1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

Gag you with soccom biggov overlords...

Fight Back Against The Global HOMOGENIZATION Regime...

Before they throw *you* in the blender and render you down into goo,
literally...



“The UnCommunist Manifesto” outlined the utopian communist dream as
the grand homogenization of man:

    If only everyone were a series of numbers on a spreadsheet, or
automatons with the same opinion, it would be so much easier to have
paradise on earth. You could ration out just enough for everyone, and
then we’d be all equally miserable proletariats.



If We're Not Careful, The AI Revolution Could Become The "Great Homogenization"

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/how-the-ai-revolution-could-become-the-great-homogenization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Police
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot
https://markbisone.substack.com/p/screen-grab
https://www.amazon.com/UnCommunist-Manifesto-Message-Responsibility-Liberty/dp/0578396300

https://www.reuters.com/technology/g7-leaders-confirm-need-governance-generative-ai-technology-2023-05-19/
https://medium.com/jigsaw/reducing-toxicity-in-large-language-models-with-perspective-api-c31c39b7a4d7
https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/


As artificial intelligence grows, so do attempts to control it. But,
if we can differentiate the real risks from the fake risks, this
technology could be used to encourage diversity of thought and
ideas...

The world is changing before our very eyes. Artificial intelligence
(AI) is a paradigm-shifting technological breakthrough, but probably
not for the reasons you might think or imagine.

You’ve probably heard something along the lines of, “Artificial
general intelligence (AGI) is around the corner,” or, “Now that
language is solved, the next step is conscious AI.”

Well… I’m here to tell you that those concepts are both red herrings.
They are either the naive delusions of technologists who believe God
is in the circuits, or the deliberate incitement of fear and hysteria
by more malevolent people with ulterior motives.

I do not think AGI is a threat or that we have an “AI safety problem,”
or that we’re around the corner from some singularity with machines.

But…

I do believe this technological paradigm shift poses a significant
threat to humanity — which is in fact, about the only thing I can
somewhat agree on with the mainstream — but for completely different
reasons.

To learn what they are, let’s first try to understand what's really
happening here.

INTRODUCING… THE STOCHASTIC PARROT!

Technology is an amplifier. It makes the good better, and the bad worse.

Just as a hammer is technology that can be used to build a house or
beat someone over the head, computers can be used to document ideas
that change the world, or they can be used to operate central bank
digital currencies (CDBCs) that enslave you into crazy, communist cat
ladies working at the European Central Bank.

The same goes for AI. It is a tool. It is a technology. It is not a
new lifeform, despite what the lonely nerds who are calling for
progress to shut down so desperately want to believe.

What makes generative AI so interesting is not that it is sentient,
but that it’s the first time in our history that we are “speaking” or
communicating with something other than a human being, in a coherent
fashion. The closest we’ve been to that before this point has been
with… parrots.

Yes: parrots!

You can train a parrot to kind of talk and talk back, and you can kind
of understand it, but because we know it’s not really a human and
doesn’t really understand anything, we’re not so impressed.

But generative AI… well, that’s a different story. We’ve been
acquainted with it for six months now (in the mainstream) and we have
no real idea how it works under the hood. We type some words, and it
responds like that annoying, politically-correct, midwit nerd who you
know from class… or your average Netflix show.

In fact, you’ve probably even spoken with someone like this during
support calls to Booking.com, or any other service in which you’ve had
to dial in or web chat. As such, you’re immediately shocked by the
responses.

“Holy shit,” you tell yourself. “This thing speaks like a real person!”

The English is immaculate. No spelling mistakes. Sentences make sense.
It is not only grammatically accurate, but semantically so, too.

Holy shit! It must be alive!

Source: Author

Little do you realize that you are speaking to a highly-sophisticated,
stochastic parrot. As it turns out, language is a little more
rules-based than what we all thought, and probability engines can
actually do an excellent job of emulating intelligence through the
frame or conduit of language.

The law of large numbers strikes again, and math achieves another victory!

But… what does this mean? What the hell is my point?

That this is not useful? That it’s proof it’s not a path to AGI?

Not necessarily, on both counts.

There is lots of utility in such a tool. In fact, the greatest utility
probably lies in its application as “MOT,” or “Midwit Obsolescence
Technology.” Woke journalists and the countless “content creators” who
have for years been talking a lot but saying nothing, are now like
dinosaurs watching the comet incinerate everything around them. It’s a
beautiful thing. Life wins again.

Of course, these tools are also great for ideating, coding faster,
doing some high-level learning, etc.

But from an AGI and consciousness standpoint, who knows? There
mayyyyyyyyyyy be a pathway there, but my spidey sense tells me we’re
way off, so I’m not holding my breath. I think consciousness is so
much more complex, and to think we’ve conjured it up with probability
machines is some strange blend of ignorant, arrogant, naive and… well…
empty.

So, what the hell is my problem and what’s the risk?

ENTER THE AGE OF THE LUI

Remember what I said about tools.

Computers are arguably the most powerful tool mankind has built. And
computers have gone through the following evolution:

    Punch cards

    Command line

    Graphical user interface, i.e., point and click

    Mobile, i.e., thumbs and tapping

Source: Author

And now, we’re moving into the age of the LUI, or “Language User Interface.”

This is the big paradigm shift. It’s not AGI, but LUI. Moving forward,
every app we interact with will have a conversational interface, and
we will no longer be limited by the bandwidth of how fast our fingers
can tap on keys or screens.

Speaking “language” is orders of magnitude faster than typing and
tapping. Thinking is probably another level higher, but I’m not
putting any electrodes into my head anytime soon. In fact, LUIs
probably obsolete the need for Neuralink-type tech because the risks
associated with implanting chips into your brain will outweigh any
marginal benefit over just speaking.

In any case, this decade we will go from tapping on graphical user
interfaces, to talking to our apps.

And therein lies the danger.

In the same way Google today determines what we see in searches, and
Twitter, Facebook, Tik Tok and Instagram all “feed us” through their
feeds; generative AI will tomorrow determine the answers to every
question we have.

The screen not only becomes the lens through which you ingest
everything about the world. The screen becomes your model of the
world.

Mark Bisone wrote a fantastic article about this recently, which I
urge you to read:

    “The problem of ‘screens’ is actually a very old one. In many ways
it goes back to Plato’s cave, and perhaps is so deeply embedded in the
human condition that it precedes written languages. That’s because
when we talk about a screen, we’re really talking about the
transmission of an illusory model in an editorialized form.

    “The trick works like this: You are presented with the image of a
thing (and these days, with the sound of it), which its presenter
either explicitly tells you or strongly implies is a window to the
Real. The shadow and the form are the same, in other words, and the
former is to be trusted as much as any fragment of reality that you
can directly observe with your sensory organs.”

And, for those thinking that “this won’t happen for a while,” well
here are the bumbling fools making a good attempt at it.

THE ‘GREAT HOMOGENIZATION’

Imagine every question you ask, every image you request, every video
you conjure up, every bit of data you seek, being returned in such a
way that is deemed “safe,” “responsible” or “acceptable” by some
faceless “safety police.”

Imagine every bit of information you consume has been transformed into
some lukewarm, middle version of the truth, that every opinion you ask
for is not really an opinion or a viewpoint, but some inoffensive,
apologetic response that doesn’t actually tell you anything (this is
the benign, annoying version) or worse, is some ideology wrapped in a
response so that everything you know becomes some variation of what
the manufacturers of said “safe AI” want you to think and know.

Imagine you had modern Disney characters, like those clowns from “The
Eternals” movie, as your ever-present intellectual assistants. It
would make you “dumb squared.”

“The UnCommunist Manifesto” outlined the utopian communist dream as
the grand homogenization of man:

    If only everyone were a series of numbers on a spreadsheet, or
automatons with the same opinion, it would be so much easier to have
paradise on earth. You could ration out just enough for everyone, and
then we’d be all equally miserable proletariats.

This is like George Orwell’s thought police crossed with “Inception,”
because every question you had would be perfectly captured and
monitored, and every response from the AI could incept an ideology in
your mind. In fact, when you think about it, that’s what information
does. It plants seeds in your mind.

This is why you need a diverse set of ideas in the minds of men! You
want a flourishing rainforest in your mind, not some mono-crop field
of wheat, with deteriorated soil, that is susceptible to weather and
insects, and completely dependent on Monsanto (or Open AI or Pfizer)
for its survival. You want your mind to flourish and for that you need
idea-versity.

This was the promise of the internet. A place where anyone can say
anything. The internet has been a force for good, but it is under
attack. Whether that’s been the de-anonymization of social profiles
like those on Twitter and Facebook, and the creeping KYC across all
sorts of online platforms, through to the algorithmic vomit that is
spewed forth from the platforms themselves. We tasted that in all its
glory from 2020. And it seems to be only getting worse.

The push by WEF-like organizations to institute KYC for online
identities, and tie it to a CBDC and your iris is one alternative, but
it’s a bit overt and explicit. After the pushback on medical
experimentation of late, such a move may be harder to pull off. An
easier move could be to allow LUIs to take over (as they will, because
they’re a superior user experience) and in the meantime create an “AI
safety council” that will institute “safety” filters on all major
large language models (LLMs).

Don’t believe me? Our G7 overlords are discussing it already.

Today, the web is still made up of webpages, and if you’re curious
enough, you can find the deep, dark corners and crevices of
dissidence. You can still surf the web. Mostly. But when everything
becomes accessible only through these models, you’re not surfing
anything anymore. You’re simply being given a synthesis of a response
that has been run through all the necessary filters and censors.

There will probably be a sprinkle of truth somewhere in there, but it
will be wrapped up in so much “safety” that 99.9% of people won’t hear
or know of it. The truth will become that which the model says it is.

I’m not sure what happens to much of the internet when discoverability
of information fundamentally transforms. I can imagine that, as most
applications transition to some form of language interface, it’s going
to be very hard to find things that the “portal” you’re using doesn’t
deem safe or approved.

One could, of course, make the argument that in the same way you need
the tenacity and curiosity to find the dissident crevices on the web,
you’ll need to learn to prompt and hack your way into better answers
on these platforms.

And that may be true, but it seems to me that for each time you find
something “unsafe,” the route shall be patched or blocked.

You could then argue that “this could backfire on them, by diminishing
the utility of the tool.”

And once again, I would probably agree. In a free market, such
stupidity would make way for better tools.

But of course, the free market is becoming a thing of the past. What
we are seeing with these hysterical attempts to push for “safety” is
that they are either knowingly or unknowingly paving the way for
squashing possible alternatives.

In creating “safety” committees that “regulate” these platforms (read:
regulate speech), new models that are not run through such “safety or
toxicity filters” will not be available for consumer usage, or they
may be made illegal, or hard to discover. How many people still use
Tor? Or DuckDuckGo?

And if you think this isn’t happening, here’s some information on the
current toxicity filters that most LLMs already plug into. It’s only a
matter of time before such filters become like KYC mandates on
financial applications. A new compliance appendage, strapped onto
language models like tits on a bull.

Whatever the counter-argument to this homogenization attempt, both
actually support my point that we need to build alternatives, and we
need to begin that process now.

For those who still tend to believe that AGI is around the corner and
that LLMs are a significant step in that direction, by all means,
you’re free to believe what you want, but that doesn’t negate the
point of this essay.

If language is the new “screen” and all the language we see or hear
must be run through approved filters, the information we consume, the
way we learn, the very thoughts we have, will all be narrowed into a
very small Overton window.

I think that’s a massive risk for humanity.

We’ve become dumb enough with social media algorithms serving us what
the platforms think we should know. And when they wanted to turn on
the hysteria, it was easy. Language user interfaces are social media
times 100.

Imagine what they can do with that, the next time a so-called “crisis” hits?

It won’t be pretty.

The marketplace of ideas is necessary to a healthy and functional
society. That’s what I want.

Their narrowing of thought won’t work long term, because it’s
anti-life. In the end, it will fail, just like every other attempt to
bottle up truth and ignore it. But each attempt comes with unnecessary
damage, pain, loss and catastrophe. That’s what I am trying to avoid
and help ring the bell for.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT ALL THIS?

If we’re not proactive here, this whole AI revolution could become the
“great homogenization.” To avoid that, we have to do two main things:

    Push back against the “AI safety” narratives: These might look
like safety committees on the surface, but when you dig a little
deeper, you realize they are speech and thought regulators.

    Build alternatives, now: Build many and open source them. The
sooner we do this, and the sooner they can run more locally, the
better chance we have to avoid a world in which everything trends
toward homogenization.

If we do this, we can have a world with real diversity — not the woke
kind of bullshit. I mean diversity of thought, diversity of ideas,
diversity of viewpoints and a true marketplace of ideas.

An idea-versity. What the original promise of the internet was. And
not bound by the low bandwidth of typing and tapping. Couple that with
Bitcoin, the internet of money, and you have the ingredients for a
bright new future.

This is what the team and I are doing at Laier Two Labs. We’re
building smaller, narrow models that people can use as substitutes to
these large language models.

We are going to open source all our models, and in time, aim to have
them be compact enough to run locally on your own machines, while
retaining a degree of depth, character and unique bias for use when
and where you need it most.

We will announce our first model in the coming weeks. The goal is to
make it the go-to model for a topic and industry I hold very dear to
my heart: Bitcoin. I also believe it’s here that we must start to
build a suite of alternative AI models and tools.

I will unveil it on the next blog. Until then.