"In a way, the app created its owner. "

That right there feels like science fiction, like it's something the author dropped in to do a bit of world-building. A story where we never quite got AI to doomsday levels, but let's look at what's happening as humans adapt to new and artificial constructs in our biome (for lack of a better word- sort of feels like a symbiote or a virus or something, the attention-encouraging skinner boxes and their results).

Agreed that the whole thing is "a little fucked up."

very minor correction only because the rest of the post is [chef's kiss]: it was musk's cousin, apparently, who woke up employees with the red alert about the super bowl tweet.

it seems like we're living in Infinite Jest

Have you reshared this post as a YouTube comment? Someone’s left a comment on this video, and if it’s not you they’ve plagiarized you pretty much word for word. I don’t know if you care about this sort of thing or what can be done about it if you do, but I wanted to make sure you were aware just in case

the more or less openly stated end goal of basically every web 2.0 company has been to hook a rich mark and cash out for megabucks before the lack of any way to make a normal revenue kills the company, but afaik Twitter is the first to succeed by getting oligarchs addicted to their gamification system directly instead of trying to pitch them on some technobabble get-rich-quick scheme.

The poor chumps running around trying to placate Elon now are just more marks tho really, the real architects of the scheme took their $44B and won't have to do anything to please anyone ever again

by now i am almost fully convinced that consciousness is just a state of matter for information so to speak.

apply enough something onto information and that something becomes a consciousness. which means, if you pile up enough information in "one" place, "it"* will eventually become conscious by accident.

the internet was clearly a mistake that lead to a new kind of organism. this video comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYPFenJQciw

• by it i dont neccessarily mean the information but rather the operations that are applied organize into something that allows something new to form

that line about the failure mode already occurring in the real world with algorithms that optimize for "engagement" reminds me that the way I first understood systems thinking was when I read an article years ago (back when I was still a computer nerd) that explained private companies under capitalism as the paperclip optimizer kind of AI, entities that don't have consciousness but are driven by a fixed goal (in capitalism, making as much money as possible) and will ignore everything else to get to that goal. the purpose of a system is what it does.