If we allow the far-right to continue merging political power with AI without guardrails, we will see the rise of a system where freedom is algorithmically rationed.
It’s that any public conversation broad enough to be culturally significant will be so full of AI debris that it will be almost impossible for humans to find each other.
This is the part that I question, this is certainly a fear and it totally makes sense to me but as I have argued in other threads recently I think there is a very good chance that while those in power believe that an analog of the Kessler Syndrome will happen in information, and this is precisely why they most of them are pushing this future, that it might hilariously backfire on them in a spectacular way.
I have a theory I call the “Wind-up Flashlight Theory” which is that when the internet reaches a dead state full of AI nonsense that makes it impossible to connect with humans, that rather than it being the completion of a process of censorship and oppression of thought that our imagination cannot escape from, a darkness and gloom that nobody can find their way in… the darkness simply serves to highlight the people in the room who have wind-up flashlights and are able to make their own light.
To put it another way, every step the internet takes towards being a hopeless storm of AI bots drowning out any human voices… might actually just be adding more negative space to a picture where the small amount of human places on the internet by comparison starkly stand out as positive spaces EVEN MORE and people become EVEN MORE likely to flock to those places because the difference just keeps getting more and more undeniable.
Lastly I want to rephrase this in a way that hopefully inspires, every step the rich and authoritarians of the world take to push the internet takes towards being dead makes the power of our words on the fediverse increase all by itself, you don’t have to do anything but keep being ernest, vulnerable and human. Imagine you have been cranking a wind-up flashlight and feeling impotent because there were harsh bright flourescent lights glaring over you in the room… but now the lights just got cut and for the first time people can see clearly the light you bring in its full power and love for humanity.
This is the part that I question, this is certainly a fear and it totally makes sense to me but as I have argued in other threads recently I think there is a very good chance that while those in power believe that an analog of the Kessler Syndrome will happen in information, and this is precisely why they most of them are pushing this future, that it might hilariously backfire on them in a spectacular way.
I have a theory I call the “Wind-up Flashlight Theory” which is that when the internet reaches a dead state full of AI nonsense that makes it impossible to connect with humans, that rather than it being the completion of a process of censorship and oppression of thought that our imagination cannot escape from, a darkness and gloom that nobody can find their way in… the darkness simply serves to highlight the people in the room who have wind-up flashlights and are able to make their own light.
To put it another way, every step the internet takes towards being a hopeless storm of AI bots drowning out any human voices… might actually just be adding more negative space to a picture where the small amount of human places on the internet by comparison starkly stand out as positive spaces EVEN MORE and people become EVEN MORE likely to flock to those places because the difference just keeps getting more and more undeniable.
Lastly I want to rephrase this in a way that hopefully inspires, every step the rich and authoritarians of the world take to push the internet takes towards being dead makes the power of our words on the fediverse increase all by itself, you don’t have to do anything but keep being ernest, vulnerable and human. Imagine you have been cranking a wind-up flashlight and feeling impotent because there were harsh bright flourescent lights glaring over you in the room… but now the lights just got cut and for the first time people can see clearly the light you bring in its full power and love for humanity.
That is the moment I believe we are in RIGHT NOW