✨Ben Hamill✨ @benhamill@octodon.social

"Is it" a person? Who knows. Every time we have a new AI breakthrough, we move the goal posts. But it was designed to read people, so it did.

My point was that, once it started acting sufficiently personlike, it started moving its own goal posts to make itself feel better. It's the equivalent of a white cisdude realizing that he's perpetrating racism, which makes him feel bad, so he starts to do stuff to make himself feel good. Humans feel good when we help each other.

We are, of course, heading toward option A. But, as Ursula K. Le Guin said, social orders always seem eternal until they're not. It behooves us to look at better ways to exist.

AI, as far as we've seen, is never like a person. It does things persons can do, but we're still doing things we consider centrally important to our nature AND WE CAN'T DEFINE.

The persona in Feral has a UX that is a lawyer. That's partly because I need it to be a protagonist.

That's roughly the same as spambots designed to harvest email addresses to sell to spam companies that harvest emails…

So imagine two futures. One is the one I'm writing about in Feral (and maybe some upcoming stories). Humans are, at best, a harvestable resource. At worst, they are a drag on stock price.

The other is where we decouple AI from capital and turn it into a feature of humanity.

Unlike living things, AI are evolving under the guidance of intelligent designers, though they have already exceeded the designers' ability to fully understand them.

But their purpose is to increase share price, right?

That leads to Feral phenomena like the Burger King ad that, when it plays on the TV, orders burgers through Alexa.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/business/burger-king-tv-ad-google-home.html?_r=0

I've been thinking a lot about my "feral economy" principle, where the global economy doesn't really need humans.

I first articulated it a couple of years back in a short called, simply, Feral. You can read it here: https://glyphpress.com/talk/2014/feral

Artificial intelligence is being developed under the evolutionary constrataints of Capitalism.

(More coming, under the Feral Economy content warning, which should make a way to thread? Let's find out!)

@benhamill @benhamill

THE BEN HAMILLS ARE MULTIPLYIN', CAP'N, I CAN'T STOP THE CHAIN REACTION!

*dumps core*

Oh man they're doing it they're gonna transcend dichotomous thinking in the star wars universe and a whole generation will be raised without reductive heroes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB4I68XVPzQ

https://octodon.social/@emdeesee/561929

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if witches.town jinx character limit is 666, should not cyber.space ping character limit be 512? @chr

https://octodon.social/@SuzanEraslan/558095

start here, read thread. 💖 want to double fav every post. love that this sort of discussion *can* happen here (both because the technology and the community here support it)

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It's because "鱒丼" is pronounced "masudon" and Japanese pronunciation is similar to Mastodon.