me, it looks like people don't particularly care about that either, which is strange, because I'm probably of the last generation who still went to movie theaters as a kid. I'm actually hoping that won't be the case, but I just don't know.

I myself have had the slowest internet connection that's available to me for a long-ass time, because that's all I need. And yet, I'm still able to view streaming 1080p video real-time. Imagine that.

And another thing I've been pondering in my spare time is this constant talk about conflict in the news, all this talk of war and preparing. You do know that anyone is capable of holding the entire world hostage now, right? Even the small players have all the intelligence they're ever going to need. And so, in the event a hostile nation would like to attempt something nasty, and they're about to succeed, just kill every single human being on the planet, and quickly. I mean, isn't that the logical conclusion of all of this nonsense?

Which is indeed why I've stopped actively watching and reading the news. It's one of those things where you lie once and you lie twice, but the third time I just won't believe you anymore; similarly, you speak of the end of the world once, twice, and the third time nothing you say reaches my ears anymore, because it doesn't matter. On the surface it looks like the only way people even sell any reading material is by insinuating you could miss out on something. But do you really? How long can you be without that stuff without ever learning that you've indeed missed out on something valuable? Months? Years? And is the only way to disprove the claim you don't need it to actually go and cause trouble, just so someone can give you the news?

Indeed, it's about trust. For instance, if you can't really trust what you see online anymore, then why would you want to look at that stuff in the first place? Unless it's all about amusement, and not much else. And moreover, why would you also increasingly delegate jobs to machines instead of humans, as well? I suppose there's the obvious case for speed, accuracy, that sort of thing. But then, if anyone's truly worried about AI at all, it doesn't make sense to actually decrease the amount of human involvement after a certain point has been reached, when in fact physical human involvement is the one thing that's required for trust now.

It's not a matter of whether the algorithms work or not. Of course they work for any task you set out for them, once you empirically test them out and they're ready for use.

It kind of reminds me of cryptocurrencies in the sense that aren't they too about trusting the algorithms rather than the banks? I suppose so. That, and getting rich cheating the system, of course.

An interesting angle to all of this is the idea of either trusting "hype" or disregarding it. But it's not about whether AI is able to do whatever. It certainly is. It's that I've noticed people generally believe and say whatever suits them, not what's absolutely true, and so you have to be mindful of who you're asking.

However, personally, I still lament the fact that nothing I've seen in the last ten years has increased the value I've experienced when using digital services or products. On the contrary, in some cases, the value has decreased due to perceived cheapening of the end result. The only place for AI is behind the curtains, perceived naturally as just another algorithm. Any categorical difference is more like gray area to me. But the thing is, I find myself asking the following question all the time these days: "who is this for?"

Does anyone conduct any market research anymore, of any kind? They must not, because otherwise there's no way to explain the ignorance I see – ignorance specifically about the fact that there are different kinds of people out there. It's sort of beside the point why they're different. It could be because of preferences, it could be because of capabilities. It could be because of different experiences or opinions or values.

So why on earth do people constantly talk about losing jobs? And why is the amount of jobs indeed really decreasing in the first place? In my view, people always needed the money more than society needed the job itself. That's been the case for several decades, I'm sorry to say. The value of work has been in its capacity to provide meaning for as long as I've lived. You can't seriously say you've just awakened to that fact. Or maybe it's me who's been living in a bubble the whole time.

It's like people suddenly decided that now was the time to really start judging and beating everyone with no technical expertise in the head with some cheap superiority and one-upmanship. But there's no reward at the end of that road.

Thinking about my own life and reflecting on it, I think I used to get better recommendations from humans back when there were things to recommend in the first place.

And another thing I'm thinking is that it doesn't make much sense to me that people flock to social media in droves. And it's just a couple of sites anyway. Why don't you just create your own static websites? It's way less difficult and cheaper than you think.

Everything is centralized now, and it makes zero sense to me. The code goes to GitHub, the amateur videos go to YouTube, the Hollywood-style productions go to Netflix, the video game streams go to Twitch, the bulk shopping goes to Alibaba, the consumer e-commerce goes to Temu or Amazon, and so on. The music goes to Spotify. And everything else is shit because it's unnecessary anyway. My gut response is basically this: "have you guys lost your minds?" I mean, far be it from me to judge, but dude, it's the web! It's just as easy to click a link that leads to a different site as it is to click a link that leads to the same site you're already on.

And yeah I get it, YouTube could be a proper job. Attention economy.

If this nonsense keeps going, sooner or later someone will figure out that we only really need approximately five websites altogether. Or, maybe they'll figure out that a single website could run everything and just be merely reskinned with different colors: the dark mode and the light mode. And remember: if you don't use the dark mode, you're a bad person.

The flocking isn't even defensible from the point of view of advertising, because you could still very easily add advertisements to any video on any site. You could insert ad banners anywhere. So it's not really about money in that way. It could be about visibility, perhaps. But then again, it used to be you just simply added links and you had aggregation sites. You required search engines to index the web, and not for answering questions! So no wonder large language models are seen as competitors to search engines now, in these moronic dark ages.

Indeed, in my opinion, the current popularity of those LLMs really reveals one very awkward thing: that people were dissatisfied with the information given to them by humans all along. It seems to be a widely held view that an LLM is somehow impartial or, at least, more pleasing. And yet, I barely see a difference in anything but accountability: the LLM isn't really accountable, but it sucks up to you and you can keep pestering it. A human is basically more or less the opposite.

And besides, building a good website that answers a single question well is actually much more power-efficient than running a huge machine learning algorithm for that same purpose. It's so ironic too at a time when lots of people are so worried about global warming, things like that.

Nonsense aside, I think there's a simple crossroads ahead and only two paths. One path is that you'll have to ask yourself whether you'd like to get paid for doing nothing at all. The other is that you'll have to discard the idea that effort is required in exchange for earning things, unless you want it. Or, you could just not care and stick to the old stuff for as long as you can afford to. But the crossroads is coming sooner or later. That's what superior technology gives you.

So in other words, it's not sensible that hiring is going to be based on merit anymore. So maybe it'll be based on how fun it is to have you around, as ridiculous as that sounds. Or, if it's going to go the way it's been for the last few years, people are going to indirectly kill each other by hoarding more stuff for themselves, because they don't strictly need anyone else. Maybe there should be some controls around that.

Either way it's going to go, I suppose you just can't take anything seriously anymore. I mean, how much do you have to see to finally accept that?

But the problem. The problem I see is that there's not enough time, not enough opportunities to enjoy my own life before some moron is going to shit all over it. That's really what I mean when I say that "I want to choose".

The problem is that there exist researchers who are actually researching and developing more general, more powerful AI systems. You see, for me, I was already perfectly satisfied with the state of technology 15 years ago! The way I see it is this: unless AGI/superintelligence has the capability to make every human being live forever, then there is no possible reward for creating anything like it. There already is an algorithm for every individual purpose anyway.

When you already have the capability to live a full life, if indeed you do, because not everyone does, then there's nothing to gain. So it's obvious the whole game is to develop the intelligence before the competition does it. It's not about something worthwhile waiting for you in the end, some reward. It's not about helping others. It's dominance. And it reflects on how people talk about it: "are we still going to be in control", they ask.

Even on the level of mere hypotheticals, these discussions themselves are effectively making an appeal to the viewer's or listener's own worry about losing control.

The world would be a much better place if humans just didn't get all up in everyone else's shit. The stakes are too high, and the cognitive capacity just isn't there. Maybe this is the Kali Yuga, after all.

I think like this simply because it's not worth it to rule. There's no reward. There's even less reward when you already have food, housing, and live better than kings did hundreds of years ago. Dominance is completely decoupled from quality of life, assuming you're willing to look at it rationally.

The wisest of things I've learned are from Hinduism, Buddhism, and even the Bible. There is only one useful thing to strive for: equanimity.

But how am I solving these supposed problems for myself? I've been thinking about these things for a long time because I find there's no sense in doing anything unless I can justify it to myself personally, that should go without saying. It needs to be valuable in my estimation and not just about me yielding to coercion, just because my survival depended on it. And that's assuming I still retain such a degree of personal affordance in the first place.

Well, the only answer I have is a cliché one: I'll just do what I want to do, pursue things based on what I'd like to see, and pray I'll survive. Because you can't trust anyone these days: you can't trust that the effect people want to see wasn't in fact just this, and not what they say it might be or might have been. The point being, fear is a powerful motivator: it makes people become curious of things they wouldn't otherwise care about, it makes them buy stocks, it makes them get more views and subscribers and things. It all feeds itself. A great big snowball of shit and doom.

And what if you indeed lived forever?

If you lived forever, I don't think you'd care about investing, something like that. That's because infinite longevity means infinite affordance, and that's what we already settled on when we chose that presupposition. Rather, you'd think about ethics, first and foremost, about what kinds of beings you'd like to live with, so it's sustainable. You'd be worried about how long until you've literally seen everything. You'd wonder how short your memory really needs to be in order to keep enjoying the things you do. You'd constantly ask yourself: why? And finally, you'd ask yourself whether you in fact needed death all along just to learn something that eludes you for the very reason you're still alive – to change your own internal state in order to keep things as sustainable as possible generally, and not just with respect to you personally. Still doesn't mean you want death. Just means the limits of knowledge and information itself become more and more apparent to you. And meaning itself is inexorably tied with what you know now.