Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
I think a couple of people noted it at the start, but this is truly a paradigm shift.
We’ve had so many science fiction stories, works, derivatives, musing about AI in so many ways, what if it were malevolent, what if it rebelled, what if it took all jobs… But I don’t think our collective consciousness was aware of the “what if it was just utterly stupid and incompetent” possibility.
Its a possibility which doesn’t make for good sci-fi (unless you’re writing an outright dystopia (e.g. Paranoia)), so sci-fi writers were unlikely to touch it.
The tech industry had enjoyed a lengthy period of unvarnished success and conformist press up to this point, so Joe Public probably wasn’t gonna entertain the idea that this shiny new tech could drop the ball until they saw something like the glue pizza sprawl.
And the tech press isn’t gonna push back against AI, for obvious reasons.
So, I’m not shocked this revelation completely blindsided the public.
Yeah, this is very much a paradigm shift - I don’t know how wide-ranging the consequences will be, but I expect we’re in for one hell of a ride.
Paranoia is the only one I can think of that’s actually pretty well on the money because the dystopian elements come from the fact that the wildly incompetent friend computer has been given total power despite everyone on some level knowing that fact, even if they can’t admit it (anymore) without being terminated. The secret societies all think they can work the situation to their advantage and it provides a convenient scapegoat for terrible things they probably want to do anyways.
Alan Moore wrote a comic book story about AI about 10 years ago that parodied rationalist ideas about AI and it still holds up pretty well. Sadly the whole thing isn’t behind that link - I saw it on Twitter and can’t find it now.