How can I be sure that things haven't been made up? The only thing left to do is consult books from before the AI boom. How do you do it?
For many generations, knowledge has been a tool to ensure that humankind is able to produce a value of its own. This power is on the edge of shifting towards a few companies that rely on its value closed-source. Leaving the integrity of knowledge solely in their hands. Scientia potentia est has become more distinct and clearer, being centric around a few.
> Phase 1 - Mining The real value is not here yet. The costs are immersive, and cloning every source of data is pain. How good that there are open source projects, that provide the data for free (https://index.commoncrawl.org/) a few Petabytes should be a good starting point.
> Phase 2 - Creating dependency, for less than the value Let’s start with a business 101 here, Predator pricing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing) should be a good starting point. We are lazy, as we just collected 6.4 PB of data we just leave the rest of the collection to the users that pay that we can use their data (https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is-used-to-improve-model-performance), how good is that!
> Phase 3 - Bleeding out competition Oh, shit! The most people feed their problems into our model, leaving other open source, and open knowledge transfer (https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/). They ignore them and let them die because the lack of traffic means that advertising, for example, is no longer financed, causing competitors to go bankrupt sooner or later. The internet is dying as a result, and it's not worth publishing anything because it will just be mined and fall victim to the big copycats. How cool that you're doing their work for them!
> Phase 4 - Profit Knowledge is now centralised; people are bred to be accustomed to simply throwing a prompt somewhere and getting an answer for all their activities anyway. They obey like zombies, and no matter what comes out of the prompt machine, they will believe it because they are losing their minds bit by bit. It may not work so quickly, but if everyone keeps telling you lies, you will lose your mind and eventually believe the lies yourself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments). No matter who is behind the prompt machine, they will now be able to control you.
Inspiration: https://ia801705.us.archive.org/4/items/Various_PDFs/NeilPostman-AmusingOurselvesToDeath.pdf
Even though I work in the research area of algorithms and complexity, I love interdisciplinary exchange. The most affected people I’ve met are teachers. They can’t seem to get a handle on the problem: the attention span of children in the classroom is too short. Even if you can debate modern teaching methods, we’re currently raising a generation that isn’t used to paying attention to anything for long; they’re accustomed to being entertained like a king by his court jester. I don’t see technology as the enemy. I’ve learned to love the discipline in all its facets and wouldn’t want to live without it. It’s an enormous advantage—it can bring us closer together and allow us to exchange information more quickly if we use it properly. Nor do I want to demonize social media. I want to raise awareness that algorithms designed solely to manipulate your attention span and keep you on a platform as long as possible can’t be good for humanity. Thinking needs to shift more toward human-centered design; our collective attention needs to focus on this problem. I’d like to hear your opinion. I appreciate the community here, and your perspective might help me come up with new ideas.
