The Cult of AI. How one writer's trip to an annual tech conference left him with a sinking feeling about the future

I thought it was coincidental that behind the Bastards was covering this subject in the show this week, then I saw the author. It's Robert Evans, the host. I guess if you want more information for this, listen to this week's podcast of behind the Bastards, I guess.

. . . NVIDIA in-house counsel Nikki Pope: In a panel on “governing” AI risk, she cited internal research that showed consumers trusted brands less when they used AI.

This gels with research published last December that found only around 25 percent of customers trust decisions made by AI over those made by people. One might think an executive with access to this data might not want to admit to using a product that would make people trust them less.

Indeed.

Among the early adopter set, people couldn’t wait for the chance to hand over more of their agency to a glorified chatbot.

Spot on.

Anywhere speculative investment is involved there are cult like patterns. If your investors don't believe that your product is going to revolutionize its field you're not going to get the kind of funding these startups want.

…an AI-assisted fleshlight for premature ejaculators.

Sounds straight out of idiocracy lol

I am so excited to order my Digital Monk who will free me from the drudgery of having to believe in things. Much like a dishwasher washes dishes so you do not have to, the Digital Monk believes in things so you do not have to.

They will be able to believe all commercials and politicians for me, freeing me from the heavy labor of Critical Thinking.

I love the tech but have much the same feelings. AI maybe improve the world eventually, but I predict a painful future in the intervening time. I hope investors turn sooner than later to slow this train but we’ll see. Lot of big players betting the farm on AI, to the point where they’ll do everything to see it through.

It's one of the terrible hype trains again... However, I wonder what makes him think that humans are something clearly more than a model that gathers data through the senses and reacts to external stimuli based on the current model. I think that's special pleading.

Behind the bastards is doing a 2 part podcast on this too. Those AI cult mofos are fucking crazy..

Have read the article.

Maybe call me ignorant but as someone from Eastern part of the world, sometimes I wonder why would these people worry when all of these AI stuff are still prompted from human input, in a sense that We are the one who creates them and dictates its actions. All in all they're just closed loop automata that happens to have better feedback input compared to your ordinary Closed loop system machines.

Maybe these people worried because these (regular people) don't know how these things works or simply they don't have or lack of self control in first place which what makes them feels like having no control about what happening.

I understand the danger of AI too, but those who prompted them also human too, in which it is just human nature by itself.

Hype cycles are nothing new! Way back in the 1800s they used to have world tech fairs as well which were full of inventions that you’d think were full of shit or utterly dystopian. But adoption mostly depends on the masses, and if they’re not going to jive with something, then it doesn’t matter how many nerds are into it. XR/AR is a good example for now, but maybe that’ll change as the form factor of the tech improves.

I think the main thing that comes out of the AI hype might be digital assistants which know you well enough to assist you like a real assistant, or can do easy but timesink tasks. ChatGPT-based assistants, Cortana, Siri, Alexa are not flexible enough to replace to an actual executive assistant, for example. Any current digital assistant requires a lot of hand holding.

For people who can’t shell out an executive assistant salary, but need one (almost everyone who works), this will be awesome. For people who can afford an executive assistant, their life is complex enough that they’ll assign the EA to something else.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

I was watching a video of a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show for the Rabbit R1, an AI gadget that promises to act as a sort of personal assistant, when a feeling of doom took hold of me.

Specifically, about a term first defined by psychologist Robert Lifton in his early writing on cult dynamics: “voluntary self-surrender.” This is what happens when people hand over their agency and the power to make decisions about their own lives to a guru.

At Davos, just days ago, he was much more subdued, saying, “I don’t think anybody agrees anymore what AGI means.” A consummate businessman, Altman is happy to lean into that old-time religion when he wants to gin up buzz in the media, but among his fellow plutocrats, he treats AI like any other profitable technology.

As I listened to PR people try to sell me on an AI-powered fake vagina, I thought back to Andreessen’s claims that AI will fix car crashes and pandemics and myriad other terrors.

In an article published by Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, a research journal, Dr. Andreas Roli and colleagues argue that “AGI is not achievable in the current algorithmic frame of AI research.” One point they make is that intelligent organisms can both want things and improvise, capabilities no model yet extant has generated.

What we call AI lacks agency, the ability to make dynamic decisions of its own accord, choices that are “not purely reactive, not entirely determined by environmental conditions.” Midjourney can read a prompt and return with art it calculates will fit the criteria.

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