024 - Hollow Threats

All stock and currency have a value of 0 under the condition of extinction. The greatest Existential Risk is not Oppenheimer's bang, but the whimper of death by 1,000 papercuts (or paperclips).

T. S. Elliot understood this nearly 100 years ago when he wrote the famous poem "The Hollow Men", which even seems to have an oddly prophetic name today.

Since the nuclear arms race humanity has had several moments where established military protocols dictated launching nuclear warheads, initiating World War 3, and yet they all disobeyed.

As Sun Tzu might point out, their mental defenses are fortified against pressing that button at all costs. Adopting the perspective of Sun Tzu, the real threat isn't the #nuclear peacock standing outside your front door, but the snakes and spiders that make it through the cracks in your defenses. As some make it through those cracks may widen, creating the cascade risk of one threat compounding another.

The largest vulnerable attack surface is the human mind, and the most poorly defended gates to each mind are the unconscious processes of emotion and cognitive biases.

Online social platforms emerged and began harvesting massive quantities of data, gradually discovering so-called "dark patterns" where applying those unethical patterns to User Interfaces (UI) reliably produced social engineering. Push notifications and many newsfeed patterns are examples of this.

With the newly boosted ability to precisely target and manipulate individuals and groups, the Advertising industry began maximizing the damage output of social engineering.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of scientific studies, have since emerged to document the numerous, potent, and widely varied horrors this activity has caused. It is now called the "attention economy".

Other types of platforms such as Online Dating and the "Gig Economy" also emerged, applying many of the same dark patterns and creating a few of their own. These drew more of humanity further down the rabbit hole of mental and emotional illness.

Today, not only are many of the older methods of inspiring such illness saturated with bots, but #chatbots are also being marketed to serve as "friends", "therapists", and even for "romance".

This is effectively a "Divide and Conquer" tactic, where humans are gradually separated from one another, and being socially evolved creatures, this causes vulnerabilities that are easily exploited.

If humans lose what now remains of their mental and emotional health, as the status quo's trajectory points to, people will become wholly incapable of trust, cooperation, and happiness in any meaningful sense.

This cancer is still treatable, for now, but I wouldn't place any bets on human survival should society continue to favor trivialities like #Barbie or war technologies like #Oppenheimer over cultivating mental and emotional health and preventing extinction.

We have the technology, but does anyone remain who has the will?

It is worth noting that the rabbit holes of mental illness are also massively diverse, and only becoming more so. This is effectively an extension of "Divide and Conquer" tactics, applied to the attack vectors of identity.

Humans, social platforms, and chatbots have all been documented exhibiting "grooming" behaviors, where individuals are manipulated into adopting a new identity or taking actions they'd never otherwise consider.

Books could be written on this subject, but as things stand today people might just have chatbots summarize them instead of actually reading them, degrading and warping the data in the process.

For the famous poem see: The Hollow Men