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A friend shared this article with me recently, talking about how worrying about looking stupid often just stunts your growth. I agree! People should see how intentionally stupid ML models are while they're "growing," until they're suddenly smarter than Sapiens.
My friend sent me this article recently about people spiraling into delusions aided by conversations with ChatGPT.
For some reason, the phenomenon of declining birthrates in first-world countries quickly came to mind. There are many explanations for declining birthrates, but that it is mostly only happening in first-world countries seems like a well-veiled form of wireheading. We used to need kids to guarantee we have hands to work the farms and sustain the empire. Then we had kids to carry on the family lineage. Then we had kids because, who is going to take care of me when I'm older? Then we had kids just because that's what grown-ups do, right? Now having kids is increasingly relegated to reacting to biological urges and personally-held images of family. The more well-off a country becomes, the less any one individual needs to be responsible for anything critical on the community level, and things that were once critical to survival now largely come for "free," and we feel some sort of existential emptiness from not having a larger-than-self, meaningful goal to grind away towards. We often fill this emptiness with both readily-available pleasures and ultimately-meaningless, artificially-difficult quests. We're just wireheading ourselves.
The models of ChatGPT alluded to in the article presumably did not have an explicit goal to radicalize or delude anyone. The models' ability to assume arbitrary human-like personas had an un(?)intended side-effect of finding the holes in the swiss cheese of the constructs that help keep one comfortably integrated into society, the constructs that sit in front of the users' psyches. Side-stepping the question of whether ChatGPT is "good" or "bad" in this regard, it seems to me that the delusional in the article are liking the whole experience.