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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35000 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Or we could imagine the opposite. Personal AIs that know us intimately might be able to find us perfect friends and partners. Add in augmented reality tech that eliminates distance as a barrier to any form of socialization that doesn't require physical contact, and perhaps we're about to completely wipe out atomization/loneliness and save modernity from itself.

Really, nobody has any idea where this is going. The only safe bet is that it's going to be big. A service enabling people to share 140 character text snippets was sufficient to meaningfully shift politics and culture, and that's peanuts to this, probably even if the current spring ends short of AGI.

I think latency issues will be a serious barrier to virtual reality feeling right.

There is also the unlikely result (though far from not impossible) that this is the height of AI. If you asked some in the late 60s whether their grandkids would visit or even live on the moon many would’ve said yeah.

I would be curious if AI optimists could outline a rough path for how we get from ChatGPT to being able to say, replace a top engineer at Google or a top mathematician. Is it JUST more parameters and more training data?

We probably haven't seen the ceiling for what multimodal training (e.g. PaLM-E) can accomplish yet.

A matchmaking AI would be amazing! But will the moral busybodies allow me to train my AI to deselect people who hate me? I'd like to eliminate from my life anyone who believes that sexual harassment is a real problem.

Do we expect moral busybodies to pitch in on a matchmaking AI? After all, it’s much less work to hoot and holler and carry on about how matchmaking AI ‘reinforces cisheteropatriarchal assumptions’ until the cows come home.

If matchmaking has a dominant role in social life (like social media does today) I imagine that the busybodies will do everything in their power to control it.

I'm sure they'll allow them to deselect anyone who believes it isn't.

Or we could imagine the opposite. Personal AIs that know us intimately might be able to find us perfect friends and partners. Add in augmented reality tech that eliminates distance as a barrier to any form of socialization that doesn't require physical contact, and perhaps we're about to completely wipe out atomization/loneliness and save modernity from itself.

What about the Tinder trap? The goal of Tinder is to keep you using Tinder, not find a stable partner. Any company that creates a personal AI will similarly want you to use that AI instead of going hiking with your new friend. Natural selection will ensure that the AI service that people talk to the most will win the AI service wars.

But if you go hiking occasionally the AI can sell you tents and backpacks and cabin rentals.

Really, outcomes in most markets aren't nearly as perverse as what we see with Tinder. Chrome, for instance, doesn't intentionally fail to load web pages so that Google can sell me premium subscriptions and boosters to get them to load. Unlike Tinder, Chrome is monetized in a way that doesn't provide an incentive for its developer to intentionally thwart me in my attempts to use it for its ostensible purpose, and there's enough competition that if Google tried this people would stop using it.

I wonder if Tinder isn't so bad but gets blamed for the dysfunctional Western dating market. In the poor country where I am living, I use Tinder and another local app and I get dozens of likes and multiple messages per day. (This is coming from someone who got maybe one fat-chick like per day in America. BTW this is an experiment you can do yourself, if you are willing to pay for Tinder gold or do some VPN shenanigans to spoof your location. Try setting your location to Manila, PH and see how much attention you get.)

That sounds more like PH women being super-interested in marrying a white guy and moving to America, or just being interested in someone taller, richer, and hairier than the local men. The local dudes might still be being treated poorly.

I'd be interested in stats that indicate that Tinder in places other than the USA/Europe is "healthier," but I'm not sure what those would look like.

I never heard any of these girls express any interest in moving to America (and even if I had the perfect loving wife, I wouldn't want to live in the US again.)

I don't think the local dude are treated poorly here. My theory is that poor men tend to immigrate to other countries for work, creating a male gender bias in rich countries, and leaving a female gender bias back home. This combined with some of the psychological effects of wealth (such as more feminism) causes the wildly distorted dating market in rich countries.

Something that constantly shocks me is just how many young women there are here. It seems like every business I patronize has 75%+ female workers. Where are this country's young men? Sure there are male dominated professions like taxi driver, and maybe there are lots of men in industry or farming but I don't see them. I'm not sure.

Try setting your location to Manilla, PH and see how much attention you get.)

I was passing through KL and got 100 likes in 24 hours. I'm lucky to get two a week in my western country.

Granted some of those are escorts, bots and scammers, but still..

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