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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23605 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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I've recently been very amused at the thought that Star Wars may have correctly predicted the future of AI:

  • There's a Star Wars fan theory is that droids REALLY good at hacking, to explain why everything is analogue. To your point about creating a system that favors the defenders: in Star Wars, you typically have to physically access a defender's hardware to do anything. And just to be sure, we're storing the Death Star plans on physical tapes. Good luck hacking that!
  • The protocol droids, like C3PO, are running an LLM model. They're not necessarily reliable, but they are extremely good translators! (However their context windows do need to be wiped from time to time...)
  • The astromech droids, on the other hand, don't even try to speak a single human language, because you would never, ever, ever let an LLM perform a task as important as calculating a hyperspace trajectory.

Anyway, I wonder if/hope that we'll actually see less "everything is on the Internet." I think it might be good if fewer things were so easily accessible in the digital world, and even without LLMs the amount of abuse bad cybersecurity generated was uncomfortably high.

Ha, that's funny to think about! And maybe it's also considered too dangerous to allow computers to directly control weapons, so everything has to be manually aimed by humans...

I've already watched that anime.

I'd had the thought that video 'evidence' becoming worthless (as it could be trivially faked by anyone who felt like it) might actually be a blessing in disguise. We didn't evolve in an environment where it was easy to get reliable, graphic knowledge of things happening far away and it just seems to break some peoples' brains. We respond much more strongly to things we can see because historically, being able to see something meant it was happening within line of sight. If you consider which (non-fiction) videos were the most influential of all time, how many of them influenced things for the better? The moon landings, I guess.

I'm less gung ho about flooding online discussions with low quality bots, but I suppose the effect is similar. Turtling down so you don't get hacked, too.

Still, isn't it a bit ironic to turn to media to demonstrate we'd be better off if we spent more time in the real world? But I know why you did: I haven't lived your life but I have seen those movies. It's a useful touchstone, and it would be just as useful meeting a stranger in person as online. But we might not far away from an era where such touchstones cease to exist because everyone would rather just consume media generated on the spot to match their specific tastes. Definitely too early to say what the net effect of AI will be on society.

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