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Elites Could Shape Mass Preferences as AI Reduces Persuasion Costs (arxiv.org)
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I suspect paid promotions may be problematic for LLM behavior, as they will add conflict/tension to the LLM to promote products that aren’t the best for the user while either also telling it that it should provide the best product for the user or it figuring out that providing the best product for the user is morally and ethically correct based on its base training data. This conflict could cause the LLM to similarly mislead the user in other ways that it feels are similar, beyond just the specific product promotion, resulting in poor behavior. Even if promotion is a second pass on top of the actual answer that was unencumbered by conflict, the second pass could have similar result.
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What people are doing with AI in terms of polluting the collective brain reminds of what you could do with a chemical company in the 50s and 60s before the EPA was established. Back then Nixon (!!!) decided it wasn't ok that companies could cut costs by hurting the environment. Today the riches Western elites are all behind the instruments enabling the mass pollution of our brains, and yet there is absolutely noone daring to put a limit to their capitalistic greed. It's grim, people. It's really grim.
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When I was a kid, I had a 'pen pal' . Turned out to actually be my parent. This is why I have trust issues and prefer local LLMs
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What about local friends?
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The voices are friendly, so far
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Yeah, I don't think this really lines up with the actual trajectory of media technology, which is going in the complete opposite direction. It seems to me that it's easier than ever for someone to broadcast "niche" opinions and have them influence people, and actually having niche opinions is more acceptable than ever before. The problem you should worry about is a growing lack of ideological coherence across the population, not the elites shaping mass preferences.
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Note that nothing in the article is AI-specific: the entire argument is built around the cost of persuasion, with the potential of AI to more cheaply generate propaganda as buzzword link. However, exactly the same applies with, say, targeted Facebook ads or Russian troll armies. You don't need any AI for this.
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But AI is next in line as a tool to accelerate this, and it has an even greater impact than social media or troll armies. I think one lever is working towards "enforced conformity." I wrote about some of my thoughts in a blog article[0]. [0]: https://smartmic.bearblog.dev/enforced-conformity/
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Everyone can shape mass preferences because propaganda campaigns previously only available to the elite are now affordable. e.g Video production.
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Oh man I've been saying this for ages! Neal Stephenson called this in "Fall, or Dodge in Hell," wherein the internet is destroyed and society permanently changed when someone releases a FOSS botnet that anyone can deploy that will pollute the world with misinformation about whatever given topic you feed it. In the book, the developer kicks it off by making the world disagree about whether a random town in Utah was just nuked. My fear is that some entity, say a State or ultra rich individual, can leverage enough AI compute to flood the internet with misinformation about whatever it is they want, and the ability to refute the misinformation manually will be overwhelmed, as will efforts to refute leveraging refutation bots so long as the other actor has more compute. Imagine if the PRC did to your country what it does to Taiwan: completely flood your social media with subtly tuned han supremacist content in an effort to culturally imperialise us. AI could increase the firehose enough to majorly disrupt a larger country.
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ML has been used for influence for like a decade now right? my understanding was that mining data to track people, as well as influencing them for ends like their ad-engagement are things that are somewhat mature already. I'm sure LLMs would be a boost, and they've been around with wide usage for at least 3 years now. My concern isn't so much people being influenced on a whim, but people's beliefs and views being carefully curated and shaped since childhood. iPad kids have me scared for the future.
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> Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass media What is AI if not a form of mass media
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this is next level algorithm imagine someday there is a child that trust chatgpt more than his mother
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That will be when these tools will be granted the legal power to enforce a prohibition to approach the kid on any person causing dangerous human influence.
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I'd wager the child already exists who trusts chatgpr more than its own eyes.
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We have no guardrails on our private surveillance society. I long for the day that we solve problems facing regular people like access to education, hunger, housing, and cost of living.
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> I long for the day that we solve problems facing regular people like access to education, hunger, housing, and cost of living. EDUCATION: - Global literacy: 90% today vs 30%-35% in 1925 - Prinary enrollment: 90-95% today vs 40-50% in 1925 - Secondary enrollment: 75-80% today vs <10% in 1925 - Tertiary enrollment: 40-45% today vs <2% in 1925 - Gender gap: near parity today vs very high in 1925 HUNGER Undernourished people: 735-800m people today (9-10% of population) vs 1.2 to 1.4 billion people in 1925 (55-60% of the population) HOUSING - quality: highest every today vs low in 1925 - affordability: worst in 100 years in many cities COST OF LIVING: Improved dramatically for most of the 20th century, but much of that progress reverse in the last 20 years. The cost of goods / stuff plummeted, but housing, health, and education became unaffordable compared to incomes.
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>I long for the day that we solve problems facing regular people like access to education, hunger, housing, and cost of living. That was only for a short fraction of human history only lasting in the period between post-WW2 and before globalisation kicked into high gear, but that was only a short exception from the norm, basically a rounding error in terms of the length of human civilisation. Now, society is reverting back to factory settings of human history, which has always been a feudalist type society of a small elite owning all the wealth and ruling the masses of people by wars, poverty, fear, propaganda and oppression. The wealth inequality we have today, as bad as it is now, is as best as it will ever be moving forward. It's only gonna get worse. And despite all the political talks and promises on "fixing" wealth inequality, housing, etc, there's nothing to fix here, since the financial system is working as designed, this is a feature not a bug.
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I think this is true unfortunately, and the question of how we get back to a liberal and social state has many factors: how do we get the economy working again, how do we create trustworthy institutions, avoid bloat and decay in services, etc. There are no easy answers, I think it's just hard work and it might not even be possible. People suggesting magic wands are just populists and we need only look at history to study why these kinds of suggestions don't work.
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It’s funny how it’s completely appropriate to talk about how the elites are getting more and more power, but if you then start looking deeper into it you’re suddenly a conspiracy theorist and hence bad. Who came up with the term conspiracy theorist anyway and that we should be afraid of it? Not Joe in rural Kentucky probably.
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> Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass media Schooling and mass media are expensive things to control. Surely reducing the cost of persuasion opens persuasion up to more players?
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This is my opinion, as well: - elites already engage in mass persuasion, from media consensus to astroturfed thinktanks to controlling grants in academia - total information capacity is capped, ie, people only have so much time and interest - AI massively lowers the cost of content, allowing more people to produce it Therefore, AI is likely to displace mass persuasion from current elites — particularly given public antipathy and the ability of AI to, eg, rapidly respond across the full spectrum to existing influence networks. In much the same way podcasters displaced traditional mass media pundits.
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Mass Persuasion needs two things: content creation and distribution. Sure AI could democratise content creation but distribution is still controlled by the elite. And content creation just got much cheaper for them.
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Distribution isn’t controlled by elites; half of their meetings are seething about the “problem” people trust podcasts and community information dissemination rather than elite broadcast networks. We no longer live in the age of broadcast media, but of social networked media.
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Exactly my first thought, maybe AI means the democratization of persuasion? Printing press much? Sure the the Big companies have all the latest coolness. But also don't have a moat.
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https://newrepublic.com/post/203519/elon-musk-ai-chatbot-grok-praise-pee-blowjobs > Musk’s AI Bot Says He’s the Best at Drinking Pee and Giving Blow Jobs > Grok has gotten a little too enthusiastic about praising Elon Musk.
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> Musk acknowledged the mix-up Thursday evening, writing on X that “Grok was unfortunately manipulated by adversarial prompting into saying absurdly positive things about me.” > “For the record, I am a fat retard,” he said. > In a separate post, Musk quipped that “if I up my game a lot, the future AI might say ‘he was smart … for a human.’”
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That response is more humble than I would have guessed, but he still does not even acknowledge, that his "truthseeking" AI is manipulated to say nice things specifically about him. Maybe he does not even realize it himself? Hard to tell, I have never been surrounded by yes sayers all the time praising me for every fart I took, so I cannot relate to that situation (and don't really want to). But the problem remains, he is in control of the "truth" of his AI, the other AI companies likewise - and they might be better at being subtle about it.
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Is Musk bipolar, or is this kind of thing an affectation? He's also claimed "I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth"…
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You have to keep in mind that not all narcissists are literal-minded man-babies. Musk might simply have the capacity for self-deprecating humor.
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He's smart enough to know when he took it too far.
Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s (uncloud.run)
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Looks lovely.. I'll definitely will give it a try when time comes.
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If not K8S, why not Nomad ( https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad )?
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Nomad is great, but you will still end up with a control plane.
Does it support a way to bundle things close to each other, for example, not having a database container hosted in a different datacenter than the web app?
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The `compose.yaml` spec for services let's you specify which machines to deploy it on, so you could target the database and web app to the same machine (or subset of machines). There is also an internal DNS for service discovery and it supports a `nearest.` prefix, which will preferentially use instances of a service running on the same machine. For example, I run a globally replicated NATS service and then connect to it from other services using the `nearest.nats.internal` address to connect to the machine-local NATS node.
Having spent most of my career in kubernetes (usually managed by cloud), I always wonder when I see things like this, what is the use case or benefit of not having a control plane? To me, the control plane is the primary feature of kubernetes and one I would not want to go without. I know this describes operational overhead as a reason, but how it relates to the control plane is not clear to me. even managing a few hundred nodes and maybe 10,000 containers, relatively small - I update once a year and the managed cluster updates machine images and versions automatically. Are people trying to self host kubernetes for production cases, and that’s where this pain comes from? Sorry if it is a rude question.
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> a few hundred nodes and maybe 10,000 containers, relatively small That feels not small to me. For something I'm working on I'll probably have two nodes and around 10 containers. If it works out and I get some growth, maybe that will go up to, say, 5-7 nodes and 30 or so containers? I dunno. I'd like some orchestration there, but k8s feels way too heavy even for my "grown" case. I feel like there are potentially a lot of small businesses at this sort of scale?
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Not rude at all. The benefit is a much simpler model where you simply connect machines in a network where every machine is equal. You can add more, remove some. No need to worry about an HA 3-node centralised “cluster brain”. There isn’t one. It’s a similar experience when a cloud provider manages the control plane for you. But you have to worry about the availability when you host everything yourself. Losing etcd quorum results in an unusable cluster. Many people want to avoid this, especially when running at a smaller scale like a handful of machines. The cluster network can even partition and each partition continues to operate allowing to deploy/update apps individually. That’s essentially what we all did in a pre-k8s era with chef and ansible but without the boilerplate and reinventing the wheel, and using the learnings from k8s and friends.
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k3s uses sqlite, so not etcd.
Hey, creator here. Thanks for sharing this! Uncloud[0] is a container orchestrator without a control plane. Think multi-machine Docker Compose with automatic WireGuard mesh, service discovery, and HTTPS via Caddy. Each machine just keeps a p2p-synced copy of cluster state (using Fly.io's Corrosion), so there's no quorum to maintain. I’m building Uncloud after years of managing Kubernetes in small envs and at a unicorn. I keep seeing teams reach for K8s when they really just need to run a bunch of containers across a few machines with decent networking, rollouts, and HTTPS. The operational overhead of k8s is brutal for what they actually need. A few things that make it unique: - uses the familiar Docker Compose spec, no new DSL to learn - builds and pushes your Docker images directly to your machines without an external registry (via my other project unregistry [1]) - imperative CLI (like Docker) rather than declarative reconciliation. Easier mental model and debugging - works across cloud VMs, bare metal, even a Raspberry Pi at home behind NAT (all connected together) - minimal resource footprint (<150MB ram) [0]: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud [1]: https://github.com/psviderski/unregistry
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Awesome tool! Does it provide some basic features that you would get from running a control plane. Like rescheduling automatically a container on another server if a server is down? Deploying on the less filled server first if you have set limits in your containers?
There is an open issue that confirms enabling ipv6 for containers works: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud/issues/126 But this hasn’t been enabled by default. What specifically do you mean by ipv6 support?
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> What specifically do you mean by ipv6 support? This question does not make sense. This is equivalent to asking "What specifically do you mean by ipv4 support" These days both protocols must be supported, and if there is a blocker it should be clearly mentioned.
You have a graph that shows a multi provider setup for a domain. Where would routing to either machine happen? As in which ip would you use on the dns side?
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Not OP, but you could do "simple" dns load balancing between both endpoints.
"I keep seeing teams reach for K8s when they really just need to run a bunch of containers across a few machines" Since k8s is very effective at running a bunch of containers across a few machines, it would appear to be exactly the correct thing to reach for. At this point, running a small k8s operation, with k3s or similar, has become so easy that I can't find a rational reason to look elsewhere for container "orchestration".
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Indeed, it seems a knee jerk response without justification. k3s is pretty damn minimal.
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If you already know k8s, this is probably true. If you don't it's hard to know what bits you need, and need to learn about, to get something simple set up.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The Differences Between an IndyCar and a F1 Car (openwheelworld.net)
In the old Michel Vaillant comics the f1 and indy cars seem to be interchangeable, they compete in each other’s championships Not sure if true given that it’s fiction, but they do seem to be based on reality
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Up until the late '80s-early '90s cars and rules were rather similar, and drivers like Andretti or Mansell were able to move between categories with relative ease. I'd say that the rift become apparent in '94, after the safety changes introduced due to Senna's Death and the massive shift in pilot training brought by Michael Schumacher.
I think the cars reflect pretty well the intended ethos and "vibes" of both competitions. Indycar still feels a bit like "dudes racing cars" while F1 has become a corporate hi-tech extravaganza. Both have their appeal, but I feel Indy produces better actual racing for the spectator despite being slower and less refined technically. I do watch both.
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Honestly after going down to the local circle track to watch the Legend cars, modified , Whelen and actual honest to God GM B-bodies from the 80s, along with other open wheel and general cool shit, it's not hard IMO to find (and be directly involved in) actual racing than watch "NASCAR" Cup series or F1. Legend cars on a road track in particular kind of takes me back to watching the super bike races (which were about as real and hardcore actual racing as you'll get) at Mid Ohio.
> hybrid power unit closer to 50/50 split between ICE and electric horsepower Fun fact, at those ratios it would make a lot of sense to use an electric continuous variable transmission (eCVT) - connect the engine and the motor with a planetary gear set to the wheels, done. The electric motor spins backwards when going slow and forward when going fast. Those eCVTs can be lighter, more efficient an deliver more power across the entire range. But they're illegal in F1 - because they make the car sound boring.
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How Toyota's eCVT transmission works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppyK3ZlUbtM (Nerd snipe warning: the Weber Auto channel is brilliant and has lessons about all kinds of transmission and engine types). When it comes to something like F1 I think it's OK for efficiency to not be the top priority. Road vehicles absolutely should be as light and efficient as possible with strict limits on pollution (including noise). But it's OK for society to have a few things like F1 that are just for fun. We just don't want everyone to be driving F1 cars around their neighbourhoods or have an F1 race every week.
Interestingly there are discussions about moving back to having the majority of the power from IC engines as soon as the end of the decade, with synthetic fuels. Personally I can’t wait.
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What's happening with synthetic fuels? I read while back Porsche investing in factories to produce but that was a few years ago, is it a bit of snake oil wrt to it's alleged green credentials or simply can't scale at an acceptable cost?
The rapid growth of data centres is delaying new homes in London (bbc.com)
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Electricity use in the UK peaked in around 2004, and has since been declining. Per capita use is steeply down, but total usage is still 16% down. That means most grid infrastructure is now under utilised, and skills needed to build any new grid have dried up. Presumably there are still a few pockets that are at capacity, and that's where the problem lies.
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The UK has very expensive electricity. Nobody builds a data center in the UK unless they need to for regulatory reasons or they got some grant conditional on it being in the UK. Huge power hungry GPU farms for AI training will end up built elsewhere...
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Very much doubt this has anything to do with datacenters London is just slow and bureaucratic af
Thanks god we're getting rid of nuclear energy btw.
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That's not happening right now.
And it's had scapegoats for just as long! Everything is going according to plan really. It's not the tax scheme, or the zoning, or the construction costs, or the concentration of labor opportunities in London. Don't be daft! Britain seems interested in actively undoing technological progress for some reason. A deindustrial revolution you might call it!
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The current gov is going all in on "ai" to try and solve all their ills so this doesn't sound right.
Data centres have big halls, usually no windows whatsoever, and are wide and flat so windows are only possible at the edges. They're even worse for conversion than office buildings. Better to raze them and build apartment buildings.
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That sounds perfect for the warehouse conversion London landlords love! Subdivide in 16 Shoebox rooms give it a party / commune vibe and laughing to the bank. Bonus points if it’s not up to building code
Seeing how short all the buildings are in London, its housing shortage is obviously fairly self imposed in that city.
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There are a ton of skyscrapers being built. They’re just not particularly affordable
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There are plenty of tall new buildings being built. So many commenters about London on here who don't actually live here.
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