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Yesterday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Harambe.
The White House has remarked on the occasion.
How much credence do you put on the idea that Harambe represented an actual sea change in American culture? At the time, it felt like a joke, but in hindsight, it feels like the first time that internet memeing bled over into real space. A lot of the people making jokes about a gorilla ended up making jokes about a former real estate developer and steak salesman that propelled him into the public eye. Was Harambe a watershed event, or just one where we look back and project meaning?
Harambe is definitely a real 'canon event' for a certain generation of people.
All major events after that point have felt very 'unreal' and usually gets twisted to someone's agenda right away.
It is also one of the last times we had a major cultural event that virtually everyone, of every ideology, agreed on the valence of, and didn't turn political. Everyone agreed the death of the gorilla was tragic and likely unneeded, a result of human irresponsibility.
It didn't trigger a gender discourse (although the "dicks out for Harambe" meme got people some errant looks), it wasn't co-opted as a weapon against political opponents, there were no racial undertones, it was just half-sincere meming about a low-level tragedy. I can't off the top of my head think of any recent events like this which weren't immediately converted to culture war fodder.
I dunno if that gorilla was cosmically important, but as a marker of the boundary between one cultural era into another, it works extremely well.
The only other event I'd offer as a marker of passing from one epoch to the other, also from 2016, was Alphago beating Lee Sedol. That one actually DID portend a massive sea change, and if I had been a bit smarter/braver/wealthier around that time, I could have made a lot of money placing bets on future AI development.
By comparison, there is no way I know of anyone could have traded on the death of Harambe to make a real profit.
(Ah the good old days, when we were young...)
But yeah, before that, there was a wholesome-but-also-edgy, "Internet culture", 9gag, advice animals like Bad Luck Brian and Overly Attached Girlfriend. A couple of years before that, we had memes like the Chocolate Rain song, the Numa Numa guy, etc. It was definitely detached and ironic, in the South Park sense. The world wasn't necessarily more unified but the sort of people who hung out online were mostly middle-class young guys, gamers, nerds etc. with mostly compatible values and tastes.
I think the big break was the shift to phones and mobile internet. Before that, going online was an intentional thing you did mostly at home, when you had time, or on your laptop in college. Even if your phone had a camera, you had to transfer the pictures with a USB cable, then intentionally upload them on a social media site. This required intent and patience, it was friction. To discuss, you had to be told about some forums by (online) friends, you had to register on a php board, then you carefully curated your signature, your avatar, your nickname (obviously you had to use a cool pseudonym, your real world identity wasn't supposed to matter, you were supposed to leave all that behind at the doorstep). People got to know each other in those communities, people developed reputations behind the nicknames, they discussed off-topic issues in misc forum sections with the same set of people, instead of hopping between subreddits or being at the mercy of the algorithm regarding which random user's content you're going to see today.
After that, suddenly the internet escaped from the home, out into people's pockets in the streets, at parties, at festivals, everywhere, suddenly it wasn't just nerds, but people with dense social lives and the friction mostly disappeared. Uploading a picture was a single tap of the finger. Notifications started pouring in in all contexts. You were expected to know what's going on online, FOMO started etc.
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I do not believe that "Harambe represented an actual sea change in American culture" but i do believe that it sticks in a lot of people's minds as the last time that all the different tribes agreed with each other about something. And that makes it a milestone or inflection point of sorts, something that people will naturally think back to, and contrast against what we see now.
That said, as a fan of urban fantasy I am a bit enamored with the idea that "the seventh seal" would be a gorilla in a zoo somewhere.
The idea of "otherwise unremarkable thing that we'd have no reason to consider anomalous was actually vitally important to the sanctity of our entire planet" is always a funny trope to me when it surfaces in fiction.
There was a funny bit in the first episode of new Doctor Who along those lines.
DOCTOR: How can you hide something that big in a city this small?
ROSE: Hold on. Hide what?
DOCTOR: The transmitter. The Consciousness is controlling every single piece of plastic, so it needs a transmitter to boost the signal.
ROSE: What's it look like?
DOCTOR: Like a transmitter. Round and massive, slap bang in the middle of London. A huge circular metal structure like a dish, like a wheel. Radial. Close to where we're standing. Must be completely invisible.
(Rose stares over his shoulder pointedly.)
DOCTOR: What? What?
(The Doctor turns and looks at what Rose is staring at on the south bank but the penny doesn't drop.)
DOCTOR: What? What is it? What?
(He finally catches on to what Rose is looking at. It's called the London Eye, it's on the south bank of the Thames, it's lit up like a Christmas tree, and it was the biggest Wheel in the world when it opened in 2000.)
DOCTOR: Oh, fantastic!
In Lilo and Stitch the only reason they can't gas the whole planet to get at Stitch is because they consider Mosquitos an endangered species.
It'd be absolutely MASSIVE irony IRL if we manage to genocide mosquitos and in turn this gives aliens the clearance to finally genocide us.
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You might have lost a lot of that money. Almost none of the tech used in AlphaGo lead to LLMs and it produced a frenzy of research and startups that mostly looked in the wrong direction. I guess RL for behaviour tuning made it in.
That's like saying I'd have lost money betting on electric cars because most of them have been massive failures.
But if you put $10,000 in Tesla stock at its high in 2016, it'd be worth (approximately) $250,000 today. Not bad ten year turnaround, and probably a big enough win to make up for a dozen other losses.
Granted, a lot of that is due to Quantitative easing pumping ALL stocks like crazy in that time.
One of the biggest 'regrets' I carry is NOT putting at least a few thousand dollars worth of excess student loan money into Tesla circa 2013, actually.
My point is that as soon as it became clear that AI was now becoming a serious field with possible industrial application, I should have started looking at companies that would stand to be lead players.
But lo, I tried being financially responsible.
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Almost none of the tech used in AlphaGo lead to LLMs, but as I understand it a lot of the principals pioneered by AlphaGo ended up being used in the sort of autonomous targeting systems that are currently being used to kill Russians in the Donbass.
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The obvious investment in response to AlphaGo would have been Google. So, although you'd have lucked into it, 10xing your investment over ten years isn't terrible. Maybe you'd also have seen that a fleet of TPUs were used for training and made the jump from that to Nvidia.
I guess the main learning would have to have been "you can convert massive compute into narrow but superhuman performance" and speculated that it could be successfully extended to human language by AIAYN, published the next year.
Yes, I think the ‘bitter lesson’ is the other thing that came out of this, but AlphaGo’s intelligence didn’t generalise to simultaneously learning even a single other game.
Finding that sufficient data could lead to expertise in massively distributed domains came as a huge shock to me, professionally, and completely destroyed my notion of how intelligence could work.
The AlphaZero engine inspired by AlphaGo and released about two years later learned chess (better than Stockfish), go (better than AlphaGo) and shogi (better than the best human players or computer engines then existing) and a closely related engine reached grandmaster level in tournament Starcraft.
AlphaGo is also proof-of-concept for the "big dumb neural net" approach to artificial intelligence which had previously been in the doldrums, which I think was critical for the approaches that eventually worked for LLMs to be taken seriously and attract the funding they needed.
Both Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky correctly called AlphaZero as the "AI fire alarm" - i.e. the first hard evidence that smarter-than-human AI was something we needed to start worrying about as a realistic possibility rather than as a philosophical debate.
Yes, later self-play could be used to learn different games (and the original DRL was applied to many Atari games) but AFAIK nobody successfully made one of these agents learn chess and Go.
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I think that's the heart of what I've been wondering. 2015 - 2017 was a wild ride. Things definitely aren't the same anymore. If it happened today, I can't help but imagine that the aftermath would be far more polarized and ugly than it was at the time.
The night Trump won his election is indelibly engraved in my head. Driving home from work expecting to wake up in Hillary land, then suddenly driving over to my buddy's house to drink and laugh at the intrinsic ridiculousness of what we were observing. The moment he won Florida was when it kicked in as "wow this is real."
This video encompasses the feeling well.
The night he won it a second time is also burned in there but not quite as deeply.
I don't even remember what I was doing the night Biden 'won.'
Now President Trump is just a facet of reality. I can't imagine the timeline without him.
Wild ride indeed.
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