Agents of Manipulation (the real AI risk) | Hacker News Reader

Agents of Manipulation (the real AI risk)

venturebeat.com

11 pointsbonkerbits7 comments

If AI is controlled by the current players, this is the most probable endgame of the current AI trajectory. Not human extinction, but a permanent dystopia where most of humanity is manipulated 24/7 for profit by a few advertising companies. I remember when I actually believed computers would make us more creative, more productive, more self-realized. That they would make lives better. A lot of people used to think this. It’s still a possibility but now it’s unlikely to be the winning side. Now, human life and human culture are just seen as something to strip mine for profit, and tech is the most efficient way to do it. And there’s so much money betting on that side, they’ll probably win. A sad end.

We massively underprice the potential for ai generated porn to derail humanity.

An answer to the Fermi Paradox!

I have the same "fear" and am working on creating an alternative future to that. It's just difficult at the current stage to find people who see this & are technical & creative enough. Especially because i am running out of money (bootstrapped) without anything to show yet (much time spent in PoC & exploring ideas & dummy software prototypes etc). But i don't think trying to get a VC involved is a good idea.

Any ideas on where to find people like you that might wanna do something before "they" actually win? Or maybe just to hear some other opinions about what you think should be different?

I believe we actually have a very good chance of poking the giants where they don't like it. But the time for that is right now and i am running low on cash, while still need more time to explore ideas & find fellow maniacs to create a truly different future.

Not even sure what i am asking, but i don't know other people who see this (and other things connected to this that seem to not be discussed), like you...

I have just enough money left to pay myself and one other person for about 5-7 months. But even then it won't be time enough to have a product on the market to generate revenue. So i am stressed out & appreciate any ideas / thoughts even just slightly connected to these ideas.

I’m intrigued! I’m up for a conversation if you want to hit me up at daniel at imal dot name. I’d love to hear more about what you’re up to.

I should say more. I think most people are going in the wrong direction. Everyone is focusing on chatbots, and I think that's too limited. Conversation is a slow, low-bandwidth interface that isn't good for most work. I'm hoping to work on tools that will help people be more productive, more self-realized. I think for a small subset of humanity (us, the programmers), that's already occurred, but for people that can't think like a computer, that hasn't happened, and so they only see computers as media consumption devices.

I think a major reason that the computer revolution failed is because up until now, every application has only a single user interface. Every individual is different but with today's interfaces, individuals are forced to adapt their minds and behavior to fit the computer, making the human less important than the machine. When you look at most people and how they use software, they're working around limitations in the user interfaces. For example, when you go to a doctor, they're spending most of their time clicking through a shitty UI instead of focusing on healing people. Most non-tech jobs are like this. People waste their lives using shitty user interfaces. After that, scrolling on social media is a way to get some relief.

I'm interested in working on generative UI [0], that adapts to individuals. I've worked on a few systems in the past that built some of the underpinnings of this, so I can see how it's doable now with LLMs. I'm hoping that if more people could use computers for things that they care about in a way that fits their way of thinking and working, they will be less likely to fall into manipulative media consumption / AI chatbot manipulation. If they can get into a flow state doing something meaningful, maybe they'll choose that over addiction. I know that it won't be for everyone though.

I think the economics of competing with the giants is the biggest problem, though. There's no way that a single bootstrapped company can compete. The only way I can see it working is to foster an ecosystem. I'm inspired by companies like Ghost [1] and even Wordpress. Lots of businesses build off those platforms. In AI maybe it could start from a client with a plugin architecture. I think getting some sort of interop standards between local AI tooling would help as well. I'm just giving a high-level overview of how it could work. But the hope is that a swarm of companies could take on the larger companies, if they all agree to support the ecosystem. Right now, no one is coordinating, and unless that happens, they will all lose. And founding the company as a public good corporation, with a solid Ulysses pact to protect against enshittification might help people to get on board. I've got more ideas about pricing, open source licensing, etc. I think that could be tricky. You want it to be open, but not give away everything.

Right now I'm doing a stint at the Recurse Center [2]. If you're looking for people who might be interested in your work, that might be a good place to look. There are a lot of interesting, smart people there. And it would probably be a great environment for you to do your work, too. Lots of people to bounce ideas off off. I highly recommend it.

Those are some of my thoughts. Hope this helps. Seriously, email me if you want to talk. Good luck.

[0] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/generative-ui/

[1] https://ghost.org/

[2] https://www.recurse.com/

I don't understand people who simultaneously predict "Industrial Revolution" changes in tech and "business as usual" in the economy. Ok, we have robots that can do anything. And they're going to be controlled by... The identical entities that were here before? "AI will be controlled by corporations." What corporations?

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