| > "What you said just now—the idea that we fall into a kind of trance—what I’m hearing you say is that’s distracting us from actual threats like climate change or harms to marginalized people." Is the argument here that people are rather passive and go along with whatever the system serves up to them, hence they're liable to 'fall into a trance'? If so, then the problem is that people are passive, and it doesn't really matter if they're passively watching television or passively absorbing an AI-engineered social media feed optimized for advertiser engagement and programmed consumption, is it? If you want to use LLMs to get information about fossil-fueled global warming from a basic scientific perspective, you can do that, e.g.: > "Please provide a breakdown of how the atmospheric characteristics of the planets Venus, Earth, and Mars affects their surface temperature in the context of the Fourier and Manabe models." If you want to examine the various approaches civilizations have used to address the problem of economic and social marginalization of groups of people, you could ask: > "How would [insert person here] address the issue of economic and social marginalization of groups of people in the context of an industrial society experiencing a steep economic collapse?" Plug in Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, etc. for contrasting ideas. What sounds best to you? It's an incredibly useful tool, and people can use it in many different ways - if they have the motivation and desire to do so. If we've turned into a society of brainwashed apathetic zombies passively absorbing whatever garbage is thrown our way by state and corporate propagandists, well, that certainly isn't the fault of LLMs. Indeed LLMs might help us escape this situation. |