I think the effect is polycausal, but I think there's an important primary one that is often ignored: alienation crossing a threshold.
In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards, because the tribe and the individual are coextensive. One can't hurt the tribe without also hurting yourself, so while individual interests may not coalign, the overall goals do: the health of the people and therefore the self.
As population increases, that coalignment becomes more nebulous, and the individual can more easily gain while hurting the other. This is partly why crime increased as the species civilized, created cities, and exploded the population. This, as an isolated factor, might've increased forever, and most dystopian fiction from the 20th century assumed it would.
However, alienation then largely became complete, thanks to technology. This had the contrary effect, because the public surface became a smooth wall, removing much of the opportunity for anti-social behavior. The alienated man now lives in his bubble, without connectivity to the outside world of other individuals. Human emotion, as a pre-req for the anti-social behavior we classify most crime as, required an other, someone to direct it against. It's harder (though not impossible) to get angry at abstract social megastructures like corporations and governments, and even when you do, what are you going to do about it? You can't stab Google, you can at best post something unkind about them (on your Android phone) and the algorithm (your actual interface to the entity you may despise) ignores it. Most of us realize this and don't even bother getting angry. Thankfully, these same non-human entities provide the products we need for emotional regulation. Feeling lonely, bored, understimulated, sexually frustrated? There's a product that will safely mediate those desires and get you back into a metastable, yet ever more alienated, state.
So great, we have less crime, sure, but it required the social neutering of the species.
> In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards, because the tribe and the individual are coextensive
Source? Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature had lots of issues. But its core observation that one’s homicide hazard rate has almost monotonically fallen across human history would imply that small, ancient group were way more violent than our modern societies are.
In this context, simply killing other humans, or any violence, is not equivalent to crime. Crime is dependent upon a collective interpretation of any act, not necessarily whether it's objectively destructive. A tribe may decide to wage war upon neighbors, sacrifice virgins, or what have you, but they do so under the impression that it's perceived to be in their coaligned interest.
This is relevant because the metric we're measuring now is exactly that: crime, not violence. WWIII could break out tomorrow, billions could die, and crime could still go down.
Lots of the deaths appear to be separate from war [1]. We have lots of evidence of violent crime in non-state socieities [2].
Where you might have a point is in the reduction of anonymous property crime. But that's just because small societies don't tend to have privacy. The property crime may still happen, it will just be resolved comunally or bilaterally using violence.
Having had the fortune to travel to many places, one thing I've learned is that crime stats tell you nothing by themselves. For instance there are many countries that have homicide rates comparable to, or even higher than the US, but where you could feel completely safe alone just about anywhere at any time, whereas in many parts of the US, or some other countries lower crime rates - that's certainly not the case.
So for instance a big one is interpersonal 'justifiable' crime, versus random crime. There are places where if you insult somebody's integrity, they will kill you. Add some alcohol into the mix and these sort of places can have some rather high homicide/assault/etc rates. But on the other hand in these very same places, your chances of falling victim to random crime is basically zero, so they feel extremely safe in spite of having many crime rates comparable to places that feel extremely unsafe.
And data about the nature of crime in the past is strongly suggestive that it also had a similar character. People would not hesitate to use violence in the case of interpersonal conflicts, but the chances of falling victim to random crime was likely significantly lower than it is today. And I think these are the sort of crimes that people mostly care about, and it being a result of social alienation does seem like a perfectly valid hypothesis, though I'm not sure if in present times South America and others would falsify it. From an outsider's perspective, they seem quite socially cohesive, yet have exceptionally high rates of criminality.
> your chances of falling victim to random crime is basically zero, so they feel extremely safe in spite of having many crime rates comparable to places that feel extremely unsafe
Where are you thinking of? What I've seen, more commonly, is societies with lots of crime having ways for the wealthy to insulate themselves for it and then, acting against a background that has normalised high crime, feeling very safe. Versus societies where everyone is more mixed together where folks are constantly paranoid about vanishingly-infrequent crimes.
One typical example would be Thailand. Its homicide rate is quite close to the US, yet the nature of crime in the country is very different. Your chances of running into any sort of random violent crime is basically zero. It also even challenges the economic integration argument since it's also atypical there as well - poor households being right next door to a luxury condo is quite common.
WWII involved a lot of crime - straightforwardly illegal acts. And I don't mean just "hiding jews" ethical crime (which was super rare), but crime crime like murder, stealing, frauds, rapes. Both by soldiers and civilians.
Historians of violence have a ton of criticisms of that book. But they also agree with the general claim that violence today is much lower than in almost all times throughout the past.
> In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards,
Dude, tight-knit societies produce crime, it is just that everyone ends up enabling the biggest abuser, rapist and what not there. So it ends up tolerated. We know, because those things come out after decades when people eventually feel safe to speak.
The author loved technology when it worked for him, now he toils in its service. Previously, it was additive, only giving and not taking; now it narrows options to only one: the app.
Obviously, we shouldn't let this happen. Keep paper tickets, physical menus, cash, etc. These things are human, made by and for humans. They make sense across the intelligence spectrum as they connect to us in the physicality of the real (which everyone understands).
Of course, the individual doesn't get to decide if all his government and city services app-ify themselves. What to do in that case? I guess this guy's chosen the path of minimal leashing: wearing the digital yoke as little as possible. That's just harm minimization though.
Perhaps it'll help someone to say this: It is possible to live without a smartphone. I do it. There's times when you can't use a service. QR codes are meaningless. You might occasionally be bored. I've always found an alternative or workaround to these issues. Yes, that's inconvenient sometimes (usually not though, surprisingly), but is that worse than being a slave to glass slab?
> Previously, it was additive, only giving and not taking; now it narrows options to only one: the app
This seems a bit dramatic. The issue is who is making the decisions. People have stopped being intentional about their decision-making, in a variety of ways, and tend to simply go with whatever the company providing the software recommends. This is the thing that we need to change. Using these services and using a smartphone are fine. We need to find a way to do it on our own terms, though.
For an example from my own life (technically less relevant because if it comes down to it I'm fortunate and stubborn enough to win the lawsuit if that's what it comes down to, but swap me for any of their other million customers and the story still applies), my HSA has unilaterally made owning a sufficiently modern smartphone (<3yrs practically speaking, though it depends a bit on the manufacturer) with all the secure enclave bells and whistles mandatory to access my money I voluntarily placed into their system under a completely set of rules. Customer service has gone nowhere. If I couldn't afford the lawsuit, what options would I have? The employer offering the HSA a decade ago was just trying (and succeeding) to provide a nice benefit. I would've been insane to turn down a bunch of free money from my employer when the only stipulation was that it went through a third party taking a <<1% cut. The fuck-the-customer mentality happened later, and suddenly enough I couldn't do anything about it. If some family caves to their demands to access their own money, I'm not going to be the one to blame them for not being intentional about their decision making.
You can get pretty far replacing your launcher with something that makes you type the name of the app you want to launch, and avoiding most apps, like FB, X, Amazon, Insta, etc.
The trillions are effective at forcing network effects, but anything outside that it pretty trivial to swap out and get a better experience.
I'm a bit surprised by the fatalism on display in this discussion. I get that it sounds like I'm victim-blaming, but you can only alter your own behavior, so assuming responsibility has merit.
People don't want to admit this because it is uncomfortable to blamed by the problems you yourself create, but if you are addicted to your phone to the point that you feel compelled to complain about the network (on the network, mind you), then it is entirely because you let yourself get addicted and you still let yourself keep being addicted.
The most insane part of this is the subtle-as-a-hammer-to-the-face MiSTER ad shoved in the middle of the article as if it made any sense whatsoever. And people are taking this guy seriously?
Addiction has a demand and supply component. I think we can all recognize that fact. Personal responsibility matters of course. However, ignoring the fact that companies spend trillions to make their products addictive is a very silly thing to do.
IMO the closest corollary we have is gambling. Most countries place strict limits on gambling, because it's so incredibly addictive to some people. We can see this very obviously in the rise of online gambling platforms like Polymarket it recent years. Without regulation, a lot of people will get sucked in and their lives will be destroyed.
I encourage you to read up on how addiction works. Your comment implies a severe lack of understanding about the subject. Alternatively, you could take a course on addiction at your local college. Always good to get educated!
Not letting yourself be addicted does not mean it is easy, it means that you have the power to stop it, and fuelling that addicting (as in: posting ON THE FUCKING NETWORK that you don’t like the network) is exactly that.
There's two main schools of thought regarding the downsides of AI: One is apocalyptic, focusing on existential threats of the kind seen in scifi literature, and is largely influenced by the exact warnings given therein. The other, which I'll call "socio-realism", often looks into the actual past at the introduction of automation and its displacing effects.
The "AI safety" movement is largely an answer to only one side: the apocalyptic one. Doomers like Yudkowsky and his ilk are popular over there. Note how his most recent book reads like scifi, including with its implausible "solutions"? These people are living in a fantasy land. This isn't to say p(doom) = 0, but we've lived with it being non-zero since the introduction of nuclear weapons. Very little has changed there, I'd say.
For the socio-realism side, well, this model aligns well with exactly the kinds of real-world misery often posted on this site, as intellectual workers' livelihoods and telos are negated by automation. Sellers of "AI safety" don't care about them. There's no calls from that community to carve out space for us to retain a life of meaning within society when our ability to contribute is nullified. The fantasy of AI safety doesn't have room for that: they're too busy warding off imaginary demons; hence the cult-like behavior.
> There's two main schools of thought regarding the downsides of AI: One is apocalyptic, focusing on existential threats of the kind seen in scifi literature, and is largely influenced by the exact warnings given therein. The other, which I'll call "socio-realism", often looks into the actual past at the introduction of automation and its displacing effects.
Yes! Also the "apocalyptic, focusing on existential threats of the kind seen in scifi literature" serves as a useful strawman fo AI advocates to deflect attention away from the socio-realism critique.
It's happened a few times where I say I don't really care about in the apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios [1] but I'm more concern about the "socio-realism," but some AI proponent keeps trying to bend the discussion back to the unrealism of self-replicating von Neumann machines or something.
[1] The most interesting thing about the apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios is that they show the fundamental irresponsibility and recklessness of many very important AI leaders. Those people often seriously entertain those doomsday scenarios while simultaneously racing as fast as they possibly can to build the technologies that they say would enable them.
Use common sense! You yourself are either an LLM or one half of a self–replicating von Neumann machine. You cannot possibly claim that von Neumann machines are ”unreal“.
> The most interesting thing about the apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios is that they show the fundamental irresponsibility and recklessness of many very important AI leaders.
To me at least, it looks like a very cheap and transparent way of bragging and elevating one's self-importance. If we take a practical approach, then AI is just another tool that makes some jobs easier and more automated, which sounds about as sexy as inventing the mass-production of interchangable screws. An astonishing improvement for people who used to mill everything by hand, and absolutely critical technology for the modern world, but barely anyone has even heard of the people who made it possible.
Another aspect is the world that people like the Altmans and Musks come from. The wealthier someone is, the more detached they tend to be from the manual labor that runs the world. When your goods simply appear at your door after a few taps on an app, it's easy to forget that someone made them with their hands (especially true for high-end products), someone packed them, someone drove them to a warehouse, someone photographed and edited them, someone wrote the listing, someone packed them again, and someone eventually brought them to your door.
The entire physical world gets compressed into an app. From that perspective, it can start to seem as if the app is the world itself, and that if someone can hack the app, they can destroy the world.
I'm pretty sure the CEOs of Tesla/SpaceX, OpenAI, and any company depending on data center buildout are painfully aware of physical supply chains and manual labor scarcity right now.
> [1] The most interesting thing about the apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios is that they show the fundamental irresponsibility and recklessness of many very important AI leaders. Those people often seriously entertain those doomsday scenarios while simultaneously racing as fast as they possibly can to build the technologies that they say would enable them.
It's the fascist playbook to champion the end of times while simultaneously proclaiming to being the chosen one to save humanity. It's not different than with these LLM companies.
Naomi Klein's and Astra Taylor's book go over just this: "End Times Fascism."
If a giant, Chicxulub-sized asteroid is headed toward Earth, it makes sense to focus on the existential threat, instead of worrying about whether it will cause inflation or have disparate impact.
You can reject the idea that the asteroid will hit the Earth, but you need to actually make that argument, not just call the people warning about the asteroid an apocalyptic sex cult.
Corollary to your complaints: Another downside that I haven't seen on anyone's AI hatelist yet is that it crowds out all other discussion. What happened to everyone talking about languages, protocols, algorithms, architecture, etc.? We can't have those conversations anymore because we're not even sure they matter now. In fact, we probably suspect they don't, hence the not bothering.
Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.
Yes I've noticed that too. It seems accomplishments in general have been devalued, it's not specific to languages, protocols, algorithms or architecture. If I have some idea at work, I feel like even that receives less recognition now because of AI. AI has ideas too, what does it matter? Sure, your idea could be good. But we are already drowning in ideas from AIs, everytime you prompt an AI it will tell you dozens of ideas on what you could improve. Who can say which one matters, does any of it really matter anymore? Why care about things that are effortless? That's the impression I get in regards to how people think now.
To go along with that, it's also crowding out a whole generation's worth of labor and innovation. We're not curing cancer, we're churning out TPS reports faster and drowning in Show HN shovelware.
The overlap comes from the cancer-curing-capable people also drowning in AI slop and people using AI to flood the space with ideas on how to solve cancer and funders wanting to see people using AI because they think it will solve cancer, etc.
I don't think it speaks well of Software Engineers the will to delegate the construction of blueprints to unreliable workers. Architects and Civil Engineers know that licensed, professional people that have experience and know-how will execute it in a nearly flawless way. Compared to that, agents might hallucinate, build something completely different to the intended project or leave subtle bugs behind that, in the case of complex systems, the humans in charge will probably not even notice.
Why go see Rome when you can google up some photos? Why climb Mt Everest? Why have your own sex when there's so much porn? The answer is going to be the same it's always been: because we fucking can.
I take your point, but unlike everything you mentioned, programming languages have usually been written for others to use, with a handful of Intercal-like exceptions.
Any fully new languages we get will be either doomed from the start, or the language equivalent of TempleOS. Or both.
I think it might be because of the comment to like ratio or something. Hope I am wront, but its like someone doesnt want something generating lots of discussion… in a discussion forum
Agreed that the Lacanian subject is relevant in this context... it's a thin wisp of a subject; any less there, and it'd be the Deleuzian non-subject. (In one interpretation) Lacan's subject comes into being within the signifier chain, retrocausally giving the chain meaning as the "I" manifests subject, in both senses of the term.
I think this is one potential path to machinic subjectivity, or a machine phenomenology. To fully replace the human, we don't just want to give the machine some nebulous notion of "agency", we want it to possess this degree of Being as subject. If Lacan's right, perhaps we're closer to this than we might think. The machine already has language in a very Lacanian sense (what I've been calling a machinic linguistic unconscious), the subject just needs something extra to emerge where meaning breaks down. This will be the Lacanian split subject, one not fully present to itself, and allow desire already present in the language mappings within the model to provide immanent causal force.
Until that happens, we'll still need at least one human on the planet to retain his full faculties, to give the global compute infra its telos. Once that threshold is crossed, then that'll be the moment of our final displacement.
In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards, because the tribe and the individual are coextensive. One can't hurt the tribe without also hurting yourself, so while individual interests may not coalign, the overall goals do: the health of the people and therefore the self.
As population increases, that coalignment becomes more nebulous, and the individual can more easily gain while hurting the other. This is partly why crime increased as the species civilized, created cities, and exploded the population. This, as an isolated factor, might've increased forever, and most dystopian fiction from the 20th century assumed it would.
However, alienation then largely became complete, thanks to technology. This had the contrary effect, because the public surface became a smooth wall, removing much of the opportunity for anti-social behavior. The alienated man now lives in his bubble, without connectivity to the outside world of other individuals. Human emotion, as a pre-req for the anti-social behavior we classify most crime as, required an other, someone to direct it against. It's harder (though not impossible) to get angry at abstract social megastructures like corporations and governments, and even when you do, what are you going to do about it? You can't stab Google, you can at best post something unkind about them (on your Android phone) and the algorithm (your actual interface to the entity you may despise) ignores it. Most of us realize this and don't even bother getting angry. Thankfully, these same non-human entities provide the products we need for emotional regulation. Feeling lonely, bored, understimulated, sexually frustrated? There's a product that will safely mediate those desires and get you back into a metastable, yet ever more alienated, state.
So great, we have less crime, sure, but it required the social neutering of the species.
reply