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{{a|tech|}}So here is the thing I don’t understand. Where are ''our'' bots? | {{a|tech|}}{{quote|“The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.” | ||
:—{{author|Douglas Adams}}, {{br| Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency}}}} | |||
So here is the thing I don’t understand. Where are ''our'' bots? | |||
Everything we know about the information revolution tells us they cannot be far away. [[Wikipedia]], crowd-sourced and free-for-all, vanquished Encyclopædia Britannica. [[Reddit]] vanquished the hedgies. Yet, still, we all seem to be on a hiding to nothing from the monstrous technology conglomerates and their [[artificial intelligence|artificially intelligent]] catnip social media engines, systematically exploiting humankind’s innate horror of boredom — filling our heads with clangorous, quadrophonic noise that pleases us because it obscures the abysmal ''silence'' that otherwise would predominate — thereby aggregating, parsing tracking our every move, anticipating our every thought, nudging our preferences around as if we are cups on some giant [[Ouija board]], from it extracting some magical well of human weakness into which it relentlessly jams its products, thereby consigning us by degrees to some stale, mute, digital oblivion. | Everything we know about the information revolution tells us they cannot be far away. [[Wikipedia]], crowd-sourced and free-for-all, vanquished Encyclopædia Britannica. [[Reddit]] vanquished the hedgies. Yet, still, we all seem to be on a hiding to nothing from the monstrous technology conglomerates and their [[artificial intelligence|artificially intelligent]] catnip social media engines, systematically exploiting humankind’s innate horror of boredom — filling our heads with clangorous, quadrophonic noise that pleases us because it obscures the abysmal ''silence'' that otherwise would predominate — thereby aggregating, parsing tracking our every move, anticipating our every thought, nudging our preferences around as if we are cups on some giant [[Ouija board]], from it extracting some magical well of human weakness into which it relentlessly jams its products, thereby consigning us by degrees to some stale, mute, digital oblivion. | ||
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How so? Like so: if [[AI]] can map, track and anticipate all human frailty, and thereby predict with greater certainty even than we can, our next moves, then [[AI]] can ''emulate'' human frailty. It can ''impersonate'' it. If it can impersonate it, it can ''fake'' it. The point must soon arrive, therefore, when we can deploy [[AI]] to do our doom-scrolling on our behalf. And that ought to be devastating. Think GameStop, only with the Redditors tooled up with the machines the hedgies have. Call this implementation an “[[avatar]]”. | How so? Like so: if [[AI]] can map, track and anticipate all human frailty, and thereby predict with greater certainty even than we can, our next moves, then [[AI]] can ''emulate'' human frailty. It can ''impersonate'' it. If it can impersonate it, it can ''fake'' it. The point must soon arrive, therefore, when we can deploy [[AI]] to do our doom-scrolling on our behalf. And that ought to be devastating. Think GameStop, only with the Redditors tooled up with the machines the hedgies have. Call this implementation an “[[avatar]]”. | ||
As {{author|Douglas Adams}} once remarked of the | As {{author|Douglas Adams}} once remarked of the videocassette player which watches television for us that we don’t have time to watch ourselves,<ref>For thirty years, [[Grandma Contrarian]] had the 1981 Royal Wedding taped on video. It was her most prized possession. Not once did any of us watch it.</ref> such an [[avatar]] would be a ''labour saving device'': it ''does our [[doom-scrolling]] for us''. Now if I can have ''one'' [[avatar]] emulating my human browsing habits — surely I can have ''one thousand''. And if the technology is as good as billed — and we have no reason to believe it is not — then the forthcoming apocalyptic battle will not be between ''us'' and ''the Man'', but between ''our'' technology and ''the Man’s'', and since, [[Q.E.D.]], the Man’s technology has no way of telling ''us'' from ''our avatars'', we we have a natural advantage. Especially since our avatars ''don’t'' have to emulate our behaviour at all. We can obstreporously configure them to emulate ''something else''. | ||
So, if we deploy a thousand [[avatars]] each to randomly browse, like and share content ''at random'', constrained only by the requirement that an [[avatar]]’s browsing habits should emulate as nearly as possible the behaviour of ''some'' human, even if not necessarily its host’s, then all that wondrous aggregated data that the FANGS have on us isn’t on us. It is worthless, meaningless, hypothetical. | So, if we deploy a thousand [[avatars]] each to randomly browse, like and share content ''at random'', constrained only by the requirement that an [[avatar]]’s browsing habits should emulate as nearly as possible the behaviour of ''some'' human, even if not necessarily its host’s, then all that wondrous aggregated data that the FANGS have on us isn’t on us. It is worthless, meaningless, hypothetical. | ||