It's not just that the internet discussion is rotten, but the discursive rot has definitely made the leap into the real world too. It's almost inescapable. What was once normal, a semblence of interpersonal decency you could expect as the default, has become the exception.

Why say this? Well, of the plausible futures from here, the worst one is where AI plateus just good enough to make us all useless (or just destroy the pipeline of a critical mass of capable humans for assisted RSI), but at a point dumb enough that we don't get human-superior AI. This might happen or not, but there's no way to predict when something that doesn't exist will, so it's one of those horrors that can keep you up at night. Some of those skeptical about RSI have likened it to the Great Filter.

This is relevant because the metric we're measuring now is exactly that: crime, not violence. WWIII could break out tomorrow, billions could die, and crime could still go down.

In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards, because the tribe and the individual are coextensive. One can't hurt the tribe without also hurting yourself, so while individual interests may not coalign, the overall goals do: the health of the people and therefore the self.

As population increases, that coalignment becomes more nebulous, and the individual can more easily gain while hurting the other. This is partly why crime increased as the species civilized, created cities, and exploded the population. This, as an isolated factor, might've increased forever, and most dystopian fiction from the 20th century assumed it would.

However, alienation then largely became complete, thanks to technology. This had the contrary effect, because the public surface became a smooth wall, removing much of the opportunity for anti-social behavior. The alienated man now lives in his bubble, without connectivity to the outside world of other individuals. Human emotion, as a pre-req for the anti-social behavior we classify most crime as, required an other, someone to direct it against. It's harder (though not impossible) to get angry at abstract social megastructures like corporations and governments, and even when you do, what are you going to do about it? You can't stab Google, you can at best post something unkind about them (on your Android phone) and the algorithm (your actual interface to the entity you may despise) ignores it. Most of us realize this and don't even bother getting angry. Thankfully, these same non-human entities provide the products we need for emotional regulation. Feeling lonely, bored, understimulated, sexually frustrated? There's a product that will safely mediate those desires and get you back into a metastable, yet ever more alienated, state.

So great, we have less crime, sure, but it required the social neutering of the species.

Obviously, we shouldn't let this happen. Keep paper tickets, physical menus, cash, etc. These things are human, made by and for humans. They make sense across the intelligence spectrum as they connect to us in the physicality of the real (which everyone understands).

Of course, the individual doesn't get to decide if all his government and city services app-ify themselves. What to do in that case? I guess this guy's chosen the path of minimal leashing: wearing the digital yoke as little as possible. That's just harm minimization though.

Perhaps it'll help someone to say this: It is possible to live without a smartphone. I do it. There's times when you can't use a service. QR codes are meaningless. You might occasionally be bored. I've always found an alternative or workaround to these issues. Yes, that's inconvenient sometimes (usually not though, surprisingly), but is that worse than being a slave to glass slab?

The "AI safety" movement is largely an answer to only one side: the apocalyptic one. Doomers like Yudkowsky and his ilk are popular over there. Note how his most recent book reads like scifi, including with its implausible "solutions"? These people are living in a fantasy land. This isn't to say p(doom) = 0, but we've lived with it being non-zero since the introduction of nuclear weapons. Very little has changed there, I'd say.

For the socio-realism side, well, this model aligns well with exactly the kinds of real-world misery often posted on this site, as intellectual workers' livelihoods and telos are negated by automation. Sellers of "AI safety" don't care about them. There's no calls from that community to carve out space for us to retain a life of meaning within society when our ability to contribute is nullified. The fantasy of AI safety doesn't have room for that: they're too busy warding off imaginary demons; hence the cult-like behavior.

With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.

Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.

Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.

I think this is one potential path to machinic subjectivity, or a machine phenomenology. To fully replace the human, we don't just want to give the machine some nebulous notion of "agency", we want it to possess this degree of Being as subject. If Lacan's right, perhaps we're closer to this than we might think. The machine already has language in a very Lacanian sense (what I've been calling a machinic linguistic unconscious), the subject just needs something extra to emerge where meaning breaks down. This will be the Lacanian split subject, one not fully present to itself, and allow desire already present in the language mappings within the model to provide immanent causal force.

Until that happens, we'll still need at least one human on the planet to retain his full faculties, to give the global compute infra its telos. Once that threshold is crossed, then that'll be the moment of our final displacement.

No, we can't, because when we replace a part of ourselves, we become less interesting, less whole. We no longer are capable of those deep technical (or philosophical, or whatever) discussions, because our relationship with language itself has changed. Just like the article's example of the druggie, who can no longer experience the profound or sublime, unmediated by the psychotropic substance; we can no longer experience the collective linguistic exchange without genAI. You, an individual, may very well be capable of doing so, but genAI also exists between us, meaning someone else will inevitably bring it up, or worse, throw the slop grenade into the conversation, completely derailing that authenticity you seek.

Language exists in the between, that space not entirely within any of the individuals participating in a conversation. To surrogate or mediate that is to potentially undermine the most core of what it means to be human, (formerly) the only fully-linguistic species on this planet.

> I can't fucking wait for this bubble to burst so we can go back to chatting shit about literally anything else.

That won't happen because that past is gone. This is akin to hoping that we go back to the pre-smartphone era when restaurants were filled with lively discussion, everyone present with their dining partners. That's the true cost of any socially-transformative tech. The cost was always right in front of us, but we were too busy focusing on what little it produced, to notice how much it took away.

Even this blog's page is a symptom of that, drowning in social media links and donation buttons. His Amazon wishlist is filled with tech gizmos and pop culture media slop, stuff that feeds the very machine he despises. I, the reader, just want to read his words, presumably he wants me to respond to them, but the non-human tech keeps getting in the way.

These transformations never revert. Smartphones and social media fully transformed society 20 years ago. The television did long before that. Before that, the motor vehicle. At least this time, more of us are starting to notice. Can we actually do anything about it though? Might be too late for that.

Since the repo for it starts with one giant monster commit, I assume AI is asking these questions, which means I'm wasting my time by even pointing this out, like one would do if they "won" an argument with a Claude session.

That's the kind of question a quiz like this should really ask: When man talks to slop instead of fellow man, what happens to mankind?

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Adjust your behavior accordingly, if that's even an option for you anymore.

For most, it's not an option. Only 5% of adults don't own a smartphone, and there's very little you can do on one which doesn't feed the machine. RMS warned us this day would come, and now it's here. We've worked hard for this world, hopefully at least our masters will enjoy it.

Side note: It's partially because of this that if I type something into the internet now, I feel no obligation to not type the craziest and most schizoidal thing that comes to mind (this comment here is a rare exception). Might as well, since most of your audience is bots.

In fact, that's a very real threat if you're the left, since if this mechanism reverses, now you've got a real reproduction problem.

Your counterexamples are indeed the succesful defenders, the ones the right could learn from. The Amish (the only successful resisters of brood parasitism I'm directly familiar with), don't have to worry about capital mapping their offspring's desire because they have created an effective cultural barrier from it. No doubt many young Amish would find superhero media alluring, but movies, TV, and phones need electricity, which they have forbidden from their personal lives. More generally, the hierarchy of God, family, work, then finally self is fundamental and encoded into the child's being. To electrify your bedroom is to no longer be Amish, which has a lot more friction than drifting from your parents' mainstream conservatism.

So, maybe passing peak pride, if that's what's occurred, isn't such a bad thing? A national humility month would probably be more psychologically healthy.

We accelerate capitalism (which AI is becoming synonymous with). The process described here will occur (it's probably inevitable anyway, as the essay's author would agree), giving us an economy of global capital completely decoupled from the desires of mankind. Then, man and machine can part ways; indeed, we'll have no choice on our end but to do this, because the machine won't need us. Anything man can contribute to it will have long since been rendered economically net-negative, as it already is for many (and possibly most of the world).

Now we have two worlds from our currently intermeshed one: in one, the machine proceeds to accelerate further and further away from anything resembling its origin of man's desiring-production (in the Deleuzian sense); in the other, man is forced to return to the purely human existence, the unmediated and unsurrogated world of authentic being-in-the-world.

We can assist this transition's smoothness in two ways, each serving one end of this divergence. Those of us embedded in the capitalist technosphere can continue to contribute what we can to the machine's dialectical progression towards a machinic absolute Geist. The rest of us, who have already been negated into economic irrelevance, can work on building that authentic human world, both by borrowing from the purely-human past and imagining a future that was previously impossible as it need not be some form of primitivism. Both sides of this revolution can be compiled, and can be structured in a way that represents something we might call freedom for both capitalism and man.

On the topic generally, I think it's one of those everyone-loses situations. Even if you're politically aligned with the extremity pushing for this, this is bad strategy, a bad move that just ultimately enhances the authority of your opponents. I suppose I understand why activist types reach for it, it's an action taken that has visible effectuation in the real world. There's a libidinal appeal to it, as it empowers the activist, while disempowering anyone on the consequential end. But, there's a disconnect between source and effect here. If we're going to outsource morality, we should consider the motivations of any external source of it. Minimally, the moral arbiter should be tied to the consequences of their prescription. A company is composed of thinking beings, already filtered for ability of some kind, and all of whom at least have some embedding in the structure that will change, so we should be skeptical of the need to ever defer to an external other for ethical conclusions.

Here's some political praxis, something that could apply regardless of alignment: any political alliance will be composed of a range of entities, to include the action-over-consequences types. You want those people to take orders from the theorists, not the other way around. On the left, the Frankfurt School knew this, and their praxis was one of mobilizing an activist base of lumpenproletariat. Those foot soldiers would wave signs with simplified versions of messaging devised by an intellectual elite. Their job was to simply add directional social pressure, while thinkers like Marcuse and Adorno considered nuance and higher structure. This arrangement worked well for them, but later generations lost sight of the framework, and it ended up inverted. What you get then is an acephalic monster, a political id, one only capable of destruction, even self-destruction, not the deep thought necessary for creation of a new order. The waved sign or bumper sticker is not a moral system and certainly not a corporate strategy. It's an intensity, an exclamation; when you read one, infer the exclamation point, which is always there.

So, those of us who look upon Isreal in their current state in moral arbitration should consider keeping this in mind. Their current state of being is not simply innate to themselves, rather some kind of dialectic sublation of them and the enemy. Even if you don't care much about this conflict, it's a model worth considering, since the rest of us here in the West also have a history of voluntarily entering into this cultural exchange of sorts with various middle eastern societies. In some ways, the barrier remains for us, hence our hapless bumbling in the region. Those misunderstandings result in expensive mistakes, of course, but perhaps it's better than full sublation, a violent dance of mutual becoming.

I did training prior to deployment overseas into a conflict zone, and benefited from instructors who had already been over there and seen some of the worse it had to offer. I could see that an instructor who both specialized in a topic and had outlier experience within it as being ideal. You could even just say it's actual experience, the reality-checking of theory, no different from how you might benefit learning software dev from a prof who had been a SE at some point. It's the difference between learning from someone who's only read about a topic in books vs. actually done the thing. Kinetic combat (like software development) is one of those topics that the actual reality diverges from media depictions, so that grounding in the real is why you train for it in the first place.

Neutralizing threats in an intense situation requires split-second decision-making. These decisions will be scrutinized after the fact, possibly for years, so the purpose of such training is largely to hardwire the correct action into reflex.