I’d expect George to weather this future better than most of us. I don’t see evidence of mental health issues in his post? Sounds pretty spot on to me. But then maybe I have issues..

He definitely has the smarts to figure stuff out, yes.

It will just be necessary to separate the emotions from the reality to enable one to react properly and decisively against a threat that primarily attacks emotions, stories, etc.

LLMs are story engines. Stories are the exploit vector. Language is stories.

___

There are very real things wrapped in stories, but one can only truly tackle them by unwrapping first.

Truth. And I am very nervous about the future, so of course it resonated with me for that reason alone

Not sure if that helps you or makes it worse, but you can probably relatively safely assume that you personally have little (if at all) control over the future at large.

You do however have control over your personal future, your friend- and relationships, your neighbors and your local social circles.

Unless you're in the bay area I guess, in which case I am part sorry part full of schadenfreude. I am not confident that healthy local social relationships are possible there.

What´s the substance? Seems like we see these minor differences in the enthusiasms of comfortable people pop up here every week

I would say that these quotes hold a lot of stuff one could explore after resolving the emotional undercurrents.

> AI that can play a whole society in hours can manufacture entire histories, years of archives of daily newspapers, and an Internet that never happened. The dead Internet theory is coming true before our eyes. Now I can still see the bots, soon I won’t be able to.

> A media landscape that is botted and microtargeted to all hell, nonsensical elections where the only thing people agree on is the names of candidates. Massive dumps of corporate slacks and intranets. (come on Russian kids, grab an abliterated AI and do a hacking!)

> The Internet era is over. Your life will never be the same. The chaos will come for the resistance as well as the fascists; it’s unclear who it will hurt more.

Fair enough, I think, maybe I was uncharitable. Seems kind of bog standard pdooming, abstract and undirected towards political action. Maybe my objection is that the whole "chaos/order" thing isn't based on any sort of analysis, or maybe the evaluation here is a little breathless. I guess if it's just a complaint or rant, that's cool, but like the first poster, this reads a little "Guy with a sandwich board on the corner" for me.

My wife and I had a long running debate: is psychosis socially transmissible or is it purely mechanical? QAnon answered the debate conclusively: there is an entire class of psychosis that is socially transmissible. I believe AI is driving another psychotic mass disorder among the ai world, and at some level people need to walk away.

It's literally just tensor multiplications at the end of the day, generating likely outcomes in useful ways.

i'm sure there is some pure-psychosis where you are alone in a field and start thinking you don't need water or food to live or don't need to sleep or something. but more often "psychosis" seems to be used to refer to a narrative deviation from accepted stories of society.

these stories shift and change over time and have a massive impact on the people living and using the stories (religion, science, technology, economy, etc), both for good and for bad.

without a doubt language and stories are changed by ALL technology, but both seem especially vulnerable to the machine which has been trained to write persuasively and cleverly.

> I think at this point it is safe to say that the whole bubble is having deep mental health problems

I'm starting to arrive at the same conclusion. It's very, very difficult to see the transition from intelligence to madness. You really do need to be connected (and close!) to people outside of tech, especially in the humanities, to fully grasp the insanity of this industry's development and evolution. The tech industry is, broadly, starting to be reviled in developed countries. I'm regularly having to qualify that I don't work in big tech when I share what I do.

When I connect with people who largely only have connections in tech, I'm finding I relate less and less with their thinking. I think "AI psychosis" is a very apt term.