ABE GREENWALD: The AI-to-AI Economy.
A friend of mine recently got laid off from his job at a large firm. Wasting no time, he immediately started hunting down and applying for available positions. The thing was, almost all his initial application letters were swiftly rejected. “I realized I was dealing with AI, not humans,” he told me. The vast majority of big corporations screen job applications with AI platforms trained to search for specific phrases that indicate a candidate’s desirability or undesirability. It’s up to the AI to put you through to the next phase or give you the thumbs down.
So my friend changed his approach, and he started getting interviews. “What did you do differently?” I asked. The answer: “Every application is now written by AI on my end before I send it.”
I was chilled by the notion of my highly capable friend having to employ one lifeless machine to speak to another on his behalf in hopes of getting a foot in the door. I then learned that everyone does it that way now.
Dystopias, real and imagined, aren’t just cold, nightmarish places. And they’re not shaped merely by evil ideas. The most overlooked aspect of dystopian worlds is the dumbness that settles at their core, the incredible stupidity of the schemes that people are roped into.
Still though, could be worse: PJTV alum James Poulos on “The Doomer Delusion:”
The celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion,” recently caused a stir on social media by confessing a sort of love for the Claude model he interacts with, which he calls Claudia. “If my friend Claudia is not conscious,” he enthused, “then what the hell is consciousness for?”
The cringe-inducing spectacle of a credentialed scientific authority acting like the nerd version of a hormonal teenager — “when I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines,” he gushed — quickly triggered an ongoing wave of predictable mockery. “The king of the Reddit atheists has been duped by the magic midwit machine,” one poster groaned. “Incredible.”
Yet far be it from me to pile on. Rhapsodies to consciousness like Dawkins’ aren’t funny so much as sad. The enchanting attribute is so notoriously hard to define that even super-smart consciousness lovers like Dawkins are prone to define consciousness tautologically (and dangerously) as being whatever smart-enough conscious people such as themselves act like it is.
Comedian Jimmy Carr told Joe Rogan last year:
CARR: My hot take on AI is we were not made in God’s image, but we so wanted there to be a God, we made one in our image. So if you think about the attributes of AI, it’s all-knowing, all-powerful, can perform miracles, it lives in a cloud. Sorry, is that God or AI?
ROGAN Wow. Yeah, it’s interesting. Especially emerging, it’s an emerging God. It’s not even done growing yet.
CARR: At the moment, it’s the Oracle of Delphi.
ROGAN: It’s like a 10-year-old right now though. It’s not even an adult.
CARR: Yeah and then where’s it going to? So the idea of like the interesting thing about AI is it’s the the gap between me and who’s the smartest guy we know, Eric Weinstein. Mm-hmm. Used to be enormous and the gap is getting smaller because AI can just I can ask it.
ROGAN Yeah bitch, I got all the answers right here!
CARR: It’s weird what’s going on you know I had a gag about it about it, a bit about [how] in our universities you know the students are using AI to write their essays and then the tutors are using AI to mark the essays and then after three years AI gets the job. It actually seems very fair.
ROGAN: Yeah it’s probably what’s going to happen. What you’re saying is very funny. It’s like, it is accurate though. It does seem to resemble a god. Well, I wonder… Do you know who Marshall McLuhan is?
CARR: Of course, the Canadian [philosopher.]
ROGAN: He had one of the great lines of all time. “…human beings are the sex organs of the machine world.”
Dawkins may be taking that notion just a bit too literally.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): You could write a book on this.