Well, here’s an example of the blind spots we posses. You, and most people, by default privilege “information”. However, in our current reality, everything is “content”. Information is simply content with a flag.
The commodification is towards the production of content, not information.
Mostly, producers of Information, are producing expensive “luxury goods”, but selling them in a market for disposable, commodified goods. This is why you need to subsidize fact checkers, and news papers.
I believe this is a legacy of our history, where content production was hard and the ratio of information to content was higher.
Consumers of content are solving for not just informational and cognitive needs, they are also solving for emotional needs, with emotional needs being the more fundamental.
Consumers will struggle with so many sources of content, and will eventually look towards bundling or focus only on certain nodes.
Do note - the universe does not need to favor anything for this situation to occur. Deception is a fundamental part of our universe, because it’s part of the predator prey dynamic. This in turn arises out of the inability of any system to perfectly process all signals available to them.
There is always place for predators or prey to hide.
I thought of the predator prey frame shortly after posting my last comment.
Maybe it boils down to game theory and cooperation vs competition, and the free energy principle. Competition (favoring deception) puts pressure on cooperation (favoring truth). Simultaneously life gets better at deceiving and at communicating the truth. They are not mutually exclusive.
When entities are locked into long term cooperation, they have a strong bias to communicate truth with each other. When entities are locked into long term competition, they have a strong bias to deceive each other.
Evolution seems to be this dance of cooperation and competition.
When a person is born, overwhelmingly what's going on between cells inside their body is cooperation. When they die, overwhelmingly what happens between cells is competition.
So one way that AI could increase access to truth, is if most relationships between people and AI are locked into long term cooperation. Not like today where it's lots of people using one model from a tech co, but something more like most people running their own on their own hardware.
I've heard people say we are in the "post truth era" and something in my gut just won't accept that. I think what's going on is the power structures we exist in are dying, which is biasing people and institutions to compete more than cooperate, and therefore deceive more than tell the truth. This is temporary, and eventually the system (and power structures) will reconfigure and bias back to cooperation, because this oscillation back and forth is just what happens over history, with a long term trend of favoring cooperation.
So to summarize... Complexity arises from oscillations between competition and cooperation, competition favors deception and cooperation favors telling the truth. Over the long-term cooperation increases. Therefore, over the long-term truth communication increases more than deception.
We are in a post truth era, and discomfort is a side effect of ideology and lack of information.
I’ve been there too, is what I am saying. But, reality is reality, and feeling bad or good about it is pointless beyond a point.
AI cannot increase access to truth. This is also part of the hangover of our older views on content, truth and information.
In your mental mode, I think you should recognize that we had an “information commons” previously, even to an extent during the cable news era.
Now we have a content commons.
The production of Information is expensive. People are used to getting it for free.
People are also now offered choices of more emotionally salient content than boring information.
People will choose the more emotionally salient content.
People producing information, will always incur higher costs of production than people producing content. Content producers do not have to take the step of verifying their product.
So content producers will enjoy better margins, and eventually either crowd out information producers, or buy out information producers.
Information producers must raise prices, which will reduce the market available for them. Further - once information is made, it can always just be copied and shared, so their product does not come with some inherent moat. Not to mention that raising prices results in fewer customers, and goes against the now anachronous techie ethos of “Information should be free”.
I am sure someone will find some way to build a more durable firm in this environment, but it’s not going to work in the way you hoped initially. It will either need to be subsidized, or perhaps via reputation effects, or some other form of protection.
Cooperation is favored if cooperation can be achieved. People will find ways to work together, however the equilibrium point may well be less efficient than alternatives we have seen, imagined or hoped for.
More dark forest, cyberpunk dystopia, than Star Trek utopia.
There’s an assumption of positive drift in your thinking. As I said, this is my neck of the woods, and things are grim.
But - so what? If things are grim, only through figuring it out can it actually be made better.
This is the way the pieces on the board are set up as I see it. If you wish to agency in shaping the future, and not a piece that is moved, then hopefully this explanation will help build new insights and potential moves.
My move is to focus on making it easier for college students to develop critical thinking and communication skills. Smoothing out the learning curves and making education more personalized, accessible, and interactive. I'm just getting started, but so far already helping thousands of students at multiple universities.
There's one thing that I just realized hasn't come up in our discussion yet which has a big impact on my perspective.
Everything in the universe seems built on increasing entropy. Life net decreases entropy locally so that it can net increase it globally. There also seems to be this pattern of increasing complexity (particles, atoms, molecules, cells, multi cells, collectives) that unlocks more and more entropy. One extremely important mechanism driving this seems to be the Free Energy Principle, and the emergent ability to predict consequences of actions. Something about it enables evolution, and evolution enables it.
This perspective is that gives me more confidence that within collectives the future will include more shared truth than the past, because at every level of abstraction and for all known history that has been the long term trend.
Cells get better at modelling their external environment, and better at communication internally.
The reason why I am so confident we are not "post truth" is because lies don't work, not in the sense that people can't be deceived by lies (obviously they can), but dysfunctional lies won't produce accurate predictions. Dysfunctional lies don't help work get done, and the universe seems to be designed for work to get done. There is some force of nature that seems to favor increasingly accurate predictive ability.
Your perspective seems to be very well informed from what feels like the root of the issue, but I think you're missing the big picture. You aren't seeing the forest, just the trees around you. I know you assume the same of me, that I don't see these trees that you see. I believe you, that what you see looks grim. I also agree we need to understand the problems to solve them. I'm not advocating for any lack of action.
Just suggesting that you consider:
- for all history life has gotten better at prediction
- truth makes better predictions than lies
What's more likely? we are hitting a bump in the road that is an echo of many that have come before it, or something fundamental has materially changed the trajectory of all scientific history up until this point?
Your points about the cost of information and the cost of content are valid. In a sense, content is pollution. It's a byproduct of competition for attention.
I can think of a few ways that the costs and addictive nature of content could become moot.
- AI lowers the cost of truth
- Human psychology evolves to devalue content
- economic systems evolve to rebalance the cost/value of each
- legal systems evolve to better protect people from deception
These are just what come to mind quickly. The main point is that these quirks of our current culture, psychology, economic system, technological stage and value system are temporary, not fundamental, and not permanent. Life has a remarkable ability to adapt, and I think it will adapt to this too.
I really appreciate you engaging with me on this so I could spend time reflecting on your perspective. If I ever came across as dismissive I apologize. You've helped me empathize with you and others with the same concerns and I value that. You haven't fundamentally changed my mind, but you gave me a chance to hone my thinking and more deeply reflect on your main points.
It feels like we agree on a lot, we are just incorporating different contexts into our perspectives.
Nah. I see it more as there was an information asymmetry, on this specific topic, due to our different lived experiences.
I can feasibly provide more nuanced examples of the mechanics at play as I see them. Their distribution results in a specific map / current state of play.
> - Economic systems evolve
> - legal systems evolve
These types of evolutions take time, and we are far from even articulating a societal position on the need to evolve.
Sometimes that evolution is only after events of immense suffering. A brand seared on humanity’s collective memory.
We are not promised a happy ending. We can easily reach equilibrium points that are less than humanly optimal.
For example - if our technology reaches a point where we can efficiently distract the voting population, and a smaller coterie of experts can steer the economy, we can reach 1984 levels of societal ordering.
This can last a very long time, before the system collapses or has to self correct.
Something fundamental has changed and humanity will adapt. However, that adaptation will need someone to actually look at the problem and treat it on its merits.
One way to think of this is cigarettes, Junk foods and salads. People shifted their diets when the cost of harm was made clear, AND the benefits of a healthy diet were made clear AND we had things like the FDA AND scientists doing sampling to identify the degree of adulteration in food.
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> My move is to focus on making it easier for college students to develop critical thinking and communication skills. Smoothing out the learning curves and making education more personalized, accessible, and interactive. I'm just getting started, but so far already helping thousands of students at multiple universities.
The commodification is towards the production of content, not information.
Mostly, producers of Information, are producing expensive “luxury goods”, but selling them in a market for disposable, commodified goods. This is why you need to subsidize fact checkers, and news papers.
I believe this is a legacy of our history, where content production was hard and the ratio of information to content was higher.
Consumers of content are solving for not just informational and cognitive needs, they are also solving for emotional needs, with emotional needs being the more fundamental.
Consumers will struggle with so many sources of content, and will eventually look towards bundling or focus only on certain nodes.
Do note - the universe does not need to favor anything for this situation to occur. Deception is a fundamental part of our universe, because it’s part of the predator prey dynamic. This in turn arises out of the inability of any system to perfectly process all signals available to them.
There is always place for predators or prey to hide.