16 karma · joined January 12, 2026
“Excess” implies irrationality, but I wonder how could something irrational be a threat to ‘American dominance in computers’?
On one hand the author recognizes the scope of the “protocol wars” as a rational thing being irrelevant in the actually relevant time span. On the other hand, the author swears that they can bring rationality to a deeply emotional matter through discourse.
In fact now I’m a bit worried that you can’t really have any sort of accurate feeling of the magnitude of the ironic statement that went over your head. You hear something that’s not true, you internalize it, you figure the character of it’s falseness, and when it’s your time to subvert it you invert it and amp it up creating something more absurd, which in turn will be internalized by even more people without its apparent falseness that you tried so hard to convey.
This makes me think that speaking absurd is the only way to convey truth. Not immediately, but eventually.
And don’t be naive to think that there aren’t sophisticated symbolic handling mechanisms being implemented in the training of the models by Big Tech. Not even baby soap is truly neutral.
Reminds me of that Black Mirror episode with the circular QR code.
When the moral panic of induced schizophrenia from the use of ChatGPT is presented what’s at stake isn’t the innocent concern over the overall mental health of individuals. It’s about how the fear of radicalization from previously unobtainable ideas being circulated within society. The partial validity of every idea vis-a-vis the radicalizing nature of the current stage of development of our society is explosively disruptive.
I’m not saying that there’s a clear outcome here. The other way around can also apply, but surely this contraption (LLMs in general) will not fade until the society itself is deeply transformed. If that’s good or bad depends on where you stand in the stratified society.