jonny (nonvenomous)RE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/116604745957981805
"links will become an afterthought" is not even coded language for "the rest of the internet is merely training data and we will own the entire means of accessing information online"
as Dr. Bender says upthread, the Rethinking Search paper just says this explicitly, also AMP, etc. I only mildly edited their figure here
The shift to "search journeys" is just another way of referring to "whole life immersive surveillance" where the intention is to slowly train you to expect more and more of your personal information to be visibly injected into search results as a surface for "personalization" and eventually move towards "zero-query search" where advertisements-i-mean-helpful-information are proactively volunteered to you.
this language appears in full form as early as 2018 and was chilling even then:
The zero-query search paradigm can be expressed with the slogan “the query is the user.” In practice, the context of the user is used to infer information needs. (Entity Oriented Search)
Who gives a single shit how good the "AI" can code when the purpose of "AI" is and always has been enclosure of all information in an ad-driven surveillance platform. If you love LLMs, this is the future you, yes you, are actively helping create.
There IS NO LLM USE not associated with the project to seize all information as a product. That is the WHOLE gamble being made that is driving all those billions into getting as many people as possible dependent on the most preposterously expensive and inefficient model of computing ever devised. It is only worth it if the upside is owning the whole economy.
Every step you take towards building LLMs into your daily habits and work ratchets the spring tighter on the mousetrap until, surprise! It clamps shut while your whole ass is wrapped around the cheese. Don't make me laugh with local models nonsense, if you think that those don't get deprecated the moment they pose the slightest whiff of a threat to the profit model - meta isn't releasing weights to be nice, it's to capture labor and control the tooling space. Don't be a sucker.
joshbuddy@jonny I don't think I follow what you're saying about local models. Isn't the horse kind of well out of the barn at this point re: local models? It's not like some entity can take them away, and the best open models don't even come from Meta etc.
George BAlso almost every time I see local models mentioned it's someone using them to derail a conversation about the harms of LLMs. Makes them a very useful tool for those big companies to keep doing all the damage they want and then just have someone say "but local models" when the companies' extremely antisocial policies are hilighted.
@gbargoud @jonny So many of these conversations seem conceptually mushy to me. The benefits and harms of LLMs can be discussed separately from the benefits and harms of big tech.
Feels like the harms of big tech are very obvious and keenly felt whereas I'm still uncertain about the harms of LLMs specifically. They seem to make specifically crime easier and contribute to skills atrophying.
I'm trying to get clear on this stuff myself, it's not easy.
No it is not possible to separate the technology from the context of its production: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116606065797032036
Here is my attempt at providing concrete history and context: https://jon-e.net/surveillance-graphs/
You can stick around for the whole thing or just skip to the punchline: https://jon-e.net/surveillance-graphs/#the-near-future-of-surveillance-capitalism-knowledge-graphs-get-chatbots
jonny (nonvenomous) (@[email protected])
@[email protected] Except that its entire design, technological lineage, and deployment is inextricably bound to its nature as a product developed for this purpose. As far as you can reach in the tech stack and prior art that leads to LLMs you will find information companies whose business model is informational enclosure dumping oceans of money into research on how to better enclose information. Not every tool is a hammer, there are in fact tools to which analogies that apply to one category of tool do not apply. It's not some magical bush out there in the woods that we would have inevitably come across. It's not a byproduct of physical law. It was *made* for profit and control. You can imagine any number of different directions that information automation could have gone if not designed as a product given this particular web platform landscape (that was itself designed and built, rather than natural). I don't know, spend even one billion dollars on a p2p information system where people can better co-curate information and social spaces so it can be found, conversationally, on demand, through the magic of other people. Spend even one billion dollars on foundational coding tools and frameworks that avoid the need for generating boilerplate altogether. The idea that technologies are morally neutral and it is only their use gives them moral valence is only coherent if ignoring their history, and maybe more importantly, the many alternate futures their existence foreclosed.
@jonny @gbargoud I don't think I understand the point "No it is not possible to separate the technology from the context of its production"
Isn't it safe to say that the tech has escaped its original intended purpose? Doesn't technology escape its original intended purpose all the time? This was kind of my takeaway watching James Burke and Connections.
@joshbuddy
@gbargoud
No it has not escaped its intended purpose. Its purpose was to provide a ubiquitous any-machine that cultivated dependence as a necessary passage point of information that once reaching saturation can be exploited for stupendous profit in a multi-sided market selling access to consumers, attention to advertisers, influence to.... and so on. It is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
Read da linked piece, its much more coherent and comprehensive than I'll be here.
@jonny @gbargoud I did read what you linked to btw, I was kind of hoping for more background and argumentation. I mean, I think it's an interesting argument "LLMs are made for info enclosure", and it would explain some of my sickening feelings regarding them, but I'd like to see some more facts rather than assertions.
but maybe expand this into something a little more full? then you might have something here.
@joshbuddy
You stayed up all night, read all 26,000 words with 276 references and concluded that it didn't have enough facts and wasn't full enough?
You stayed up all night, read all 26,000 words with 276 references and concluded that it didn't have enough facts and wasn't full enough?
@jonny I'm obviously looking at the wrong thing, sorry, I thought you meant the thread itself.
I see now you meant https://jon-e.net/surveillance-graphs/ Can't wait to read it! Thank you
Surveillance Graphs
Vulgarity and Cloud Orthodoxy in Linked Data Infrastructures - A critical history of the semantic web and linked data, grappling with the next generation of surveillance capitalism, where grand corporate knowledge graphs devour the planet and sell it back to us as a glassy-eyed LLM personal assistants, will we remain stuck in the ideology of the cloud, or can we have better dreams?