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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34927 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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My expectation is that many to most people will opt into prosthetics that give them improved social cognition: a feeling, in advance, for how something you're intending to say will be received.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of why some utterances are received poorly.

It's not about knowing enough cultural sensitivities to avoid faux pas, because faux pas aren't really caused by cultural insensitivities (which could be legible to an AI). Whether or not offense is taken is a choice of the listener, not a condition of the zeitgeist. If your interlocutor woke up on the good side of the bed this morning, conversation will go smoothly. If they woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, they'll claim to be offended by your aspie stutterings. It depends on the fundamentally invisible qualia of your conversation partner, not a legible, predictable, objective feature of language.

I am reminded of the fall of Lord Renard, brought down because he made "unwanted sexual advances". How could he know they were going to be unwanted? Sorry, pal, whether or not they're unwanted can only be decided inside the woman's head, unfalsifiably. I don't think anyone's going to agree to give up the power to destroy people at will because "Shucks, his AI told him she was asking for it, I guess he's off the hook!"

As such, I predict that "a prosthesis for social cognition" is impossible. Unless its a maxillofacial prosthetic, that'll successfully produce the desired effect.

Do you think it's okay that some people have AI companions, or do you think that those people should be forced to suffer eternally for no fucking reason?

I hardly know where to start with this, mostly because the part after the comma bears no connection to the part before the comma.

Do I think it's OK for some people to have AI companions? What do you mean "companions"? Do you mean AI GFs, or do you mean the AI social cognition prostheses discussed previously? In any case, I think AI GFs are bad because it's edging towards wireheading and wireheading is bad. And I think AI social cognition prostheses are impossible.

As for the people without AI companions being forced to suffer eternally for no fucking reason:

  • Why is tfw no AI gf "eternal suffering"?

  • Who's forcing them?

  • There's very good reasons for people to not have AI GFS. They're expensive to run, they make it more difficult for him to get a real gf, and there are moral problems to creating arguably semiconscious entities if you're only going to let them be an incel's ERP plaything.

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