I really like this post. Few months ago I've read a book that really made me finally get a word for what I think we both see happening. it's from a book called Seeing Like a State, and the word is over-abstraction. If you want to know what this is. Imagine a forest with all of it's unpredictable branches, grazing animals, various species of leaves growing from the ground. Now over-abstraction is when you make a plot of monoculture on which not even insects roam and conclude that's plantlife. And I kinda realize that's something that we humans do to other people too. We've mind ourselves kinda predictable and boring because how we express and think by ourselves is in these boxed in, unecessarily fixed, ways. I feel AI is kinda an outgrouth of that too. Since in many ways what makes software AI instead of regular software is how little control you have over it. Not really what it does.

AI worries me though, not because I believe it will be intelligent or sentient or whatever anytime soon. But because it cuts people who do important work from money. Which means there's a high chance we'll be poorer off if we don't do something about it in the near future.

I don't think it'a good thing it all. There are multiple reasons for this

One is for something to have quality you need to support people making it. And the AI doesn't make stuff, it just repackages it. If there was no one on the internet writing about 'x' topic the AI couldn't give you an answer. And by pretending AI does actually write it we are lowering the support for the real creators which makes them less likely to write. They need to eat, and it's great if they can get their bread by writting because they do their job and get their bread. If they no longer can do that, they will put hours into something else which gives us less writing.

Second one is that AI will probably in my eyes be the leading subject of making sure there's more fake news and less scientific literacy. This would be too big to sum up in short text form. But how I see it the important stuff happens because of perspective/context changes. But the web and AI programs have next to no context. If I go on the web I get a small glimpse of someone's view, before it gets mushed together with someoene elses short view, and then an ad, and some completely unrelated paragraph about some event happening on the other side of the globe, and so on and so on. It's like studying something in a circus. There's no context in a circus outside of chaos and I think the same applies to technologies we build and are building. There's lot of data, but very little communication or meaning happening. Now imagine how the world looks if majority of what is written is made by machines we've build to spin around existing (already crazy with no context) written word and produce more of it?

I hate to sound like a nostalgic fart, but remember when content creation meant making never seen before flash games and animations, or long video content instead of 5 seconds jokes and girls dancing half nakedly?

These are mostly used as Ipad apps, and even then, they nowhere provide the tools that are available on a standard PC. Sure, you can use them to do cool things, but I can also create paintings with just ketchup and fries. That's not what 99% of people who have fries in their hands do/should do.

Oh come on. Don't try comparing modern Russia to Nazi Germany. The reason for the tension is simple and you just need to look at it from other side. If Russia made a coalition in South America that would be spanning into mexico, US would act the same way. I see the argument that Russia deserves to be looked down upon because it's a threat to nations around it, but the same can be said about the US. US is no stranger to invasions of nations in South America or even brutal economic domination of them. What Russia is doing is your standard and even rational geopolitics.

> The reason for the tension is simple and you just need to look at it from other side. If Russia made a coalition in South America that would be spanning into mexico, US would act the same way.

Even if one were to agree that that were true, it wouldn't be a justification. Customary international law, the UN Charter, and the multilateral treaty Russia signed on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine do not admit to any “unless they make friends with people we don’t like” exception.

Whataboutism—and even moreso hypothetical counterfactual whataboutism—doesn’t change that. This is an extension of the ongoing crime of aggression being committed by Russia against Ukraine, for which Russia is solely responsible and culpable.