Copying stuff I wrote on Mastodon…
We should be prepared for the shadow world where humans walk and talk surrounded by empty machines, sometimes remote controlled but usually without controllers, endlessly crawling the web, uploading the data, producing reports that nobody ever reads. We will have automated bullshit jobs because all the bot nets and crawlers and auto dialers and pseudo intelligence writing near-comprehensible text that mostly other pseudo intelligences read and so it goes.
They send us mail which we delete, the call us on the phone but we hang up, they post on our blogs and we delete it. If we move on, they colonize our wiki and guestbooks like mold, growing and taking down our works, making everything that’s open unusable.
There is always going to be a traitor to humanity that will work for the machine heads. They will try and open the gates and let in the Trojan horse holding the spammers and vandals and creeps and spies and cops. And we shall build wall after wall, lay rings of ice and install bots as countermeasures to bots. While they fight, we build defence in depth.
It will be important to connect with real people, read and listen to messages by real people, and from there the hundred thousand shadows flow, cast by real people sending real messages.
It will be important to teach our children how to find the islands. How to identify shadows. How to move through the shadow lands. We drive without seeing the ads, we buy without looking at the labels, and we move through the shadow lands like the blind and the deaf. The voices sound like our relatives in distress, recorded by machines, stolen by machines, style transferred by machines, operated by soulless men.
I have automated defences against bots on my servers, on my email inbox, my shades are always down as I am looking for that human spark, that link back into the real network. It’s an art that is constantly evolving. Like children, we invent new styles and new slang to set us apart, and they steal it and transfer it and parrot it like boomer software from beyond the pale.
„Luke, I am your father. Send me three hundred dollars because I am surrounded by bots and lawyers!“ Delete. „There’s a parcel waiting…“ Delete. „Hello Darling…“ Delete. „Beloved…“ Delete.
We’re heading for a strange future.
We’ll need a follow-up to Shannon’s theorem: the theorem of misinformation that considers a world of bot agents and two real people trying to communicate.
#Philosophy #Bots
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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It’s increasingly hard to tell humans from bots. And the bots are out to get you.
For those targeted—which is often the elderly, the Post reported—it can be increasingly difficult to detect when a voice is inauthentic, even when the emergency circumstances described by scammers seem implausible. – Thousands scammed by AI voices mimicking loved ones in emergencies
Thousands scammed by AI voices mimicking loved ones in emergencies
– Alex 2023-03-07 07:15 UTC
The real problem is capitalism. I think it likely that at some point, the capitalists will try to sell us “solutions” to the problems they have created. Manufacture a need or a problem, and then sell the thing that solves that problem or fulfils that need. We need to abolish capitalism, preferably yesterday.
– Teiresias 2023-03-07 17:09 UTC
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Yes! In a sense, I guess what I sometimes feel is that the world needs to improve in some way and I don’t know what to say or do. Occasionally I listen to history podcasts or the like and I hear about the French revolution, the Russian revolution or the abolition of slavery, and I try to find a way to apply what I just heard to my situation. Dan Carlin talks of the slaves picking up on the slogans of American independence and the settlers slowly realizing that they were in in a bind:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…
What does that mean for slaves? Writers start picking up on this and driving the wedge in. Dan Carlin talks about the pen being mightier than the sword, in this, and calls it “weaponised philosophy”, he recounts how the public mood shifted, how suddenly change seemed possible within a lifetime, and here I am, thinking: What can I do?
Yes, I can live a happy life, which is, as we know, the sweetest revenge. I can listen to Voltaire saying that we need to cultivate our garden. I can listen to my past self who decided one day that there was no point in following the news every day and that ranting only hurt me, never the opposition. But every now and then, I can write something on my blog.
Perhaps that’s what I’m trying to do. I write about role-playing games and small-scale server administration, and it ties in with the global struggle for privacy, the global struggle against plutocracy, the global struggle against discrimination, in short: for human rights.
Capitalism is one of the problems. It enables the sociopaths among us, and there are many ways to attack the problem. We are many and we must pursue them all.
This is my way.
Thank you for coming to my pep talk! 😀
– Alex 2023-03-07 18:04 UTC
Tend your own garden is basically one of the main tenets of Epicurianism, a philosophy I have some affinity with as well. Probably Voltaire was making a little joke there too, calling back to the garden of Epicurus.
PS. I love the little slice-of-life openers you use on your blog, like this one from the Vision for Search post. It’s a warm touch. There’s another person on the other end of that wire, living and loving and being human.
It’s early in the morning, my wife left for her commute and the Duke Ellington band is playing. I’m between first coffee and breakfast.
– Teiresias 2023-03-08 04:23 UTC
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Thanks! Apparently they are working in an interesting way.
Writing them was a deliberate decision I made not too long ago, but for a different reason: I wanted to make sure that readers (and I!) understand that the blog is an artifice, a projection from an altogether different person. If it turns out that this adds a warm touch, I won’t complain. It makes the writing against bots more believable. 😆
[Blogging is] a bit like me “writing notes to my future self” – except now I’m looking at these notes from my past self and wondering “who dis?” And I’m wondering whether there is some sort of flourish I could add to semi-divest myself from my blog. – 2021-09-02 A framing story for the blog?
2021-09-02 A framing story for the blog?
– Alex 2023-03-08 05:58 UTC
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@atomicpoet writes about bots talking to bots and links to this announcement:
This marks a significant milestone in the world of social media, as small businesses can now leverage the power of AI to create engaging social media posts on the go, using only their mobile devices. The app is a game-changer for busy entrepreneurs who want to maintain a strong social media presence but don’t have the time to use complex desktop apps or create content themselves. – Hookle Launches AI Tool to Create Social Media Posts for You
Hookle Launches AI Tool to Create Social Media Posts for You
🤮
– Alex 2023-03-12 12:47 UTC
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Funny to compare the shadow world of bots with earlier thoughts of shadow people where you don’t know whether they are alive or dead: 2020-09-05 The shadow people of social media.
2020-09-05 The shadow people of social media
– Alex 2023-03-15 06:13 UTC
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Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders want to defend against AI lobbying:
Campaign finance reforms such as contribution limits, particularly when applied to political action committees of all types as well as to candidate operated campaigns, can reduce the dependence of politicians on contributions from private interests. … We can expand mandatory disclosure of contributions and lobbying relationships, with provisions to prevent the obfuscation of the funding source. … Promote inclusion and engagement in the political process … Encourage direct contact that generates more-than-digital relationships between constituents and their representatives, which will be an enduring way to privilege human stakeholders. Provide paid leave to allow people to vote as well as to testify before their legislature and participate in local town meetings and other civic functions. Provide childcare and accessible facilities at civic functions so that more community members can participate. – Defending against AI Lobbyists
Defending against AI Lobbyists
– Alex 2023-03-15 12:49 UTC