66 Comments

Alfred Whitehead quote, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

Let me propose a corollary: Civilians in said civilization retreat as they experience operations that can be performed without thinking about them.

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A certain kind of learned helplessness, in a way.

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"Retreat" is the operative word! That is what I find myself doing with most everything I do these days. Only trouble is, as given in some of the responses, that people don't even give a thought about it. Oh, well! Good luck, y'all.

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You're cooking with the corollary 👏🏾

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Maybe the whole internet will be soon taken over by pointless AI garbage, and then people will abandon social media and return to living actual lives? One can only dream.

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This is my dream and hope as well. But then, where does that leave Substack? 😂 it’s fun here.

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The Curious George stuff is meme culture, so I’m pretty certain there’s consciousness behind them. The corporate phone maze, alas, is a better example.

As far as the stickers’ “strangeness”, are you unfamiliar with the genre of “sick humor”? Some of these would have fit in at National Lampoon (or possibly rejected; I read some Substackers with very deep knowledge of that era that can be a bit snobbish about this stuff), or maybe Mad, and they certainly give off a vibe of Wacky Packages from the ‘70s, or Garbage Pail Kids from your era.

Which leads to an interesting question: Does my familiarity with these styles make me more or less susceptible to unconscious generation? I’ve literally seen some of these (that “Furious George” is a rip-off of a Family Guy bit), but what if some of them were generated? They’re close enough to what I’ve seen that I’ll accept they’re part of conscious conversation, so I theorize it’s when that gap becomes too wide that it starts to feel like AI. But other signs of intentionally creating a gap *could* come into play and make me feel like we’re on conscious ground again.

But please, for the love of God, *always* check the pictures and description of what you pick on Amazon before buying! Especially the vendor!

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I ordered a set of Bluey temporary tats and got a bunch kind of like this, but tamer. I posted them on a fan page as a laugh and a couple commenters scolded me for buying them because they had been "stolen from fan artists" and I was like, "my guy, I did not want these it was not a value-add, please adjust your sense of self-importance you stole this IP in the first place".

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Curious George, yes! The small mammal of question, full of mysteries and the eating of yellow-shaped food units. His energy of adventure is beyond the normal spectrum, reaching into quantum banana fields. Is it the man in the yellow hat controlling time itself? We may never understand. But George, the curious of all beings, teaches us to smile in the algorithm of existence. Data shows 78% of monkeys feel similar joy. Please, continue posting.

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Hahaha, yes, may we all be as stalwart as Curious George in the face of high strangeness! Although I do wonder if his happiness is explained by his minimal prefrontal cortex.

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‘We might cheer at the lack of missing fingers’… and generative AI now adds an extra one here and there..

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I really felt that last line, about being an alien far from home in the midst of our current culture.

Your thesis mirrors one of my own that I have been despairing over, that meaning/consciousness is draining out of our lives at a rapid rate, mostly into our smart-phones.

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It feels like Future Shock to me, only real this time.

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The nature of matter is to drain consciousness. As we have in the West have become more proficient with manipulating material Nature (matter), we become more enmeshed with our creations. Next steps in the pipeline...virtual reality followed by brain-computer interfaces and generated fantastical realities 🤯

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There seem two senses in which this can be understood. Firstly the automation/digitalisation of everything – giving us a world in which you can have a positively hateful day dealing with website forms with insufficient sense behind them, recorded automatic phone messages acting as further barriers to human contact or the acceptance of responsibility, or automated check-outs where there is no choice of going to a human instead (unless you smash it or it bursts into flames, in which case humans will appear). Dehumanisation has gone much too far, and in some kind of insane pursuit of cost-cutting bottom-line-based “management” it is not stopping yet, despite being culturally and clinically, and literally, insane. Secondly, I can’t remember whether you have mentioned any familiarity with the work of Dr Iain McGilchrist, but this is partly the draining away of right-hemisphere consciousness from the culture, leaving everything in charge of that grasping delusion-prone rigid moron who runs the left hemisphere. (Well, yours might not be a moron, but most people’s are. Yes OK, probably including mine too. Your posts are important to us. The next available operator will be with you shortly. Have you downloaded the app or referred to our FAQ page?)

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My Facebook feed is now dominated by posts from fan pages, half of which I'm not even a member of, rather than stuff from my friends. Sometimes it'll be a Peanuts strip. I click into the post and nearly every comment says 'Love Snoopy ❤️' regardless of whether the beagle's in the strip or not. Uncanny valley is right.

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Cultural death by emoji

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💀

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Just fyi, use an adblocked Firefox browser and Facebook Purity. I don't even know if FBP still works, but my feed remains pretty clean. Another thing I do is just open up the notifications and click on them. If I miss some friends, I go to their page and look for new posts. But I've always been careful to only "Like" original content from my friends, or maybe shared content from friends I want to keep in my feed.

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I follow a number of animal rescue organizations on Facebook; but lately I keep getting these random posts from pages I've never heard of. The page will be called "Dogs Are Beautiful" or "We Love The Animals" or something like that; the content is always a cute dog photo (often I recognize it as something stolen from a legit organization), and then the caption is always a list of trivia facts about the BMW Corporation. It is very weird; I can only assume AI is generating these pages and not doing a very good job of it.

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Mine is easily more like 5:1 ratio fan pages to people I actually know. The fan pages come and go according to no perceivable logic. One day its Aliens (I did see Romulus, so I'm probably to blame for that somehow), next day its Marvel (haven't did or said bupkis related to Marvel in years). Dune, LotR, etc. FB decides I need to know about these things. When I subscribe to real actual journals about actually interesting and relevant things...crickets. Have some more pop nostaligia.

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You guys must listen to this podcast about rampant AI bots on FB . Nobody at the company gives a damn what’s happening at the platform . https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/tech-wont-save-us/id1507621076?i=1000661119064

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I think this is the straightforward argument against AI generation as the human consciousness, the soul imbued in it, gradually gets drained out of the products.

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Unfortunately, Erik, and what I mean by 'unfortunately,' is you're right. Yet again. I would add another macro-level interpretation to complement the apparent absence of consciousness in this very weird moment we are living in. This is the emerging, perhaps soon-to-be realized reality, the absence of humanity. Hopefully, this dystopian possibility is light-years away. The uncertainty of sustaining our humanity, the very essence of existence since the beginnings of evolution, is sufficient cause to press pause, if we can.

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The dark factory you imagined already exists. And they call them Dark Factories. I believe the Chinese cell company Xiaomi built the first one and it operates 24/7 without lights because it’s completely staffed by robots producing 60 phones per minute, from what I understand.

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Chilling, tbh

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This is not intended to be snarky, but why is a lights out factory chilling but the Star Trek replicator is utopian? Is it about agency e.g. a human issues a command and the machine obeys? Is it the difference between a bunch of stuff and a custom-made singular item?

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I think we’re at a stage where the robots are pretty dumb still, so it feels like the quality of everything is going down and not up, whereas the StarTrek replicator had perfect quality? So maybe when the robots get better at making things it will be more utopian?

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It's interesting you went to quality. The primary reason you have lights out manufacturing is to protect quality at extreme levels. In semiconductors, contact between humans and works-in-progress is minimized because human oils, dandruff, etc. can wreck parts at the nanometer/angstrom scale. They have to be really high dollar value parts to invest that much in automation that justifies minimizing scrap.

I would expect stuff like Erik's stickers to come off an older line that has long since paid for itself, the parts aren't super sensitive to the environment, and it's trivial to just crank out stuff as long as people want to buy it on Amazon at prices that justify running the machine and paying for stickers.

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Fascinating! I didn’t know that about the lights out. Seems dystopian, but that’s only because we’re humans with limited senses. If we were owls it would be totally normal to work in the dark! Hopefully AI will also help us increase our own senses and develop the ability to see at night and then maybe none of us will need lighting except for fun aesthetic reasons.

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I think its largely because the replicator in fiction never took over all human agency. Humans were generally assumed to matter.

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Bars and bartenders still existed despite the ubiquity of on-demand drink service at the point of consumption. Perhaps one more utopian dream we'll find ST never intended, but I remain optimistic.

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I'd never really thought about what happens when the enshittification (not my word) of the internet and it's AI 'slop' crosses over to the real world, and is delivered to your door to be put in kids party bags! Physical AI slop has arrived, and it's Curious George getting wasted on ether! 😎

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Sorry to object, but anyone who thinks the Curious George ether image is anything other than the product of a keen human mind and profoundly insightful is sadly mistaken. First of all, it has been around since computers had floppy disks so it is most definitely not the product of AI or even high strangeness (I first saw it in the early 80s). More importantly, conceptually it may actually be the best illustration of the author’s observation about the Curious George paradigm, “George gets into trouble because he doesn’t actually understand the systems of the world around him”. Curiousness without insight (or with a minimal prefrontal cortex) often ends in unpredictable ways.

So I think this one doesn’t fit well into your high strangeness hypothesis. Plus, the way George is passed out next to the open ether bottle with that big smile on his face and the cork on the floor is just f’ing hilarious - I don’t care who you are!

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The ether image is straight from the book _Curious George Takes a Job_, published 1947. I was startled to encounter it at the library a few weeks ago.

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This is the only image in the lot that definitely comes from an actual Curious George book. As he's about to be released from the hospital, George is left unsupervised for a few minutes and wonders what's in the blue bottle...

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Thanks Erik,

Love it, "primates living amidst alien machinery far from our homelands." Those of us who are older, with somewhat larger than minimal prefrontal cortexes, who remember courteous customer service are a bit concerned about where we will allow all of these machines to take the world.

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In the 90s and 00s people were scared that the digital and physical worlds were blending together.

Nowadays I think they’ve pulled apart again - way apart - the physical world is becoming more and more different from the unconscious meme filled BS we see across every major platform on the web (save for maybe here on substack, for now). The “people” we encounter online feel more alien than ever.

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"Touch grass" is a thing for a reason after all.

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I'd lean further into your argument - that unconscious production is *the* defining characteristic of the industrial revolution, and that it's finally coming for 'artistic' or 'mental' pursuits.

Both on the individual level (washing machines) and societal level (what is a bureaucracy, except a process to remove consciousness from important decisions and let them persist beyond individuals?) modern humans have tried to extract consciousness from all pursuits; ostensibly in the pursuit of leisure and greater wealth...

So agree with @tslothrop below.

But as you go further and further 'up the chain' where do we draw the line? The question has been asked many times before - so it's not new at all!

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Also where is that promised leisure. What greater wealth are we seeing, except for the multi-billionaires?

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I'd use "awareness" but get the gist.

The scary part is that while we as a society can no longer pay attention to everything, the next wave will make the whole concept of attention moot. In the sticker case, someone could recognize the error (as you did), they just didn't look.

In the AI era, even if we look, we can't see, as it is all opaque and fundamentally beyond our understanding. Even the idea of AI safety is laughable - if you cannot understand how or why something works, you cannot make it safe. For example, if I am in the middle ages and the plague comes, my lack of awareness of microbes means any attempt at "safety" is just wild guessing.

And that also applies to government. You cannot make logical regulations for something that is not-knowable.

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