Just post some more private information on facebook. Tag your friends in your party photos. It won’t come back to bite you or them on the ass later. Yeah, that checks out.

Almost certainly not, no. Evolution may work faster than once thought, but not that fast. The problem is that societal, and in particular, technological development is now vastly outstripping our ability to adapt. It’s not that people are getting dumber per se - it’s that they’re having to deal with vastly more stuff. All. The. Time. For example, consider the world as it was a scant century ago - virtually nothing in evolutionary terms. A person did not have to cope with what was going on on the other side of the planet, and probably wouldn’t even know for months if ever. Now? If an earthquake hits Paraguay, you’ll be aware in minutes.

And you’ll be expected to care.

Edit: Apologies. I wrote this comment as you were editing yours. It’s quite different now, but you know what you wrote previously, so I trust you’ll be able to interpret my response correctly.

Thank you. I appreciate you saying so.

The thing about LLMs in particular is that - when used like this - they constitute one such grave positive feedback loop. I have no principal problem with machine learning. It can be a great tool to illuminate otherwise completely opaque relationships in large scientific datasets for example, but a polynomial binary space partitioning of a hyper-dimensional phase space is just a statistical knowledge model. It does not have opinions. All it can do is to codify what appears to be the consensus of the input it’s given. Even assuming - which may well be far too generous - that the input is truly unbiased, at best all it’ll tell you is what a bunch of morons think is the truth. At worst, it’ll just tell you what you expect to hear. It’s what everybody else is already saying, after all.

And when what people think is the truth and what they want to hear are both nuts, this kind of LLM-echo chamber suddenly becomes unfathomably dangerous.

Careful Xi. You might not want to bet on that ailing horse (for which you harbor a justified inculcated hate and distrust in any case), when you really, really need the EU more than ever.

Be smart.

Of course, that has always been true. What concerns me now is the proportion of useful to useless people. Most societies are - while cybernetically complex - rather resilient. Network effects and self-organization can route around and compensate for a lot of damage, but there comes a point where having a few brilliant minds in the midst of a bunch of atavistic confused panicking knuckle-draggers just isn’t going to be enough to avoid cascading failure. I’m seeing a lot of positive feedback loops emerging, and I don’t like it.

As they say about collapsing systems: First slowly, then suddenly very, very quickly.

That’s was a pretty insightful and occasionally surprising executive summary with more than a few constructive suggestions. Excellent, simple and clear presentation too. Recommended.

Our species really isn’t smart enough to live, is it?

It’ll be terrible, just terrible. What will I do without the next Marvel cookie-cutter project, Disney-fied Star Wars movie or the no doubt upcoming Borderlands sequel?

“Why, before you know it, Americans might discover that other countries, languages, and - worst of all - cultures exist. That might make them question the rightful order, and then where will we be? They’ll start asking questions like ‘wait, paid vacation is a thing?’ or ‘what’s a union?’, and we can’t have that. No, sir.”

Personally, I’d just use one of the many good markdown / JS presentation frameworks (reveal.js et. al.) out there, a local HTTP server and a browser.

Oh? Just what I was looking for! An opportunity to be manipulated more effectively by my owners.

You can change or remove this any time…

Haha, cute.

Those are some excellent points. The root cause seems to me to be the otherwise generally positive human capability for pack-bonding. There are people who can develop affection for their favorite toaster, let alone something that can trivially pass a Turing-test.

This… Is going to become a serious issue, isn’t it?

Look, I realize the frontal lobes of the average fifteen year old aren’t fully developed, I don’t want to be insensitive and I fully support the lawsuit - there must be accountability for what any entity, corporate or otherwise opts to publish, especially for direct user interaction - but if a person reenacts Romeo and Juliet with a goddamn AI chatbot and a gun, there’s something else seriously wrong.

Norton Commander, edit.com, the Wacom C/C++ compiler, pmode/w and upx. I had a peculiar childhood.

Jesus Christ, I’d rather be sterilized with a blunt wooden spoon. Fuck off back to the US where you belong!