217 sats \ 5 replies \ @cascdr 6 Jul \ parent \ on: SITUATIONAL AWARENESS - The Decade Ahead builders
There's a great book called AI Superpowers worth checking out. It's written from the perspective of the guy that ran Google China and who now actively invests in chinese startups.
He covers a similar statist angle of US vs China. Imo he talks his book but has interesting perspectives chiefly that the simple fact of there being way more people in China gives certain edges (way more data for training) meanwhile the American tendency to innovate and ignore authority has its own advantages.
I'll need time to pore over the attached pdf. It can be hard to know what to believe especially in a world where so many people are talking their book and creating doom & gloom simply so they can get regulatory moats. Regardless of how this goes I have conviction that there are large productivity gains to be had and that it's imperative that we create censorship resistant, pro human and decentralized AI systems.
Thanks. It can all be a bit overwhelming and tiresome.
On another note, something I (again) observed today on the train in Tokyo was the rather obvious but incredible addiction that people have with their smartphones.
It was like every single one of them were being sucked into the little glass screens with a passive expression and a disembodiment that can perhaps be compared to the opium craze that overtook China in the 19th century. The little ticks they had as they scrolled and touched the precious phone, laughing and talking to themselves, in any other situation they would be diagnosed with an illness.
This addiction to information has been known for sometime, but the image of literally everyone on the train being plugged into another world was very interesting and begs questions about the territorial authority in that new digital world, and the relationship with state, big corps etc.
Is AI not some continuation of this great information fetish? A machine that can know all things at once? Is that not why it is such a powerful stimulant, even if it is potentially make-believe?
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Yea I remember Rogan bringing up the point that if aliens came here and saw us staring into phones like we are, they would mistake the phones for the masters of the planet, not humans. If it weren't for the work I'm doing + lifestyle I'm in I would engineer my life to look at phones the bare minimum.
I've been reading the Screwtape Letters as recommended by @bitcoinplebdev on @Car 's podcast. The premise of the book is a series of letters between demons scheming on how to get a man's life off track. You could make an argument that in a sense smartphones are like demons assigned to us to take advantage of our lower, most base instincts and lead us astray.
There's a significant danger of AI being a more sophisticated form of that type of demon with the added bonus of the total subversion of your privacy. For that reason I created CASCDR which I hope will be a place where AI can serve genuine human needs. Luke & I are building it in a way that preserves privacy and fosters the decentralized, free open markets that I believe are needed to make it a force for good. If you're interested this talk I gave at @PlebLab startup day is a good primer on my vision and what CASCDR is trying to accomplish.