the reason this matters to me is because reactionary anti-AI chatter is devolving into a kind of “well, the fact that it *could* be true says something about society”, when it’s like, no, man, i don’t think some crank making a YT video about brain prisons floating in space says anything at all
idk, man, if i were an editor at, say, the daily mail or any of the other quasi-reputable outlets that ran this horseshit, i might do a double take and have some questions about the prison of the future floating in fucking space
like, both anti-AI hysteria and insane AI boosterism lead you to the same conclusion, that this technology is existentially dangerous, and any treatment of this kind of completely fictional horseshit as serious helps feed those (baseless) fears
the boosters' ability to really be as ominous and joyless as possible is quite something to behold, because there are genuinely other things you could promote.
at the point that you have actual, real startups raising millions of real dollars to create a device that leverages AI to allow users to manipulate their dreams, not to mention the "we're creating a safe digital god" startups, this really isn't THAT far outside the tech culture mainstream though
I assumed people would realize immediately that this is not a real thing and never will be... but I feel the same way about several AI startups that are getting funding! Though particularly absurd, this "idea" absolutely reflects a level of ignorance of the human experience we see elsewhere in AI.
i mean, if we read about a startup promising teleportation or star trek replicators or wearables that harness the force, we’d rightly just mock the shit out of it, but an awful lot of people see “AI” and immediately jump to THIS WOULD BE SO BAD instead of “this is comical horseshit!”
I don't think "AI is involved" is the part of this that makes people think it would be bad. I guess I can only speak for myself here, but the horror of this spectacle had zero to do with overestimating AI and everything to do with misunderstanding/underappreciating humans and humanity.
The idea that "rehabilitation" is something you can program into someone betrays a horrific mental model for human thought and behavior. The mechanism through which this would happen (implanting false memories, forget the AI part) is equally grotesque. The potential for abuse is another layer.
sure, but, like, i’m not going to weigh in on how dr. dre. d. d.’s futuristic concept for megacities overseen by heavily armed judges could lead to a dystopian nightmare for americans
I'm going to mandate that a computer chip with the Ten Commandments engraved on it be implanted into every convicted criminal's brain. That should do it.
having watched the tenor and tone of comments on this story over the day, i kind of disagree! like, people are mixing their real concerns about real AI into this farcical horseshit story, the byproduct of which is lending just a little legitmacy to the latter, and over time, that matters a lot
like, if everyone treated it like the bad science fiction ripoff it is, and treated it with that level of seriousness, it wouldn’t have been a thing, even for five minutes. like, we don’t spend our days fretting over the philosophical ramifications of event horizon.
no, I agree, it just didn't occur to me that that angle is what so many people would latch onto... hence the "tech guys understand anything about the human experience challenge" part of my thread. That's pretty common though, the most anti-AV people are way too optimistic about what they can do too.
Yeah - I mean *this* thing is horrifying for the specific sci-fi ways that have led it to be a plot point in multiple sci-fi horror episodes.
The AI element just marks it as something of the present moment.
I do believe there's "not a real" as in "not in the realm of feasibility" and also "not feasible but that doesn't stop some scam artist—excuse me, entrepreneur—from claiming they're going to do it"
yeah, so the outrage for me is that anyone anywhere would think this is a good idea, regardless of whether it is possible or not. Normies will likely never have a good read on what is and isn't possible in tech, but they can (and should) think through whether the idea is even a remotely good one.
that’s the point i’m getting at, though — regular normal people need to short circuit this shit at the pass, it’s not even worth considering whether it could be good or bad because it’s so flatly impossible. it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, it’s like arguing about what sports team god follows
like, there was at least a whole page of legit-looking search results reporting this same story about something that is not 10 years in the future or 100 or 1000 but something that *is never capable of happening*
I think this technology is existentially dangerous, but largely the same way the internet is: our information environment is being completely drowned in worthless sludge.
The regular old internet was already doing this and AI only promises to supercharge the process.
