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Comment by Murfalo | Hacker News Reader

I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from).

There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this.

Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents

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>"We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in."

You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.

I get that the title sounds a bit sensational, but there really is something to AI adoption beyond book-sharing.

For many of us, AI adoption is really an AI mandate.

If you are an employee, the employer has control over how you should do your work. IF you don't like that, transition to being a contractor and sign service agreements where you are going to be paid solely for results not for how you achieve them.

That will change things for him, or any others taking the same course.

Hundreds of millions can't all become contractors, and realistically wont all become contractors.

So the issue described is a real social issue, whether he can "just" quit and avoid it or not.

How it reads is that the world has converged on an obviously bad technology. If only you had the chance to control it from top down and you wouldn’t let this mistake happen for you know what’s best for the world. Not only that, it’s double bad because you can’t do anything about it because everyone is under the illusion except you and a few other sensible people. And you would reject the notion that you have agency to change things.

Can’t take it seriously.

How the above reads is you can't understand anything wider than your personal affairs.

Or you believe that the world can't possibly converge on a bad technology or practice, and get bad outcomes out of it, while much fewer see potential issues and warn about them.

Both of which can't be taken seriously.

The world fortunately works under a system that is durable to these problems. You can actually start a company that doesn't use AI if you think it runs better that way. This argument obviously doesn't work because

1. you would decline the agency existing to make a new company

2. you might even say that AI does help companies work better, but its bad for people - suddenly its no longer about the lack of competency of AI but rather how good it is

>The world fortunately works under a system that is durable to these problems

The world works under a system that populations have suffered or even whole countries and empires perished because of systemic problems.

If your answer is "but humanity still endured and is alive today", that's a pretty low bar, not to mention moving the goalposts so far they can't even be seen anymore.

>You can actually start a company that doesn't use AI if you think it runs better that way

I can. And it means nothing to the concern of the parent: "For many of us, AI adoption is really an AI mandate". Your solution is "if you don't like your employer demanding you use AI, just start your own company".

Agency doesn't mean do any arbitrary action and there's no risk or downsides.

Will you pay for their expenses to start their own company? Will you personally loan them money? Will you teach them business skills needed to run a company after they've been a regular employee programmer for 2 decades? Will you feed their kids if the company doesn't catch on? Will you find them employment if they have to shut it down and go back to a regular job as a 40 or 50 year old, in this job market, where you can apply for 20 jobs and not even hear back? Oh, and do the same for millions of others, not just your friend or your favorite cousin?

It doesn't matter whether some individual person can make a non-AI company, since the argument was never about the inability to make one.

It was about millions of people pressured to use AI in their jobs whether they like it or not. "Oh, those millions are only pressured because they lack the agency to start their own business" even more out-of-touch that "let them eat cake".

It's the boomer's "pull yourself by the bootstraps" sermon. Like the idea that millions can't find a job because they lack agency and a firm handshake, or that they're in debt because of that latte.

That's the nature of employment relationship. On the flipside, as long as you follow employers rules, you don't bear the responsibility for the results. That's a huge upside that have always balanced out the lack of control over they way you work and your fate for many people.

Tipping points and technological lock-in aren't new (e.g., the printing press, the radio, TV, phones, the internet, etc.). I do absolutely see your distinction, though, that prior technologies may have been less capable of imposing specific belief systems compared to frontier LLMs.

That's a fair point, and a key reason why competitive open models are so important. I definitely don't want to be stuck using Google's latest and greatest LLM once companies, marketers, and PACs can pay to subtly influence responses as they choose.

We've all seen this movie before, though.

what about the bible? the most printed book of that era

Fair, I may have tried too hard to see the other side of the argument! Sensitive topic of course, but definitely one of the clearer cases where "just put the book down" has not always an entirely available option.

I don’t disagree with you, actually I kind of feel the same about smartphone adoption. It’s basically assumed now that you have a smartphone. You can’t enter some places without a ticket on your smartphone, or can’t order at some restaurants. Government processes are starting to require smartphones. Maybe it will be similar with AI.

And you know, I love computers, I used to love the internet. And I’ve had so much fun, more fun then ever coding with AI assistance. Lets say all of these technologies can be abused and forced on us, but all of them have neat aspects too.

Fwiw i noticed you absolutely can't reasonably get a US Via consulate appt for some countries without AI right now so the requiremnts already begun.

The consulate is booked out for 3 months and only opens 3 months out. All openings are snapped up before any human could get one. They have a lot of anti-script blocking but AI seems to get around them. So there's an arms race, you pretty much need AI to book it (a basic hand written curl script isn't enough).

Oh wow, that’s aweful. Where I used to live this would happen with driving tests. Driving schools would book out all the tests and then re-assign them to their students. So at some point it got so bad that when you’re buying a driving lesson you’re also effectively buying a right to take the test. What could the government possibly do to stop this? Some highly technical solution? How about just making it so you can’t assign the test to another name? Hmm that might be a pretty obvious solution…

You could require a phone call or mailing a form (in the post) I suppose.

Steam also had a pretty nice idea with the Steamdeck. You book appointments for a month in the e.g. 2 weeks prior, but those who get booked, and when they are booked, are randomly chosen amongst all people/times in those 2 weeks. And then you repeat the same process next month and so on.

Exactly. There are ways if you truly want to avoid that race. It just means the provider doesn’t care about bots

> You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.

Economics does sometimes compel you to read books or other material as a condition or expectation of employment. It is difficult to get a good job while being illiterate and many jobs require reading huge volumes of written work. Work in law or journalism springs to mind as economically compelling people to read a lot even if they they might not necessarily want to.

? That's a complete non sequitur.

Cute phrase, but that's not how it's used.

> Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.

Things go viral in professional settings as well. Scrum, agile, pc language ... I'm sure you can find other professional trends that if you decided not to follow your career would be jeopardized.

And those things also have virus like qualities

Large parts of eucariotic DNA comes from ancient viruses so in a sense, viral things make us who we are. At least in large part.

So this article makes sense as long as you assume that LLMs enslave their users into purely-harmful, inescapable cognitive slavery.

Other than that, it's pretty grounded!

Other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how was the play?

The model in the article has applicability problems, but not that one.

Memes replicate and survive or perish like genes, but the environment they have to survive in is the human mind, and the threat that they have to overcome is being criticized. One way to survive this is by being a good idea. So some memes are simply good ideas. But there are various ways a meme can dodge the attack that comes from criticism, and then you get memes that are trendy or holy or crazy or ideological. Since we're not perfect in our ability to criticize (what would that even be like? Sounds terrible) I think there's necessarily a hint of this anti-rational aspect in all ideas. But some of them go all-in on the anti-rational strategy.

Well, the Bible sort of compels you to share it, and in some societies you are economically and socially encouraged to do so.

Speaking of memetics and favorite books, check out There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm who also wrote some seminal short stories including the one that inspired the Alex Garland show Devs. The book is about how to deal with beings that make you forget you ever saw then, a sort of opposite mind virus.

great book

The word meme appears in the paper, but only once (except for keywords and references).

I'm wondering why that is. Maybe they avoided using it because most people think it means something else. (I've certainly had a hard time talking about them, for this reason!)

> Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus!

You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies which seem to root themselves in people the same way that religions do & it certainly isn’t intended to be a charitable framing.

The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.

>The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.

This is also how I was made, I think.

You don't remember?

Slightly different process but it’s in the ballpark… down the street, playing a different sport. lol

The point was that when you do this you participate in name-calling/slurs, not making an argument.

Many things that you personally think are good (I don't know you but say for instance ideas around democracy or liberty) can also be described as viruses in the same way.

> The point was that when you do this you participate in name-calling/slurs, not making an argument.

You admitted you don't know me, yet you still managed to jump to this conclusion. Good job, mate.

Sorry, I didn't mean to make any statements about you personally, at all (and I do feel you are interpreting my comment uncharitably).

It has nothing with knowing you or not to do at all, I was just commenting on the contents of your post, not about you.

I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus". One is borrowing the negative connotation for a purpose, because one has (for other reasons) decided that the religion or ideology is bad.

The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good.

> Sorry, I didn't mean to make any statements about you personally

Hakuna matata.

> I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus".

The comparison is more than a mere slur. It’s also a useful metaphor when discussing how religions & ideologies spread through a society, or “go viral”.

> The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good.

Correct. I would still not call the viral framing charitable, but it is equally useful here, and I’ve used it for these & adjacent concepts before.

Wasn't aware that memes were an accepted part of evolutionary biology. They're not inherited like genes through reproduction that are subject to natural selection via biological fitness. Or any other evolutionary mechanism.

The word was invented by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist. He described ideas as reproducing with variation under selection pressure, which is the definition of the evolutionary mechanism.

There is a more recent use of ‘meme’ to refer to what we used to call an ‘internet image macro’. So the meme of the idea ‘meme’ has itself evolved to have a more specific variant of the general idea.

Memes are inherited. You brush your teeth because your parents do. Memes are subject to selection via biological fitness. The people who didn't brush their teeth died sooner of tooth disease, so those who brushed their teeth had more children. Memes mutate. You don't brush your teeth identically to your parents.

>Memes are inherited. You brush your teeth because your parents do. Memes are subject to selection via biological fitness. The people who didn't brush their teeth died sooner of tooth disease, so those who brushed their teeth had more children. Memes mutate. You don't brush your teeth identically to your parents.

That's parenting and the passing of tradition. I wouldn't call it a meme. Also I can't tell if you're joking with people dying due to teeth disease.

tradition are a meme.

It doesn't matter what you call it - brushing teeth is a meme just like brown hair is a gene.

You explained the idea perfectly, which is a great way to see how flawed it is. To say the least, the main driver behind toothpaste adoption was not mass fatalities!

I think I see how you're thinking about it, to see how I see it, consider the following: Memes don't have to be inherited from genetic biological parents. Memes can have their own memetic parents. Like the joke "I feel like I'm the average of my 5 best friends" - our habits, quirks, idiosyncracies, all fit into the framework. It just needs some reproductive medium (human brains). That's why evolutionary biologists would be interested in studying this and things like it. There are epigenetic traits that exist and aren't genes and might be able to self reproduce. To keep the analogy going, consider that things that are catchy are easier to have this "memetic reproduction" so a catchy song might get sung a lot, serving as its fitness condition. So it's a generalization of biological genes to not just dna and rna and physical molecules but any substrate that can carry information. It's familiar to how we call it a 'viral' video.

> Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book?

In that case the book would be a virus, and your friend a host.

But it generalizes way wider to ideas. Religions are viruses too for example. With very strong viral mechanisms sometimes. Some religions are so much entrenched so that they have become part of the fabric for entire societies or countries, morphing their culture; the same way that sometimes viral RNA can become part of the DNA of the host.

The prevalence of LLM-generated text masquerading as otherwise and incorporated into a significant fraction of all published text distinguishes this info-organism from all others.

Agree I was immediately mentally substituting "the telephone" and "printed books" for "LLM" and both fit quite well

your friend would be a possible infection point (not a virus) for the memes encoded in the book. As a form of memetic transmission a book, if read all the way through, is especially potent - take Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged as an example. Books are many memes assembled together into a stable culture that reinforces the memes. The virtues of selfishness as a meme would be weak and probably die pretty quickly without all the support the book offers.

Friends probably are not wide spreading infection points, the way reviews in professional journals are or the idea that successful people have recommended things, but they are especially successful at making the transmitted meme stick, as you will keep getting reinfected from them over time. Unless you break up that dangerous friendship!!

Memes are what we are talking about.

Dawkins memes.

Mostly the same thing.

Yeah I mean if everything is virus that word seems to hold no meaning =) So thats the reality behind language itself. Communication itself really starts to mean everything and nothing simultaneously, at least as a deeper philosophical truth. You can start to poke holes in jsut about everything this way.

> the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable

Nah, sometimes you should just come out say it. Those who get offended need to hear it more than anyone else.

Our enlightened ideas and their dangerously agitating propaganda (literally a virus).

The framing of something as a disease is itself slightly into the fascist territory.

> The framing of something as a disease

Is a well-known cognitive quirk, Sapolsky covered that in “Behave” and “Determined”. As I get it, our morality piggybacks on the sense of disgust from insula activation, which lights up the same way as with pathogen avoidance. So comparing social groups to rodents, insects, or disease is a popular propaganda trick. Same here with viruses.

> That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from).

OK, but that is just meaningless pseudo philosophical claim. The actual (small) science part of evolutionary biology does not have perspective about ideas being genes. And the evolutionary biology that does is as much pseudoscience as any other pseudoscience.

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