> AI is not inevitable fate. It is an invitation to wake up. The work is to keep dragging what is singular, poetic, and profoundly alive back into focus, despite all pressures to automate it away.
This is the struggle. The race to automate everything. Turn all of our social interactions into algorithmic digital bits. However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement. Not sure how that is going to play out, but we certainly aren't slowing down yet.
For example, take a look at the short clip I have posted here. It is an example of just how far everyone is scaling bot and content farms. It is an absolute flood of noise into all of our knowledge repositories.
https://www.mindprison.cc/p/dead-internet-at-scale
pixl97 · 29s ago
The Culture dives into this concept with the idea of hegemonizing swarms, and Bolstrom touches on this with optimizing singletons.
Humans are amazing min/maxers, we create vast, and at least temporarily productive mono cultures. At the same time a scarily large portion of humanity will burn and destroy something of beauty if it brings them one cent of profit.
Myself I believe technology and eventually AI were our fate once we became intelligence optimizers.
verisimi · 17m ago
> However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
> We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement.
I don't think anyone will be waking up as long as their pronouns are 'we' and 'us' (or 'people', 'society'). Waking up or individuation is a personal, singular endeavour - it isn't a collective activity. If one hasn't even grasped who one is, if one is making a category error and identifies as 'we' rather than 'I', all answers will fail.
Garlef · 47m ago
This made me happy: It offers an interesting take on AI.
(After reflecting a bit on this I think this is for the following reason: Not only does this take a step back to offer a meta perspective. It also does so without falling into the trap of rooting this perspective in the hegemonic topos of our everyday discourse (economics).
Usually, takes on AI are very economic in nature: "Gen AI is theft", "We/our jobs/our creativity will all be replaced", "The training data is preduced by exploiting cheap labour".
In this sense this perspective avoids the expected in not only in one but two ways.)
> Instead, Heidegger compels us to do something much harder: to see the world as it is being reframed by technology, and then to consciously reclaim or reweave the strands of meaning that risk being flattened.
As a call to action this is inadequate. I have no idea what this is persuading me to do.
If I dig into how Heidegger solved this problem in his own life, well, I don’t think that should be replicated.
gchamonlive · 1h ago
Leave passivity behind. You should put work into understanding what's required of you. This is why it's so easy to fall back to passivity, but there are things that must be done just because it's the right thing to do. Doing anything other than that is akin to committing philosophical suicide.
TimorousBestie · 55m ago
I don’t think I have an ethical duty to parse obscurantist nonsense.
gchamonlive · 10s ago
If that's obscurantist nonsense you aren't going to get far with Heidegger.
viccis · 18m ago
There's nothing obscure about that. You might be out of the habit of consuming challenging material, but it's definitely not a good response to react reflexively with contempt for something that takes a moment of thought to understand. There's already enough vulgar anti-intellectualism in society right now without adding to it.
daseiner1 · 53m ago
Contempt prior to investigation ought not be a point of pride, I think.
daseiner1 · 1h ago
"The Question Concerning Technology" [1] mentioned in this piece is dense but can be understood by the literate layman, I think, with patience and a bit of work.
Re: "call to action", part of Heidegger's project by my read is to interrogate such phrases. I think he would refute that "action" is what we need and that orienting ourselves towards the world in terms of "action" is obscuring the Question of Being. He himself offers no real way out. In his posthumously published Der Spiegel interview [2] he himself says "only a God can save us".
I assume you're making a snide reference to his involvement with Nazism, which I'm not going to attempt to downplay or respond to here. He himself in his later life, however, went and lived a humble life in the Black Forest. Can or should we all "return to the land"? No. But his writing certainly has expanded my view of the world and my "image of thought". He is a worthwhile study.
How to Read Heidegger [3] is a great primer for any who may be interested.
P.S. just noticed/remembered that my username is a Heidegger reference. heh.
dtagames · 2h ago
This is fantastic. Perhaps the best philosophical piece on AI that I've read.
DiscourseFan · 1h ago
I need to write something, then.
smokel · 47m ago
Please do. It is unfortunate that those who shout hardest are not necessarily the smartest. There is a lot of nonsense being put out there, and it would be refreshing to read alternative perspectives.
Edit: this was a generic comment, not judging the article. I still have trouble understanding what its premise is.
deadbabe · 8m ago
We never valued the human element in the work that surrounds us. Do you care that the software engineer who produced the CRUD app you use everyday had a “craftsman mentality” toward code? Do you care about the hours a digital artist spent to render some CGI just right in a commercial? Do you appreciate the time a human took to write some local news article?
Probably not, you probably didn’t even notice, and now it’s over. It’s too late to care. These things will soon be replaced with cheaper AI pipelines and much of what we consume or read digitally will be proudly AI generated or at best only merely suspected of being AI generated. Did you know that soon you’ll even be able to install browser plugins that will automatically pay you to have AI insert ads into comments you write on popular websites? It’s true, and people will do it, because it’s an easy way to make money.
Reversing this AI trend means everyone should just do things the hard way, and that’s just not going to happen. If no one cares about how you do your work (and they really don’t give a fuck) you might as well use AI to do it.
neuroelectron · 1h ago
My chatgpt doesn't like nyc that much:
New York City, as a global symbol, exports the myth of America—its exceptionalism, hustle culture, capitalism-as-dream, fashion, Wall Street bravado, media dominance, cultural swagger. NYC has always been a billboard for "brand America," selling a narrative of limitless opportunity, grit-as-glory, and urban sophistication. Think Times Square's overstimulation, Broadway's fantasy, Wall Street's speculation, and how these are consumed worldwide as aspirational content.
But what's exported isn't necessarily real—it’s hype. The marketed dream, not the lived reality.
“...and its biggest import is grime and grief”
In contrast, what flows into NYC is the cost of that image: the labor of the marginalized, the psychological toll, the physical debris. “Grime” evokes literal pollution, overwork, and class stratification; “grief” brings in the emotional fallout—displacement, burnout, violence, economic precarity, and cycles of trauma.
NYC absorbs the despair of a world it pretends to uplift. Refugees, artists, outcasts, and exhausted believers in the American Dream all converge here, only to be consumed by the very machine that exports the myth of hope.
This is the struggle. The race to automate everything. Turn all of our social interactions into algorithmic digital bits. However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement. Not sure how that is going to play out, but we certainly aren't slowing down yet.
For example, take a look at the short clip I have posted here. It is an example of just how far everyone is scaling bot and content farms. It is an absolute flood of noise into all of our knowledge repositories. https://www.mindprison.cc/p/dead-internet-at-scale
Humans are amazing min/maxers, we create vast, and at least temporarily productive mono cultures. At the same time a scarily large portion of humanity will burn and destroy something of beauty if it brings them one cent of profit.
Myself I believe technology and eventually AI were our fate once we became intelligence optimizers.
> We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement.
I don't think anyone will be waking up as long as their pronouns are 'we' and 'us' (or 'people', 'society'). Waking up or individuation is a personal, singular endeavour - it isn't a collective activity. If one hasn't even grasped who one is, if one is making a category error and identifies as 'we' rather than 'I', all answers will fail.
(After reflecting a bit on this I think this is for the following reason: Not only does this take a step back to offer a meta perspective. It also does so without falling into the trap of rooting this perspective in the hegemonic topos of our everyday discourse (economics).
Usually, takes on AI are very economic in nature: "Gen AI is theft", "We/our jobs/our creativity will all be replaced", "The training data is preduced by exploiting cheap labour".
In this sense this perspective avoids the expected in not only in one but two ways.)
As a call to action this is inadequate. I have no idea what this is persuading me to do.
If I dig into how Heidegger solved this problem in his own life, well, I don’t think that should be replicated.
Re: "call to action", part of Heidegger's project by my read is to interrogate such phrases. I think he would refute that "action" is what we need and that orienting ourselves towards the world in terms of "action" is obscuring the Question of Being. He himself offers no real way out. In his posthumously published Der Spiegel interview [2] he himself says "only a God can save us".
I assume you're making a snide reference to his involvement with Nazism, which I'm not going to attempt to downplay or respond to here. He himself in his later life, however, went and lived a humble life in the Black Forest. Can or should we all "return to the land"? No. But his writing certainly has expanded my view of the world and my "image of thought". He is a worthwhile study.
How to Read Heidegger [3] is a great primer for any who may be interested.
[1] https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil394/The%20Quest...
[2] https://www.ditext.com/heidegger/interview.html
[3] https://a.co/d/dK5dp2t
P.S. just noticed/remembered that my username is a Heidegger reference. heh.
Edit: this was a generic comment, not judging the article. I still have trouble understanding what its premise is.
Probably not, you probably didn’t even notice, and now it’s over. It’s too late to care. These things will soon be replaced with cheaper AI pipelines and much of what we consume or read digitally will be proudly AI generated or at best only merely suspected of being AI generated. Did you know that soon you’ll even be able to install browser plugins that will automatically pay you to have AI insert ads into comments you write on popular websites? It’s true, and people will do it, because it’s an easy way to make money.
Reversing this AI trend means everyone should just do things the hard way, and that’s just not going to happen. If no one cares about how you do your work (and they really don’t give a fuck) you might as well use AI to do it.
New York City, as a global symbol, exports the myth of America—its exceptionalism, hustle culture, capitalism-as-dream, fashion, Wall Street bravado, media dominance, cultural swagger. NYC has always been a billboard for "brand America," selling a narrative of limitless opportunity, grit-as-glory, and urban sophistication. Think Times Square's overstimulation, Broadway's fantasy, Wall Street's speculation, and how these are consumed worldwide as aspirational content.
But what's exported isn't necessarily real—it’s hype. The marketed dream, not the lived reality.
“...and its biggest import is grime and grief”
In contrast, what flows into NYC is the cost of that image: the labor of the marginalized, the psychological toll, the physical debris. “Grime” evokes literal pollution, overwork, and class stratification; “grief” brings in the emotional fallout—displacement, burnout, violence, economic precarity, and cycles of trauma.
NYC absorbs the despair of a world it pretends to uplift. Refugees, artists, outcasts, and exhausted believers in the American Dream all converge here, only to be consumed by the very machine that exports the myth of hope.