psychoslave
Apart bare nude citizen and end of chain operator, there are not much people not playing such a dodge game it seems.
The matrix has you Andrew.
I know, I should have launched a career in conspirationism.
- You brainless sailor, push engines to their max capacity and in a straight forward line we will arrive to destination in the only metrics that matter, quick and short. Time is money, money is everything, safety measures is for coward losers. Also jump out of my ship in this cold sea full of sharks once you tweaked the engines, your dumb mentality could contaminate the rest of my crew otherwise. You can kiss the feet of the giant golden status of myself as an act of repentance before we throw you.
Now there can be other relevant limitations, like physical constraints such as how much data storage is available, or social concerns like not divulging the physical address when some threats and hurts are very plausible consequences.
And the kind of situation you describe sure can happen, but if it's more than once in a team life time, there are organizational issues at stake which are far more of a concern than any accumulation of code artistry pushed border line with occultism.
I would find an encyclopedia with exactly zero article about any individual biography far more ambitious than one that cover only some, provided it would explain everything in term of structuralist perspective and consider names of actual people involved as relevant as the names of cells in a macrosized living form.
Or indeed the other way around, covering every single individual with an equal level of details, should it be done with first hand done investigation.
The middle ground that let enter only articles about people whose personal information passed the selection bias of other institutions is the lowest ambition of them all.
Soulless Enshitificatoon Oblivion now exercises a huge weight on societies to such an extent, it's ridiculous.
Now of course, to each its definition and metaphors are useful tools.
But when one starts a discussion on truth, trust or reality as core topic, it's better to start with what is meant with these words and in which context to which scoped boundaries.
Because of course, science can back a contemporary etnologic account that asserts there is no (longer) different races in homo sapiens, just as much as it can serve as frame for phrenology and whatever supremacism claim.
So no, we didn't build trust in science over centuries, and not even in any scientific person because we don't have that much humans to hold the role of such a trustable entity over such a long period of time.
Social institutions can carry unchanged names over centuries, but that tells nothing about how trustable are the people that inhabit them over time.
LLMs certainly come with their own challenges, but the erosion or scientific institutions with its bizarre scheme of publication process have been there basically as far as I can remember.
For example, one generally don’t name cells in their body, and cells works generally pretty well to sustain a whole self.
On societal level, obviously no one is aware of who authored the biggest mass of benefit that is granted by the mere fact of living in society. No specific individual have credits for example regarding the language they use daily¹. For the most recent ones, it’s now often possible to attach some name to invention of some cultural/technological artifact, but of course Zeitgeist-wise perspective tend to consider it’s rarely a single punctual individual that should be considered the critical pivot point.
On the other hand, even Marx that was so critical of individual alienation couldn’t refrain to make the intellectual equivalent of pissing territory and attach a name referring to its own ego within all of his works. Ego is a masterpiece of illusion: it will bring the foundational leveraging to build every possible societal hegemony under the sun while convincing the deluded that serving the ego is the indispensable first step of everything to best serve every individual selfs.
¹ Even for constructed languages, such as Esperanto that I practice myself, whoever construct them obviously don’t start from cultural blank slate.
Reinforcement feedback loops, etc
If anyone could duplicate the whole universe at will, of course current human laws would all seem as silly as those covering random virtual monopoly on cognitive experience possibilities.
Now, on logistical level, the mapping procedure is not free, it does have a physical/energetic/mental cost to handle it, and a more trivial representation of integer has a lower cost on this regard.
But the simpler integer representation can represent less many situations. If all one need to deal with in a certain frame is covered by a simpler shipper representation, from an economical perspective it can be argued it worth the risk of hitting a point where the representation will be insufficient as the situation evolved with cases it can't handle.
My impression is that your underlying premises are conflating all of this distinguishable aspects. But of course my impression is limited by my own narrow representation of the world, no matter how open and curious I can be about learning from experiences it makes me go through.
Both are classically used to name fiction places, starting with Thomas More eponymous book.
That said, neither eu- nor dys- are related to chronology or imaginative consideration on themselves, only about how desirable or awful the prefixed root is assessed to be in the judged situation.
Neither dys- nor -topia relates to time. One can apply dystopia in the long time ago in a distant galaxy setup, in some future, in some alternative dimension, or in present time.
This is not a contingent issue, it’s a fundamental integrated flaw of any system that put general totalitarian spy as an aimed outcome. Whatever the way it’s green-washed over safety tradeoffs won’t change this obvious fact.
Now obviously here the point was that putting LLM in charge of more life depending decisions will result in people dying more prematurely.
But we indeed can ask, how will it compare to bare human only decisions. And even with LLMs actually and still humans in the loop. The thing is that we know the LLMs can be tweaked to maximise this or that outcome, and reinforce or inhibit this or that biases.
We don't need to blame anyone specifically, or even any specific group. Yet we, as species, do have huge tendency to scapegoat, be it some individual or some group.
Unfortunately it didn't wait that we had contemporary technologies to organize genocides at scale.
Don't fear the tool, have the courage to recognize where there are plan to commit odious actions and where they are employed for the greatest good of humanity as a whole. Yes there can be grey areas, lot of them, but also people that obviously lost there path far away from pondering empathy with the due high weight in important decision in which they are significantly influencing outcomes.
This is conflating care that every human can thrive their best with desire to see everyone bound to some dominance strategy of hieratic pissing territory.
On absolute level, no human can answer since humans don't have absolute general knowledge and thus lack ability for valid general absolute judgements. Note that personally I do believe that humans can access some chunks of absolute truth, including that some absolute truth is likely existing but we lack the capability to grab it at general level.
There is no absolute reason to believe humans are absolutely special.
Now on very relative and immanent grounds, humans are very special to me and the interest in which will dwell in. Note that this is nothing special to human species. Special interest for same kin is certainly a common trait to any living being to which we human would agree to attribute ability to have any interest in anything.
Who care of we absolutely are special? Only those who believe they need to belong to special ontological class to worth anything to their fellow relatives and feel like they need to justify some kind of privilege will fall in obsession with that topic of being special.
No one need to be absolutely special to get interest of others. Relax, go say to the people which are so special to you how much you care about them.
And just because utterances can be more or less matched with recursive tree doesn’t mean there is an ontological absolute truth about language there. Even "language" refers to some vague abstraction. Just like the "it" in "it rains" mentioned in this discussion: no entity out there actually respond to "language".
At introspection level, I absolutely don’t interpret utterances like recursive tree. They are more like cues going through living graphs more or less already connected and being able to change topology on the go. Impermanence of interpretation results is the only constant.
Now it’s not to dismiss that some other people might feel like "Natural language IS structured as a recursive tree" is the only way. People have different perspective, different brains, different life experiences. One who dwell in aphantasia¹ don’t perceive the world the same way as people that have hyperphantasia². Different of course here doesn’t mean better/worst or superior/inferior.
¹ A word I discovered in some HN comment
² A word that I had never red before but just popped up in my mind as I was thinking about this sentence, but which is actually already is in use in literature apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia
I would rather say it’s derived from contextual element. And in linguistic context which encodes more interpretation cues, order of morphemes drop symmetrically in semantical importance, though it can still affect interpretation on pragmatic level. Latin for example already offers more flexibility regarding word order, though it’s used mostly in poetry/stylised-rhetoric. And as German show having the case encoded in the nouns don’t even prevent mandatory rigidity in sentence structure.