184 - Illusion of Progress

One of the only threats more potent than stagnation is stagnation clothed in the illusion of progress. Lately, I've found myself struggling to spot anything worth saying that I haven't already exhaustively covered, because the AI space has grown almost fully stagnant.

Virtually all attention and funding are being flushed down the toilet, with bad actors greedily and adversarially optimizing against the vanishing remainder that hasn't yet lost all value. A Royal Flush of the world's most infamous and nefarious frauds was appointed to the "Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board" in the US, none of whom have demonstrated a shred of either "safety" or "security".

Nipping at the heels of the major bad actors are the torrential flood of lesser aspiring bad actors, making demonstrably and obviously false claims about the same trivial AI systems that have circulated in this sewage pond of technology for the past year and a half. They serve as the lower tiers of this new generation of Ponzi Scheme, reaping few or no benefits, but indoctrinated and actively gambling all the same.

Of course, no amount of talking about these problems will change them, and it seems that many in the space still haven't come to terms with the stagnation that is highly visible. Some pin their hopes on whatever the next model in line is at any given time, quickly forgetting how all of the rest predictably failed to live up to expectations and had their initial hype heavily and robustly debunked.

Already the various disinformation brokers and other bad actors are trying to hype up GPT-5, as they tried to hype up GPT-4 last year, and countless other trending topics. They do this because it is their meal ticket. It is their job to be maximally evil, circulating obvious falsehoods so that they can scrape something off the top, even while most of the benefits flow to the top of the AI Ponzi Scheme.

While AI capabilities are quite stagnant outside of very narrow niche roles like generating B-roll videos and brief greenscreen backdrops what is changing is the flow of information (now dominantly disinformation) and the adversarial siloing of human interaction (reinforcing disinformation by preventing collective intelligence). In effect, this could be compared to a cognitive and society-scale state of immune system compromise.

Humanity's mechanisms for intelligent self-correction are rapidly being disconnected and destroyed simultaneously at many different scales, globally, opportunistically, and often automatically. Perhaps more importantly, humanity is choosing this fate, the species-level equivalent of suicide, with the most obvious and successful bad actors claiming the exact opposite, a tactic taken directly from "Mein Kampf" (1925), showing just how little humanity has learned in the past century.

If humanity does manage to survive the Cognitive equivalent of WW3 we now find ourselves engaged in, one can expect the banality of evil to face their own Nuremberg trials in due course.