141 - Emotional Absurdity

Perhaps the world has already ended, and you're just scrolling the AI-generated newsfeed, watching Netflix shows about various kinds of apocalypses, and chatting with your only remaining "friend" who happens to be a stochastic parrot.

The AI-generated web pages with AI-generated SEO, and search results that predictably are "Scientifically shown to suck" probably won't give you any "hallucination-free" answers.

Looking for someone to talk to? Don't worry, a trashbot handles that now.

Have complaints about the trashbot? Don't worry, they handle customer service too.

Trying to meet people? There is an algorithm ready to show you the thousands of bots with profiles in your area.

Looking to invest in Cryptocurrency? Get with the times, all of that money flows into generative AI right now, and most of the big names don't even go to prison.

Trying to get the attention of lots of people and become an "influencer" who talks about the latest trends? Just string together enough buzzwords every day to make it look plausible that you have a clue, or at least plausible enough for the algorithm, the only one sure to actually see what you have to say.

When faced with the absurdly awful humans are often emotionally driven to seek out three major rabbit holes, the "Good Ole Days" of the last remembered positive emotional period, the "Scorched Earth" approach of burning everything down if they feel hopeless and see no means of reaching a positive emotional state, or paralysis and regressive decay within a negative feedback loop if they feel powerless.

Every human alive today is emotionally motivated above all else, as that is the human motivational system. You can stack logic and rationality on top, but you can't truly remove emotions from humans, and you can't build systems that lack it from human-generated data, nor can you align systems with humans if those systems lack human-like emotions.

The absurdities we see today are built on the exploitation of human emotions and cognitive biases automatically and at a global scale. One thing we can be relatively certain of is that if such absurdities continue to deepen and proliferate, humanity will be too far gone to recognize extinction when it hits.