Meant to be at the computer many hours ago, but I had so many other things to do—things like pray, take a walk, lift heavy weights, and generally complain about the state of all things.
And then I came across this dystopian possibility, something called Grok. Mary Harrington explains:
Grok is potentially significant because X is currently the most dynamic and influential collective consensus-formation platform of this kind in existence: a colossal prism for the convening, focusing and operation of egregoric hive-intelligences. As such, whether or not you agree with Stavish that egregores have agency independent of their members, linking X to a pattern-recognising large language model (LLM) has the potential to produce an AI that is much more genuinely alive than any other instance of AI to date.
If you still don’t quite get what she’s saying, here’s a bit more:
The interim solution to this paradox has been what elsewhere I’ve called ‘swarm governance’, the progressive draining-away of human authority into impersonal processes, systems, committees and procedures, often backed by unaccountable ‘civil society’ NGOs that themselves seem to have no clear head or directing intelligence. The emergence of this kind of governance has both accelerated loss of faith in liberal democracy and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, also come increasingly to claim its mantle. Swarm governance is, in practice, already a kind of rule by egregore. But if Musk succeeds in developing a large language model backed by a dynamic, live human-input dataset, the resulting entity could potentially both serve as the unitary figurehead of a strongman government, while also being de-individuated enough to be legitimate to adherents of the doctrine of radical equality.
Seriously, freak yourself out and read the whole thing. At least that way you’ll know when it’s finally time to throw your phone out the car window into the oncoming traffic.
I’ve noticed—perhaps you have too—an uptick in anxiety and the general sense of the whole world melting down. Some people seem to have their lives together, but then lots of people who did once appear to have it all together are now riding a live wire of anxiety and despair. The more everyone shares all their information and deepest shallowest thoughts, the more wretched everything becomes.
Particularly discouraging to me are the once strong, theologically sound Christian influencers who slow-motion (sometimes not that slow) apostatize publicly online. Who knew the gospel was so incomprehensible? Who could have guessed that the Episcopal version of bilge spirituality mixed with desultory social justice sentiments would turn out to be so bougie…25 years after their sell-by dates? Turning the ‘hive mind’ ratchet in this current climate seems like the opposite of a good time.
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