Just say what's on your mind and don't mind the votes. One thing you'll discover is that you're not alone in your views, whatever they are.
Few days ago I came across this bone chilling AI generated Metal Gear Solid 2 meme with Hideo Kojima characters talking about how the purpose of this technology is to make it impossible to tell what's real or fake, leading directly to regulation of information networks with identity verification so that all information and thought can be traced to their sources, with the government of course becoming the sole arbiter of truth. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this turned into reality.
The uppermost echelons of society have waged information warfare since the dawn of modern PR in the beginning of the 20'th century. Lots of theory on this have apparently been memoryholed, but it's easy to just start with the genealogy around Edward Bernais and the plutocracy and robber baron families still existing in the interwar period.
The masses don't really think about or realise that manufactured circus and foreverwars have been going on for a hundred years while a microscopic elite that controls the media and various organs in the state have been siphoning most wealth towards themselves in a increasingly dense cloud of smoke, while promoting rebranded ideologies for the genpop and systems of control that has become advanced cybernetic systems that steer the flow of information 100% from top to bottom.
The sad thing is that you could deduce this in the noise if you visited the last remnants of actual research journalism on the internet, but that will end now.
So where is one going to get to know the powerstructures of the world? Old physical libraries only, some dude on the corner, some "crazy guy" with a harddisk from before AI took over.
Are you claiming that powerful people only started using their power a hundred years ago when "modern PR" was formed? That nobody ever worried about information before that?
Why did you pick that as your starting point? To make things seem like a linear worsening? But even wealth inequality, which you talk about at length, got better before getting worse again during that time frame in the US... so I'm having trouble following the claim.
The Dawn of PR is just a good starting point. You can read Machiavelli or study the politics of the roman empire - all hierarchical societies tend to function like this, it's a like a mathematical distribution.
The New Deal along with social democracy in europe was a bargaining deal against the revolutionary forces existing at the time. After this was stamped out the Gini coefficient started to rise when the masses had no alternatives and global trade and outsourcing increasingly obscurred the falling realwages.
Who are the "microscopic elite that controls the media"? How many people are in the "uppermost echelons of society" to where they try to influence other people?
From my middle-of-the-road perspective, everyone is trying to change how everyone else thinks, from the small insignificant details to a cult-like brainwash. Even here and now both you and I are trying to change each others and everyone who reads this's mind.
I see so much calling out of "elites" with a negative connotation, yet anyone can post anything, and everyone can ignore it. Is it general paranoia? Do you know who these people are? How are they special/different, and why should we be scared of them?
From a european perspective even asking the question "why should be scared of these so called elites" is so bizarre it's almost frightening, i'm sorry.
It's a testament to the absurd amount of philanthropic whitewashing, PR and media control these billionaries hold.
"Elites" have conspired to exploit the masses throughout 5000 years of civilisation, it's simply a fact of history.
It's almost physically impossible to comprehend the power a group of billionaires has to pull and push issues, narratives, law, war and discourse in general, especially when the masses have zero organisation as a counterweight, and when numbers like "trillion" just doesn't register in any meaningful way in regular people.
If you study history you’ll notice that groups and their leaders are rising and falling, conquering and pillaging and then losing it all. The world is too dynamic for your reductive theory to fit in.
Elites compete with each other. They don’t sing kumbaya and cooperatively share the keys to power.
I agree, and the world is dynamic, it's just not as dynamic as especially american collective consciousness would have you believe.
There is very little social mobility, wealth transfers very solidly between generations at the absolute top and organisation around PR and Politics is tightly integrated in this class.
Off course you can always fall from grace, but that does not in any way diminish the collective power of this class. That's why it's called a class and not a "person" or one singular family or group of people that clownish conspiracy theories would have you believe.
A good primer to the historical context could be this new book from Cambridge: "The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity".
Elites have always formed tightly knit clubs that most couldn't get into.
This is not a reductive theory, it's based on solid academic research on wealth transfer and academic books like the one above.
It's a almost like a biological or physical property of advanced civilizations - like social patterns seen emerging in larger groups of monkeys, or a precursor to the labour divisions seen in ant hives - there's clear distinctions set fourth for an individual at birth or because of location or family, and no amount of ideology is able to change this unless very, very lucky - this is mirrored in the social mobility data.
While they will absolutely backstab each other given an opportunity (see the VCs who caused a bank run that primarily affected other VCs), they do seem pretty chummy. Davos is quite literally the summit of the elites.
But is the summit "let's all get together and stomp on the poor while holding hands", or is it just another high stakes poker game to show off who's winning or losing, making alliances and seeing who talks to who?
Assuming Kings/Feudal Lords can be considered elites, we were taught that these systems formed as a means of protection and overall ability to not worry about a lot of aspects of life- raiders, setting up trade routes, negotiating prices, farming, etc.
I see a direct mirroring in today's corporations. If you join a big company, it's because you don't want to risk branching out on your own. You exchange lots of potential money for a steady paycheck, and you don't have to worry about things like finding customers, figuring out taxes, etc.
It's clear that humans need some sort of hierarchy, and I just don't see why we should be frightened of the people whose skill is organization/mediation between people. I surely don't want to play the power game with them, and I don't think it's because of their brainwashing?
Isn't that just Europeans being antisemitic again?
Actual American billionaires lose half their fortunes in divorces (Gates and Bezos), are retired and don't need to care about controlling any media (…Gates and Bezos), or spend all day posting on Twitter (Musk, who is currently under the Rasputin-like hold of a retired postal worker named "catturd2".) They only have 24 hours a day and few of them seem to be secretly manipulating the media.
I mean, Murdoch does manipulate the media, but not secretly. It's completely obvious he's doing it! And nobody is tricked by it, they happily participate.
If you excise the concern about "did a government make this tech secretly for their own purposes," do the problems and possibilities it raises actually differ if it emerged from "pure research" or a conspiracy?
I don't believe anyone needed a conspiracy to try to make it impossible to tell what's real or fake, people have been trying to use technology to do that for decades (if not centuries) all on their own.
Yeah, the "government conspiracy" part is the least believable one but the resulting effects on society are the same. Within days of this technology showing up, people were already making fake AI generated recordings of politicians talking gleefully about their wonderful experiences in Epstein's island. How long is it gonna take for some politician to want to regulate this stuff? How would they do it? Mandatory identity verification is plausible.
In my country politicians are talking about regulating social media and the internet due to "fake news". They even created a government propaganda agency to "combat misinformation online", basically people paid to defend the government against information warfare. It's way too real.
Exactly, conspiracies ignore opportunists simply existing. People reacting to new information that favors them. It ignores that there are different opportunitists for every possible outcome. Every possible administration, every possible industry leveraged, every possible geopolitical outcome.
Conspiracies rely on coordination, and a counterproductive view that makes no difference in how we got to the outcome.
MGS2 and MGS4 explore ideas about AI, misinformation, the media, and society that are only now being discussed in the mainstream. The concept of an autonomous AGI that generates and filters news stories to provoke humanity into a state of constant division and war is fascinating and worth exploring IMO.
Death Stranding also explores ideas of what it means to find connection in a disconnected world that I think are relevant today (case in point, an article about social disconnection[1] is on the front page of HN as I write this comment)
I think those games are underrated works of speculative fiction relative to how much airtime books like The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Ready Player One get in conversations about nascent technology.
Kojima is kind of prescient, he was talking about AI and fake news years before it became mainstream, and Death Stranding was scarily well-timed with COVID.
> The concept of an autonomous AGI that generates and filters news stories to provoke humanity into a state of constant division and war is fascinating and worth exploring IMO.
You don't have to speculate much. Facebook and Twitter's recommendation algorithms are doing that fairly well already.
Metal Gear Rising fits that category as well, I think. I replayed it recently and Raiden's conversations with Blade Wolf, an AI that is initially serving the bad guys under threat of deletion, are absolutely fascinating and felt maybe prescient, and at least very thought provoking. I remember saying to my partner wow, I think I just met ChatGPT in an angry robot.
My TLDR is, this AI character says the line "Perhaps the day will come when conversing with AIs, too, is considered perfectly normal."
>Blade Wolf: I may analyze orders, but I may not disobey them. Should I disobey a direct order, my memory would be wiped. I must destroy you.
>Raiden: What would an AI know about freedom…
Later on, after you've freed him, there's a lot more. Really, I think it's worth replaying these games at this moment in time to see the commentary firsthand.
>Raiden: Let me ask you something: What do you think you're doing here? I mean, why are you working with me?
>Blade Wolf: Because I choose to. I owe a debt, and I wish to repay it.
>Raiden: A debt, huh...? How...human of you.
>Wolf: I contest that statement. Many humans possess little or no sense of obligation at all. And many are entirely willing to trample their fellow man for personal gain.
That conversation probably comments more on the nature of humanity than of AI, but some of the others rhyme with the present in a rather intriguing way. Like when Raiden asks Wolf if he recognizes someone, and Wolf is unsure.
>Wolf: I have no "database," Raiden. The symbol grounding capabilities or my neuro-AI allow me to identify faces in only the vaguest of terms. I can judge whether "I think I may have seen him before," but I do not have the accuracy of a database.
>Raiden: That's ridiculous. You're an AI...
>Wolf: An AI modeled after the human brain, and thus as flexible and occasionally vague as any human's. Of this man, however, I have no recollection. I do not believe I have encountered him before...Most likely.
That conversation felt like the complaints people on this board voice about GPT!
> I still have relatively little communication experience with humans. My ability to read emotions not explicitly expressed by speech is lacking.
>An AI never lies....I have yet to see evidence to the contrary...But indeed, perhaps "never lies" would be an overstatement.
>An optical neuro-AI is fundamentally similar to an actual human brain. Whether they lie or not is another question, but certainly they are capable of incorrect statements.
Or the discussion about LLM...er, I mean neuro-AI driven synthetic pets, which sound like Replika in a robot dog:
>Wolf: Other AIs as conversant as I are a possibility, yes. Robotic pets with neuro-AIs are already on the market. And I understand research and development are underway to create a model capable of conversation. Do not be surprised if such a pet becomes available before too long.
>Raiden: (Hmm) If that becomes commonplace...Hard to imagine.
>Wolf: Is it? The human race has willingly embraced all of its other inventions so far. Steam engines, electricity, the Internet, cyborgs...Perhaps the day will come when conversing with AIs, too, is considered perfectly normal.
Few days ago I came across this bone chilling AI generated Metal Gear Solid 2 meme with Hideo Kojima characters talking about how the purpose of this technology is to make it impossible to tell what's real or fake, leading directly to regulation of information networks with identity verification so that all information and thought can be traced to their sources, with the government of course becoming the sole arbiter of truth. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this turned into reality.