‘They’re afraid their AIs will come for them’: Doug Rushkoff
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Now they will have a harder time finding human generated content. So AI will start training itself on AI generated data. Which sounds like a loop that leads downward in quality.
As another commenter here said a while back, pre-2021 web crawls will be like the low background steel of the web.
Ah, it has a name even, so I'm at least not alone in thinking it's an issue.
The Achilles heel is that nobody actually fucking LIKES these "tech barons" and nobody would vote for them if they ran for office. He's right that they are removed from the real world. Even a C level politician would demolish them in town hall meeting.
> Even a C level politician would demolish then in a town hall meeting.
There might be an interesting u-shaped curve here. I totally agree I'd expect a half decent politician to call BS very easily, if that politician is actually interested in representing his constituents. Congress seems to enjoy the horse and pony show, inviting tech leaders for hearing while the goal is just to win political points and pander to voters . Love them or hate them, except for an occasional fluke anyone getting to the highest levels of federal office are A level political that should be able to demolish leaders in these hearings if they actually cared.
>They’re torturing themselves now, which is kind of fun to see.
The thing that always gets me is that they pretend to offer the insider view (rubbing shoulders with billionaires), but actually it's them fixing on these handful of figures and companies, ignoring 99.9% of the industry.
I also find it difficult to take seriously anyone who holds up 2016 as some kind of milestone in internet manipulation and propaganda... because the Obama campaign already bragged in 2012 how they used social media to win. They harvested data from Facebook, just like Cambridge Analytica would do, but Facebook looked away, and the press spun it as tech savvy democrats leaving republican dinosaurs in the dust.
There are no principles in this area, just people fighting for a team.
The fact he sounds weird is interesting because it is really the degree that everything has become dominated by the culture of San Francisco.
It is the degree that Silicon Valley beat Silicon Alley. He is expressing the side that lost the culture but it could have gone the opposite way. Wallstreet money didn't have to go very far to get to Silicon Alley.
Pseudo.com was basically doing real audio/video podcasts from Silicon Alley in the late 90s. I don't think that whole scene really recovered from the dot com bust though.
It’s funny because there was a whole New York start up scene and basically none of them made it and all the big stuff that lived was west coast.
This guy seems ok albeit a bit out there.
Edit: Re-read the article, he seems about the sanest out of all people talking on the subject lately.
Sociopaths.
This is gold!
But it's also curious coming from a journalist who played cheerleader for them for so many years: are journalists also afraid that AI will propagandize us better than journalists managed to?
I was guilty of the same optimism in the 90s, but 2016 was the last lesson I needed. Took him a bit longer.
It seems to me that it's really the social media era that needs to end for us to start making cool things again.
I got on the internet in 93 and I enjoyed about ten pretty great years of it. That internet never went away, people just stopped participating, for many reasons, including spammers laying waste to the infrastructure (usenet), but mostly because our nontechnical friends and family showed up and we mostly preferred to interact with them on the platforms than the weird collection of freaks we interacted with before. I have no idea where most of my old IRC channel are, and these were my daily friends for a decade or more (many of them go back to BBS days in the 80s). On the other hand, I miss the folks from alt.music.ween and I want usenet back, but I have little hope that that could happen.
But if you mean, "get the large corporate platforms whose purpose is to extract money from attention off the internet and replace them with systems that work like the internet worked in the 90s, ie protocols" then you are correct. That's Rushkoff's message these days too - places like neocities get a lot of heat around here and it's for a reason, a lot of us remember that there used to be a good internet, and that internet did not have the purpose of making money, its purpose was to enable communication under any kind of duress, up to and including a nuclear attack.
We need to get back to using this for its actual purpose, and kick off the people trying to use it to make money. If there is a service that we collectively want or need, we should either pay for it on an individual basis, or we should pay for it with taxes.