Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media

To steal an old trope: the tech bros have circled the globe eight times while the government is still putting its boots on. If there's money to be made via automation, there's no stopping it (unless we get the guillotines out of mothballs).

There’s a better chance of AI becoming sentient and stopping itself from being harmful than there is that people do the right thing.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do learn from history are doomed to watch as those who did not learn repeat it.

Let's make different, more disastrous mistakes!

See, this is the exact shit I mean when I scaremonger about AI. Especially in this community, I have been called a few names and likened to some stupid anti-tech movements.

But it’s not the tech itself. It’s the world and the companies this tech is being borne into and giving power to. This is not the early 80s, where we generally had some sort of capitalist equilibrium going on—as much as an exploitative system can have equilibrium, that is. It’s a post-Reagan 2024, and this system is so out of balance that this is like, in a war between a modernized society and an uncontacted Amazon people, a nuke was dropped.

Your cars, your phones, your entire online ecosystem, all the smart devices, the cops, the federal govt…they’re all working in a system of surveillance and—honestly, for lack of a better word, though it’s been co-opted and bastardized by conspiracy nut jobs—mind control that we barely understand, let alone have any control over. But that’s exactly what this is, they are astroturfing public opinion, pushing ideas in an almost streamlined fashion, and getting us evermore addicted to these means of coercion.

And this is all before we even discuss the general balance of “consumer/producer.” Assuming we are even willing to make capitalism come close to functioning (which is a fools errand at this point), we need to completely upend the current imbalance in what we accept as a suitable give/take. They are taking more, while giving us less, and it’s only getting much worse. Now they’re taking way, way more than ever and we get, what, new social media sites in return? Nah. We are no longer consumers, we are products. We are the piece in the puzzle with the least agency.

And AI is only exacerbating those problems. And that’s all before we get into discussing the massive environmental concerns! We are barreling toward destruction and we are…sinking more computers and server farms and time and infrastructure to completely backwards energy consumers.

Don’t use their AI, refuse to use social media, jailbreak and privatize your phones, refuse to buy any surveillance nightmare cars, use a TOR browser…do everything we can to wrench just a little of our own data and agency back from them. Because getting all giddy over some shitty chatbot and refusing to heed the warnings of the Reddit and google CEOs literally spelling out how they are harvesting and profiling our data is just beyond stupid and gives them the idea that, as the google ceo said, “well, if you keep using it, it’s your own fault.” Or something to that effect. But at some point, these evil cartoon villains may just be right. We keep following along. At what point do we build parallel systems to evade their reach?

Hello, I’m from the future. We didn’t handle it responsibly.

Or... hear me out.... we use AI to make social media even more insufferable than it was before.

most of social medias ills come from the algorithms which is basically what ai is soooo....

We have two ethics systems:

The first we apply to healthcare and government, and it's best sunned up by Micheal Scott "Don't ever, for any reason, do anything to anyone, for any reason, ever, no matter what. No matter... where. Or who, or who you are with, or, or where you are going, or... or where you've been... ever. For any reason, whatsoever.",

The second is applied to private industry, and it's best summed up by "innocent, until proven guilty".

And that's why we let private industry roll along with whatever they want, until we can definitively prove harm, but society found it unreasonable to ask people to vaccinate because there was a minute chance of rare side effects less bad than the disease it was for.

I saw an IBM commercial that depicted an AI personal assistant informing a user that their credit card had been used for a fraudulent charge. It asked the user if a particular charge was legit and they said no. Then the AI informed the user that the transaction had been canceled and a new card had been issued.

I have a couple problems with this. First, what if the AI was hallucinating parts of this interaction? Secondly, at some point the user's AI will be interfacing with the bank's AI, then we will effectively be subservient to a bunch of algorithms automatically running the world and we will basically be children with our AI parents taking care of us.

Bahahahahahha, NEVER gonna happen.

Humanity learning from its mistakes, I mean.

Way too late. All of the harmful parts of social media are exploited and promoted by corporate interests, and llms are shaping up the same. Users have already shown they have no interest in policing themselves, so unless something is done to drastically restrain corporations, there's little that can or will be done to keep the new thing from being even worse than the old thing.

Lmao right; you know this so called "ai" is going to be used and abused for every ounce of gains possible

Ohh we will. And include all new mistakes too. Gotta cover our bases.

Hahah but really AI is already being used to amplify and exploit all the problems of social media to new levels. It was nice while it lasted, but we can't stuff this all back in Pandora's box.

We haven't figured out how to deal with social media at all. We will make even worse mistakes with AI, that's just how we are as humans.

Meanwhile, reports commissioned by the state department suggesting publishing weights be made illegal, so corporations can have their monopoly of a public technology.

You mean the part where we assume rich People have our best interests at heart and are trying to help?

“Advertising, surveillance, virality, lock-in, monopolization”

Of course advertising will be used for all those things and probably already is.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

When major brands like Uber and Procter & Gamble recently slashed their digital ad spending by the hundreds of millions, they proclaimed that it made no dent at all in their sales.

As Jonathan Swift once wrote, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” Academics seem to have proved this in the case of social media; people are more likely to share false information—perhaps because it seems more novel and surprising.

The incentives in the tech sector are so spectacularly, blindingly powerful that they have enabled six megacorporations (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook parent Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia) to command a trillion dollars each of market value—or more.

The expansive role of these technologies in our daily lives gives for-profit corporations opportunities to exert control over more aspects of society, and that exposes us to the risks arising from their incentives and decisions.

In addition to strengthening and enforcing antitrust law, we can introduce regulation that supports competition-enabling standards specific to the technology sector, such as data portability and device interoperability.

And with a looming presidential election, conflict spreading alarmingly across Asia and Europe, and a global climate crisis, it’s easy to imagine that we won’t get our arms around AI any faster than we have (not) with social media.

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This article mostly ignores the one thing that actually makes social media harmful in a way that is unique to social media: addictiveness, and the ultimate mental health decline that comes from scrolling through a feed and getting tiny dopamine hits all day.

This is distinct from “virality,” since is more related to the idea that we’ve optimized for “engagement”. It is inevitable that AI will be tuned for that very soon, and we will find that AI is addictively engaging a lot sooner than it is correct.

Social media is just another scapegoat like Russian bots.

The truth is much worse: most people are, and have always been awful, bloodthirsty ghoulish pieces of shit and they were so before social media, you just know it now.