49 chunks · 31 episodes
...AI." Social networking is the most successful product that was ever uninvented. Social media grew to eclipse social networking. Friends to followers. Connection to performing. We're more isolated and lonely than ever before. Real connection h...
Ars Technica: With AI chatbots, Big Tech is moving fast and breaking people Social Media is going to look quaint compared to the world of sycosocial relationships.
...practice." It took us nearly a decade for the massive negative externalities of social media to be crystal clear. We're already seeing significant weird and widespread negative externalities of chatbots. Imagine where this will be in a decade...
If social media was the intellectual crack, AI could be intellectual fentanyl. Such a powerful substance, if it's put towards engagement maxing will be one of the wo...
...go. They probably have zero full-time people working on it anywhere. Meanwhile, social media quantified human relationships into a grotesque, performative fever dream because that's all computers could handle. Quantitative, not qualitative. S...
...t force of gravity that over time pulls things towards it. Yet another way that social media is like an intellectual crack cocaine epidemic.
...are an authentic signal, even if they are (somewhat) public. Contrast that with social media likes, which are free to give, are mostly public, and have no direct consequences for the giver. You can still get some emergent signals, but they ar...
...oing to miss the point.[cn] It took a decade or more of the web to discover the social media business model.
Social media shows the downside of echo chambers. Now with LLMs you can have echo chambers for a single user.[ep][eq] Uh oh!
...tant than the tech itself. But the tech industry doesn't think about emergence. Social media, crypto, etc… the goals were good, but the emergent effects were treated like a "whoopsie!" We must do better with AI given its order of magnitude mo...
...nternet. Whether it will be like electricity (universal infrastructure) or like social media (engagement-maxing aggregators) depends on who owns your context. Your context is your memories, your data, your digital life. If you own it, AI beco...
Glen Weyl et al published a new proposal called Prosocial Media. I haven't gotten a chance to read the proposal in depth yet but I love the name!
Real names in social media context collapse all the various versions of you into a single maximally safe version of yourself. You can only have an alter ego online if you have ...
... AI's. 3) cynical engagement maximizers - the people who are happy to apply the social media engagement maximizing playbook to AI and make a quick buck. Of the three humanity-denying movements, no one says they want to do the cynical engageme...
The thing that made social media problematic was social combined with mobile phones. Individually either would not have been that bad. We have our phones without arms' reach nearly e...
Social media engagement maxing is a light form of paperclip maxing. The AI in this case is just capitalism. Both are swarm intelligences. Powerful but impossible ...
Social media was terrifying and also it was data you chose to share with others. Imagine if it's intimate details you'd only tell your therapist or your diary?
...ake about complex environments. It used to be family, friends and public But on social media it's recorded forever and in lots of complex situations. We didn't evolve to be perceived at that scale.
Jonny Ive made an interesting point about AI and social media recently. He observed that we didn't realize how bad social media would be for society until well after its effects were felt. But with AI we're more...
...rm for broadcasting your eating. The Audience Capture essay told the story of a social media influencer whose videos of him eating got popular. His audience wanted him to eat more and more, so he did, putting on hundreds of pounds. He almost ...