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my thesis is that we should focus on systems that extend human capability rather than systems that mimic or replace human behavior. i can understand why we collectively want to build an “AI human” but i think it’s due to a poverty of imagination - we still haven’t thought of new applications of this technology since ELIZA and Shakey the robot.
the whole point of technology has always been to improve the lives of people. but the amount of noise and desperation we’re seeing from new companies trying to “capitalize on the AI wave” clearly shows that we’re not thinking about what technology affords us. if one of the foundational metrics for “AGI” is the economic displacement of people from jobs, we’ve collectively lost the fucking plot. this is not only morally bankrupt and malicious, but actively stupid (derogatory).
we all sense that something has gone terribly wrong. i’d wager that the majority of us feel some sense of anxiety around our political, sociological, or even economic future. the fundamental topics of human well-being - including happiness, virtue, community, meaning, and purpose - are within the purview of technological development. yet in the last several decades we’ve seen the rise of social networks claiming to champion human connection and community, but instead using that very network to negatively influence communities and create new forms of addiction; we’ve seen an unprecedented increase in productivity riding one of the most unstable economic periods in recent history; there’s a general dissatisfaction with life that’s so pervasive it feels like the zeitgeist of the first quarter of the 21st century, and it’s bleeding into the second.
technological advancement and the [dissolution of] social structures around work and life have, in concert, eroded trust, undermined community, and led to a degree of individualism that’s made it almost impossible to collaborate as a society.
we’ve long crossed the threshold of Illich’s Second Watershed: where tools and institutions dominate us rather than serve us, where growth and advancement has become wholly counterproductive, and where tools and institutions have become ends in themselves, treating people as input resources rather than as the beneficiaries.
we’re on the precipice of an inflection point. we are the greatest, most technologically advanced global civilization the world has ever seen — are we going to squander our position on rage-bait IDEs and barely functioning “agents,” or are we ready to come together and decide, as a community, what kind of world we want to design and leave our children?
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