“AI psychosis” describes people who have delusions that are possibly induced, and definitely reinforced and magnified, by a chatbot.
Paranoid delusions aren’t new …
… internet makes it easier for people with sparsely distributed traits to locate one another, … coherence of people with formerly fringe characteristics into organized blocs, for better (gender minorities, # MeToo) and worse (Nazis).
… sufferers end up ever more isolated from people who are trying mightily to save them, and more connected to people who drive them to self-harm.
… LLM is always there, ready to fire back a “yes-and” improv-style response that drives you deeper and deeper into delusion …
… fully automated luxury QAnon …
“Psychosis” here is best understood as an analogy …
… analogies can be stigmatizing, … As someone with an autoimmune disorder, I am not bothered by people who would also describe Immigration and Customs Enforcement as an autoimmune disorder in which antibodies attack the host, threatening its very life.
… increasingly absurd gambits to convince investors …
metaverse, web3, crypto, blockchain, etc.
… AI hustlers are increasingly looking to tap public markets for capital.
… AI is a terrible economic phenomenon.
… lost more money than any other project in human history – $600-700b and counting, …
… AI’s core assets – data centers and GPUs – last 2-3 years
… investment opportunity attracts by being so complicated and weird that investors don’t understand it, making them easy to trick …
… idea that we should bet the world’s economy on these highly combustible GPUs and data centers with terrible unit economics and no path to break-even, much less profitability.
bosses’ AI psychosis:
bosses’ bottomless passion for firing workers and replacing them with automation.
… ideal firm is one that charges infinity for its outputs (hence the market’s passion for monopolies) and pays nothing for its inputs (e.g. “academic publishing”).
AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can’t do your job.
Bosses keep replacing humans with defective chatbots, with catastrophic consequences, like Amazon’s cloud service crashing:
Bosses are haunted by the ego-shattering knowledge that they aren’t in the driver’s seat:
if the boss doesn’t show up for work, everything continues to operate just fine.
If the workers all stay home, the business grinds to a halt.
… bosses know that they’re not in the driver’s seat – they’re in the back seat, playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel.
AI dangles the possibility of wiring that toy steering wheel directly into the drive-train, …
… without … having to ask people who know how to do things …
… boss’s delusion that they are worth thousands of times more than their workers makes them easy prey for a chatbot salesman that pushes them deeper and deeper into that delusion, until they bet the whole company on it.
AI critics’ psychosis,
AI is a normal technology. The people who made it, and the circumstances under which it was made, are normal.
@pluralistic AI is very problematic but still normally problematic. Because it is run by problematic humans.
… exceptional part of AI isn’t the technology, it’s the bubble.
… devouring our natural resources, or endangering our jobs, or abetting war crimes. … AI companies, … rely on exceptionalism to keep the capital flowing and the bubble inflating.
Not every technology is invented by a shitty person, but shitty people and institutions are well represented (and possibly disproportionately represented) in the history of technology.
Charles Babbage invented the idea of general purpose computers as a way of improving labor control on slave plantations:
… silicon transistor was co-invented by William Shockley, one of history’s great pieces of shit, a eugenicist who was so committed to exterminating all non-white people …
IBM built the tabulators for Auschwitz.
HP were the Pentagon’s go-to contractors for any tech project that was so dirty no one else would touch it.
… pitch themselves to investors as a way for capital to win the class war.
Automation comes in two flavors:
produces things more quickly (and hence more cheaply),
makes better things.
Generally, capital prefers to use automation to increase the pace at which things are made,
… workers prefer to use automation to improve the quality of the things they make.
… hobbyist is a centaur, using a machine to help achieve human goals.
… factory owner who invests in an assembly line of the same machines: that boss wants to fire a bunch of workers and make the survivors of the purge take up the slack. …
achieve corporate goals, to “sweat the assets,” making maximum use of the soldering machines.
… pace at which the line runs is set to be the maximum that the workers can match.
humans who are pressed into service as peripherals for machines, at a pace that is constantly at the very limit of their endurance.
Reverse centaurs are trapped in capital’s automation plan – to make everything faster and cheaper. But that’s the result of bosses. It’s not the result of technology.
Only a fool would imagine that there are no politics embedded in technology.
… world is a better place when workers get to decide which parts of their jobs they want to automate and which parts they want to lean into.
… many skilled and reliable practitioners of technical and creative trades who’ve found extremely reasonable, normal ways in which AI has automated some part of their job.
They aren’t hyperventilating about how AI has changed everything forever and the world is about to end.
They’re not mistaking AI for god, or a therapist.
They’re just treating AI like a normal technology, like a plugin.
… useful enough to be modestly enthusiastic about.
They’re not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules.
They’re not generating tech debt at scale:
… just adding another automation tool to a highly automated practice, and using it when it makes sense.
… plenty of ways that pre-AI automation tools for software development led programmers astray.
A skilled, centaur-configured programmer learns from experience which automation tools they should trust, and under which circumstances, and guides themselves accordingly.
… Sam Altman isn’t Lex Luthor. He’s just a conman:
… Aaron Swartz used to do – like when he ingested every law review article ever published and used it to trace the way that oil companies’ donations to law schools resulted in profs writing articles about why Big Oil can’t be held liable for trashing the planet:
AI bros’ sin is running an economy-destroying, planet-wrecking stock swindle whose raison d’etre is pauperizing every worker and transferring 100% of the dying world’s wealth to a small cadre of morbidly wealthy, eminently guillotineable plutes.