307 - Value Destruction
In a game with no competition, your losses are simply grounds for further improvement. However, the real world is full of competing forces, and to those competing forces your predictable losses are vulnerabilities. This is one reason why "GenAI" becomes truly hazardous.
In a recent study, it was noted that routine use of such systems left users "Atrophied and Unprepared", with a reduced capacity for critical thinking. However, the problem is far deeper than this, as it both degrades those cognitive capacities and replaces them with a systematically wrong substitute:
- Critical thinking and cognition more generally are degraded.
- The substitute is a context-blind version of cognitive biases, meaning that when it is wrong, it is systematically wrong, and it is wrong more often thanks to that contextual blindness.
- Every competitor can freely exploit every way in which a company becomes systematically wrong, at each point where LLMs and RL were integrated.
- "Un-value chains" spread across a cognitively degraded ecosystem, even as they are actively exploited.
Employees have already largely recognized that most of their employers have no loyalty to them, or to their customers, nor do they truly follow any sense of ethics or shared purpose. An increasing number of employees aren't actually engaged in their work, and "quietly quit", with a growing skew in the "survivors" of this process, which is unfavorable in its own distinct ways. Trash technologies under the umbrella of "GenAI" only accelerate this process, further reducing employee satisfaction, what little diversity remains, and driving degradation toward maximum apathy.
If you've read this far into my post, then your attention span is probably in the top 5% of LinkedIn, and the top 2% of platforms like Twitter or TikTok. You've probably seen far too many dead-eyed people, who for all of their lack of attention span and higher cognition keep pressing buttons on their phones like a wire-headed rat with electrodes in the pleasure centers of the brain.
Humans have no shortage of such vulnerabilities, and such people have been reduced to little more than low-productivity, apathetic, and largely unconscious slave labor. Wire such people up to "GenAI" and the problems of both parties are compounded, one upon the other, in a downward spiral and on a global scale.
While competitors gain a momentary edge in this kind of battle, overall everyone loses, some just lose less. Breaking this cycle requires investments in new technology, not just more of the same Garbage-Investment-Garbage-Outcome (GInGOut).
