(I'm trying to go with a different approach, where I structure / edit / polish my posts less going forward. I think there's a certain point where being perfectionistic just restricts your output, while making you sound pretentious.)
I haven't talked much about AI, since I don't find it very interesting or useful, but a thought that has been in the back of my head is that to the extent that it is useful, it's more of a question of "negative" rather than "positive" applications.
Fundamentally, and despite trillions of dollars being thrown at it, it cannot create great art, introduce new scientific paradigms, or even really come up with interesting or insightful comments during a conversation (AI's speech sounds like a cross between an HR person and a used car salesman). It thus has no real positive contributions to make-- but I think can be used as a tool to reveal fakeness within the economy, as well as the broader society.
Namely if a certain sector is vulnerable to what amounts to an industrial-scale Slop Machine, it means there wasn't much real work being done in the first place. AI can be used as a detector, to test for and reveal the presence of bullshit and fake work: if it successfully replaces human labor in this or that area, it's because the humans were not doing much in the first place.
So the fact that AI is having extraordinary success within academia should not be taken as a sign of its genius, but rather as an indication of the deep structural flaws and decline of academic culture. The fact that they are incapable of distinguishing between hallucinated meaningless gibberish and real honest / insightful work, reveals how low standards have fallen.
In that sense, AI is like a species, and academia is the environment. Its exponential growth within the niche reveals that the environment positively selects for garbage, which it can produce at a much faster rate than any human can (notwithstanding the valiant efforts of academics in recent decades).
I say the same thing for everyday tasks: anything that you're doing which AI can do better, is not worth doing in the first place. Whatever it is can probably be consigned to meaningless / filler work, and cut out of your routine.
So for example, I've heard that AI is great at writing emails-- what we can infer is that, obviously, most emails are a waste of time, and ultimately meaningless, and so perfectly suited for a machine that can only generate meaningless slop.
Other insightful people have already noticed this, and it seems to be a general theme: instead of heading to a techno-dystopia, where the all-powerful machines subjugate humanity, what we're really headed for is a kind of absurdist Philip K Dick scenario, where the laughably incompetent machines break all kinds of things, and we all have to act like babysitters cleaning up after an immature, reckless, ADHD child.
I also wanted to include the clip at the beginning of the movie where the dumb robot mows down an innocent salesman, but I thought that was too techno-dystopian, compared to the dumb machine breaking on the stairs (failing a task even a child could accomplish).
ReplyDeleteIt also strikes me that AI also sheds light on how a healthy human mind works. In the same way that darkening certain parts of an image makes the other parts stand out more by contrast, the comparison between this mentally-ill robot sheds light on how an efficient, insightful, healthy human mind goes about doing things.
And, yes, 'mentally-ill' is a perfect description. It forgets everything you tell it (dementia), it will get stuck on repetitive behaviors for no reason (autism), and it hallucinates and makes shit up (schizophrenia)... and there are probably more that I'm not aware of, but these are the most famous and common ones.
And it only cost a trillion dollars!
There also seems to be a kind of information poisoning / toxicity, where an overload of data diminishes or even prevents insight, and leads to a situation where you become very, very, very confident... and yet at the same time, totally wrong.
ReplyDeleteI see this (no offense) with many of Rintrah's posts, and on Substack in general. My rough heuristic is that the more links there are, the greater the likelihood the conclusion is fake. I know that's not an argument, but it seems to be a handy rule of thumb.
ReplyDeleteAnother aspect that I want to get into, but would have to research more before confidently presenting my opinion on, is the importance of a healthy emotional system, not just for social relationships with others, but even for thinking correctly and reaching the right conclusions.
When you look at Rintrah and some of the total nutjobs in his comments section, or a schizophrenic slop machine like AI, one thing that stands out is that they're weirdly proud of and haughty about their lack of 'emotional programming'-- they think not operating on the same framework as the normies and nmundanes is a kind of strength, which allows them to freely pursue their own goals, unencumbered by the opinions of the sheeple.
And yet when you look at their lives (or the behavior of the slop machine), the lifestyle is not superior to or better than the normies-- their lack of emotional programming means they have no direction in life, and no course to follow, and they live tedious joyless existences.
And not only that, but with no real strong emotions to guide them away from pointless directions, they seem to very easily get stuck in endless loops, where their assumptions reinforce their conclusions, which then causes them to become more certain in their assumptions, and which eventually results in that phenomenon I detailed above of being very articulate and logical and at the same time totally on the wrong track.
I'll admit that this is poorly articulated due to my lack of knowledge on some of these subjects, but that seems to be a common flaw (broken emotional system) and I think it's a fair description of what's going on.
The same can be said of schizos, for example.
ReplyDeleteWhen some guy accosts you at the entrance of the supermarket or wherever, and begins breathlessly expounding on some totally retarded insane conspiracy theory (an event that is becoming more common these days), I think that if you examine closely you might find that some of the patterns, though not the theory in general, are rooted in reality. Some of them, maybe even a majority, could be true, legit, real, factual, etc.
But what's going on is that a broken mind cannot assign the proper emotional value to these various logical observations-- such as, dismissing them as irrelevant or trivial-- and so it places extreme grandiose world-shaking importance on things that, actually, don't matter. Hence the hallucinated-but-logical warped perspective.
One final art reference, appropriate too cuz I'm half-Spanish genetically:
ReplyDeletehttps://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_sue%C3%B1o_de_la_raz%C3%B3n_produce_monstruos
I'll admit that in spite of my repeated and overt pronouncements about 'not reading there anymore', I have been following Rintrah's site. It is what it is. You've probably gotten used to my pattern of making promises which never come true. I'm like this IRL too; I like to think of it as an endearing trait.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, apparently Season 2 has gone even further than Season 1 (which fittingly ended with a trip to the mental asylum). Now we have threats of suicide, weird incel slop, and openly confessing to being addicted to watching videos of people suffering (something the empathetic members of the audience had already figured).
This is another reason not to comment there, and to minimize reading.
By tying yourself emotionally to a frenzied, unhinged, maniac like Rintrah, you're asking to be subject to whatever wild oscillations he goes on, as he goes descends into another drug-fueled manic cycle-- it's better to just avoid that entirely, and maintain peace of mind and stability.
It's also revealing in terms of the nature of the person giving advice, who pretentiously views himself as a high IQ source of wisdom and insight about the state of the world, superior to the blinkered morons / Boomers / normies-- a total nutjob that can't function without huge doses of bizarre drugs, and who repeatedly masturbates to graphic videos of other people suffering in order to stave off his suicidal thoughts.
ReplyDeleteTHAT is who you are relying on, in order to learn about the state of the world (lol)-- good luck arriving at the correct outcome.
Also keep in mind that this fixation of his is not some kind of clinical scientific interest, as in the emotionless mad scientist type-- no, he's literally emotionally identifying *with* whatever force is killing the normies or causing them to suffer, since the retarded faggot views himself as some kind of avenging angel or whatever, who is going to lash out at legions of innocent people for the crime of... existing, and being normal.
Some people might have been shocked by how I wrote that anyone who'd reached that point should just kill themselves, rather than keep going on in that state of moral depravity-- but it's really very difficult to sympathize with someone like that.
I'm being asked to emotionally support, and resonate with, someone who would viscerally delight in my suffering, or in that of my friends or family or neighbors, if he had the chance to, and out of sheer sadism and malice, totally unprovoked (not because of anything I or anyone else did to him).
I'm sorry, but I'll reserve my sympathy and support for those who are, well, worthy of sympathy and support. I don't give a damn about wannabe school shooters killing themselves, or getting killed by the cops, and I'm not going to get scolded or lectured into supporting people who deserve contempt.
Of course the junkie audience there will not be challenging him on any of those things, because they are emotionally dependent on him, and because he provides them with the steady drip of doom porn that they need in order to keep on living-- paradoxically, they have arrived at a state where they need the world to end in order not to kill themselves.
ReplyDeleteOf course slurping up hopium would still be a fake activity, but at least it would be more sympathetic, compared to furiously masturbating at the deaths of your friends and family members...
If you've reached that stage in your life, you should seriously re-examine whatever decisions have led you to that outcome, instead of spending your entire existence inflating the probably fake / non-replicable results of random studies into huge prophecies of doom.
One attitude has a chance of yielding big results, and bringing about an improvement in your situation, while the other attitude not only gets you nowhere but effectively puts you in a kind of existential war against reality (with the only goal being to avoid suicide in the present).
(And of course a lot of them are school shooter types as well, which means they resonate with and support all those attitudes. I have the same thing to say to the adulators of the going postal types, as I do to the perpetrators of school shootings-- you both deserve to get executed, and it would make the world a better place if you just gave in and killed yourselves.)
You can also tell who's a paid propagandist, by their stance on AI.
ReplyDeleteOf course in some cases, there are genuine spergs out there who fall in love with their computer, and worship whatever fake slop it outputs, and develop some kind of strange emotional attachment to it-- unlike humans, computers can more or less do whatever you want ('my PC would NEVER laugh at me like all the fuckin' normies did...').
But in the majority of cases, and especially coming people who aren't into the whole retarded tech scene, it means they're on some kind of contract where part of their salary hinges upon them shoving this billionaire slop into the mix-- in order to make these failed, doomed, ultra-expensive projects popular with the masses. Hence the heavy-handed use of AI images (horrendous) or AI 'explanations' (equally horrendous-- when not hallucinating or wrong, they seem to find the longest way to arrive at the most banal answer).
And of course the war on Iran, which they've now totally shut up about, even as it escalates and escalates.
This is not because they've had a change of heart-- the usual GOP slop channels would love to stream themselves getting high on the deaths of brown people, like the depraved faggots they are, but it's just that the backlash they've faced from their audiences has been so massive, that they've decided to shut up about the entire subject of Iran and never go there or mention it. Not even the bot armies can cover up how unpopular it is.
Also, one last thing about doomslop.
ReplyDeleteAlways remember when you read that stuff that you're just dealing with junkies looking for their next fix, not insightful, interesting, people curious about the natural world, let alone people with real math / science skills. And that's in the best of cases, in others it's literally wannabe school shooters looking for a hurricane to provide them with masturbation material (since I guess they'd feel ashamed about watching clips of real school shootings / terrorist attacks).
You're also NOT dealing with concerned do-gooder libtard environmentalists, which were drawn predominantly from older generations (I'd say more so Silents than Boomers, with some Gen-Xers). Those guys are gone, and the people who've replaced them are not their successors, but Millennial / Zoomer, they're the opposite of them: sadistic commissars looking for torture subjects to ideologically discipline, not gentle flower-child / hippie types.
Since they are either paid propagandists or shills for The Powers That Be, none of them will ever mention the role of off-shoring, and especially the current round of moving factory jobs to India, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc in whatever new CLIMATE COLLAPSE NOW (2026 Edition) numbers they're waving around now.
In fact, when you press them upon this point, and you ask them what the effects of Western corporations building sweatshops in some of the most dirty and polluted shitholes will be on the climate... they won't even deign to acknowledge the point, or even agree-but-deflect. They will stubbornly, and staunchly, defend globalization and block these events out from their mental models-- because that's who they are, servants and rationalizers of the establishment.
You don't need to trust a person's words, when you can look at the outcome of their actions: if these posers are always in favor of the opposite of stewardship over the environment, stop taking their made-up names seriously (lol).