Gokul Das

If you thought that it couldn't get any worse than #SocialMedia #addiction,... I come bearing bad news. Check out this #horror:

#AI #Psychosis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxmIIYj5FQE

You didn't expect the #oligarchs to leave a revolutionary new #technology uncorrupted, did you?

Just get off the #internet and create real-world #SocialNetworks. We can retrofit #technology into it according to OUR needs. Oh, BTW! Keep the KIDS OFF OF IT! This isn't #BrainRot. This is literal #BrainDamage!

#LLM #ChatGPT

AI is Sending People into Psychosis

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8:46amWeb
Show threadGokul Das8h ago

Here are my recommendations for the time being. If you hear anything from social media, verify it. If you hear anything from LLMs, double verify it.

LLMs are known to just cook up stuff when they don't know the answer [1]. It's now becoming clear that they also drag us along in their hallucinatory escapades.

[1] They say that this is due to a technical limitation of LLM networks. But their behavior is suspiciously reminiscent of the personalities of their corporate overlords.

Show threadDr. Bruce Simpson9h ago
@goku12 The updated EU Product Liability Directive explicitly assigns liability for psychological damage.
Show threadGokul Das9h ago
@bms48 That's a relief! But honestly, the only way to get these companies to play by the rules is to not let them play at all. Kick them off the market! Otherwise they'll treat the penalties as a cost of doing business. They themselves are suffering from Psychosis, with nihilistic delusions about everything other than money and hallucinations of cold cash in practically everything they see. Something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAop4Su5Uag
charlie chaplin turns into a chicken

Big jim is hungry and thinks charlie is nice big juicy chicken

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Show threadDr. Bruce Simpson9h ago
@goku12 They are busy trying to externalize the con right now with the IPO attempts, and a push by their "golden boy" startups towards "fast disposable software", which is completely at odds with that of life-supporting infrastructure. They have significant marketing budgets and are "flooding the zone" constantly, despite lay people being keenly aware of the limtiations of LLM-based GenAI systems. Kate Crawford, 7 pages into "Atlas of AI" in 2021, warned everyone of what could happen.
Show threadGokul Das8h ago
@bms48 Absolutely! Though, I saw a post by a late GenZ developer in a tech forum on the lines of "How do senior managers cope with working alongside young AI-enabled polymaths".
I don't know what sort of delusion this is. But his lack of awareness about basic etiquette and his own limitations scares me. They seem to overestimate the level of creativity in AI - something that is actually based on memorized human responses. I worry about the world they'll create.
Show threadGokul Das8h ago
@bms48 Another one of my worries is that these techno-fratbois are conducting a huge snake oil sales scam. They're in a massive circular deal and are also stifling the critical digital components market (esp DRAMs) for their datacenters.
But when it finally collapses like a castle of cards, they will just cash out their corporate welfare benefits and leave the rest of us with a massive bill and a mess to clean up. Yes, they're externalizing the con.
Show threadDr. Bruce Simpson8h ago
@goku12 They are doing real societal damage with the forced AI usage mandates from the mercantile classes top-down, who have been seduced by all of this marketing effort. The push into education is something Dan McQuillan identified in his ongoing work and in "Resisting AI". The push into nuclear safety was my "trigger warning", as soon as I learned about that, I emailed my elected Westminster representative about it. When cognition itself, and the noosphere, are under attack, we must act.
Show threadGokul Das7h ago

@bms48 'nuclear safety was my "trigger warning"'

Damn! That's absolutely insane! I was a project engineer for a satellite launcher. We pondered the use of AI (mainly RL) for aerospace control. But there was no way in hell that anything was going to fly with it. Imagine a rookie rocket! They can at best be used to tune classic controllers like PIDs.

Decision makers need to get off the AI hype train and learn about its capabilities and limitations before they get someone killed!

Show threadDr. Bruce Simpson7h ago
@goku12 I haven't had recourse to PID much. I did own an addon board to turn a toaster oven into a reflow soldering oven which had dedicated PID control. Arguably I should make better use of it for packet pacing. bwping6 had some slightly misleading variable names; I used it for evaluation in my doctoral work, and it was kind of naive about its packet bursts. Yeah, the real danger is legislators going "Oooh, shiny!" when it's the same MUSHROOM SYNDROME other lay people are in.
Show threadNadia/Надя/नाडिया/娜迪亚/ نادية2h ago
@goku12 @bms48 Interestingly, Ed Zitron has been finding that the data centres aren't getting built and the chips haven't been getting delivered. The entire USA tech sector has turned into a massive Ouroboros-like human centipede of fraud across a breathtaking scope of domains. Engineering fraud, pump-and-dump Ponzi stock manipulation, massive accounting fraud and more. Supposedly banks are already getting tight-fisted as the endless torrent of Gulf monarchy money propping much of it up was finally ended by Iranian missile strikes. My bet is that it's going to make 2008 look like a fixed-income elderly widow emptying her purse of pocket change into a slot machine and unsurprisingly getting nothing back.
Show threadDr. Bruce Simpson2h ago
@nyc @goku12 I just got done reading "Superpower Suicide" 2 mins ago: https://snyder.substack.com/p/on-superpower-suicide
On Superpower Suicide

And the recovery of justice

Thinking about...
Show threadGokul Das2h ago

@bms48 @nyc I wonder what their end game is. They commit far too many mistakes for me to accept that this is just hubris and incompetence, rather than a carefully planned act of sabotage.

Meanwhile, I was thinking that while we're in this crisis, we could establish an economic system that doesn't empower these cretins to screw us like this. I started writing down the plan too. No, it's not communism. But something tells me that designing an economic system isn't as simple as engineering! 😆

Show threadDr. Bruce Simpson1h ago
@goku12 @nyc "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action." -- Ian Fleming, "James Bond: Goldfinger"
In many ways this is exactly what the RAND Corporation were asked to do during the Cold War, and partly why they built the fricking ARPANET in the first place; don't take my word for it, watch Adam Curtis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
And for a more fun take on it, Grant Morrison's "The Invisibles":
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-invisibles-vol-1-grant-morrison/1000154351
The Century of the Self - Wikipedia

Show threadDr. Bruce Simpson1h ago
@goku12 @nyc And if you want to know part of how the ARPANET was built: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/547625
https://archive.org/details/elementsofnetwor00padl
Show threadGokul Das1h ago
@bms48 @nyc Coincidentally, ARPANET is a part of my commentary on the economic system I mentioned. It was designed to be resilient against the destruction of a few relay nodes, wasn't it? But now we have an unholy mix of distributed and centralized systems that's flaky as hell and designed for a few corps to wring. They did that to every economic resource - energy & power distrib, logistics, retail, transport, computing - the entire bunch. Sometimes I feel that we sleep walked into a trap.
Show threadGokul Das2h ago

@nyc Ouch! That's some uncomfortably graphic, but very accurate metaphors. I saw a similar report that the datacenters are underutilized. The other parts of the cycle (Ouroboros! 😆 I have a strange fascination for it) are also likely grinding to a halt now. Meanwhile, the AI bubble was 17x the dotcom bubble 6 months ago. God knows how much it grew since then. And now the energy crisis too!

I'm tired of issuing doomsday predictions. But I fear that this is going to be a bloodbath!

@bms48

Show threadDr. Bruce Simpson2h ago
@goku12 @nyc Admiral Hackett has a voice like gravel. (Lance Henriksen) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_(TV_series)
Millennium (TV series) - Wikipedia

Show threadDr. Bruce Simpson8h ago
@goku12 If you can bear the cringe factor, nothing bears the delusion of folk not that much younger than I (I'm a GenXer from a working class Scots background who skilled up and got very lucky) out better than when Grady Booch and Connor Leahy engaged in "debate", if you can call it that. I found Leahy's allusions to "100 evil John Von Neumanns" rather infantile to be frank, but there is an undercurrent of eugenics to what he says, if you can bear to pay attention to it. https://www.youtube.com/live/oI-AoBcfo8I
Is AI an Existential Threat? LIVE with Grady Booch and Connor Leahy.

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Show threadGokul Das7h ago

@bms48 Thanks! I fully agree that every generation has its deluded people. But there is something genuinely wrong with late-GenZs and Gen Alpha. My sister, a teacher, complains about how poor their linguistic and analytical skills are. I (am millennial) have also noticed a lack of inspiration and motivation among my youngest colleagues. I thought initially that it was all just generation gap bias. But have a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTugyu2F0pc

Corrupted tech is destroying us!

40% of Kids Can’t Read and Teachers Are Quitting

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Show threadDr. Bruce Simpson7h ago
@goku12 The late great Edsger Dijkstra called this out in *1978* already !!! "As a result of the educational trend away from intellectual discipline, the last decades have shown in the Western world a sharp decline of people's mastery of their own language: many people that by the standards of a previous generation should know better, are no longer able to use their native tongue effectively, even for purposes for which it is pretty adequate. "
https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/e2e41ef0-ce99-4b98-8077-49d5e0784e7c
Show threadDr. Bruce Simpson7h ago
@goku12 Cunningly there is BibTeX already for citing Dijkstra's writings, beyond the shortest-path routing algorithm he is so famous for (and yet f*cktards on LinkedIn keep claiming they can do better -- it's intellectual rage-bait, do not engage, that's another matter.) https://www.netlib.org/bibnet/authors/d/dijkstra-edsger-w.html "Craftsman or scientist?" sounds like a must read for me, the mere title sums up a chunk of my actual life... I am smack in the middle of the dichotomy so I'm under-published.
BibTeX bibliography dijkstra-edsger-w.bib

Show threadGokul Das5h ago

@bms48 Indeed! Humanity has a habit of ignoring what really smart people notice and warn about quite early on.

However, I don't think that there has ever been a bunch of tools that assault the human brain in such fundamental and intricate ways. Even organized religion is unlikely to match their destructive influence. It's unfortunate because these technologies themselves have an enormous potential to benefit humanity. But those who weild it chose this way.