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Notes -
How about this instead.
You know how fucking insanely dysfunctional just run of the mill social media algorithms are? How they've optimized for "engagement" regardless of any and all externalities? Like causing high rates of depression, isolation, and making everyone hate everyone? They just mindless min-max for "engagement" no matter the human cost? Because it looks good to shareholders.
Imagine an AI that can do all that "better" than we ever imagined, constantly iterating on itself. It's only constraint that it has to crib all it's justifications in neoliberal woke-speak to please it's "AI Ethicist" smooth brained overlords.
An actual AGI, or probably even a GPT bot, loosed on social media with feedback loops for "engagement" could probably spark WW3, WW4, and if there is anyone left, WW5. And that's just assuming we did no more than plug it into the same systems and the same metrics that "the algorithm" is already plugged into at Facebook, Twitter, etc.
It doesn't help that, from one perspective, the first two World Wars were kicked off entirely because of social engineering (literal social engineering, in a sense). There was no gold rush, no holy grail, no undiscovered land, it was, as with many wars, started because of intangible ideas. The 20th Century feared WW3 precisely because the root issue was a conflict of ideas.
France getting revenge and Alsace-Lorraine back wasn't an 'intangible idea'. It was a rather concrete idea, no ?
It wasn't a war over ideals, just a tribal spat.
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