The Cost of Proliferation
Information has never been more valuable, but the value of the information is in what it can be used for, and the most valuable thing is data that allows corporations and governments alike to observe us, track us, know us, target us, control us. And, the ability for us to be monitored and corralled has increased exponentially through the improvement in data collection and analysis tools, coupled with the massive growth in data we provide on a digital platter.
But, there is more to the digital world of information than this, and we are entering into the age of the content creator. However, most people don't actually seem to know what this means at a practical level, other than putting some videos on YouTube or OnlyFans and hoping for advertising and subscription revenue. However we are also entering into the world of AI generated content, and that is going to have an effect too.
Before we go on, let's do a little bit of "pseudo history" and have a look at the values and costs of proliferation. For instance, if we look back at around the 80s, there was a lot of paper in offices filling up filing cabinets. Lots and lots of paper, with receipts and contracts, reports and proposals all being typed up, printed out and stored in some way. But, while it looked like a lot, and took up a huge amount of space, it was also highly limited by costs of production, storage and transport. However, the digital transition kept bringing the costs down until now, where almost no paper exists in modern offices but the amount of documents have increased enormously.
The cost of a document is zero.
But, the information that document carries has value.
However, now, the cost of creating information has also come down, and similarly to the value of a document that costs nothing to produce, transport or store, the value of content is also reducing. There is approximately 300,000 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every hour, but who is watching the majority of it?
And this is the challenge that content creators are going to increasingly face. As while they are embracing generative-AI to speed up their production processes and even increase the quality of their output as an individual, every other content creator is doing the same. There is not only an explosion of content, there is also the homogenization of content, as people rely more on the tools, and less on their own creativity. This means that the volume grows, but the diversity narrows.
And the value decreases even further.
The problem with the value of content, is that the more there is, the less it will be worth as a product itself, because there is only so much time that can be spent consuming it. This is the problem with the attention economy, because we only have so much attention to spend. But, for that content to have value, it needs to be consumed, which hints at why almost 50% of the internet traffic is actually bots, not people.
There is now no stopping the exponential increase in content creation and ubiquity, because we are predictable animals - Short-sighted and lazy. When there is a shortcut to take, when there is a way to speed up getting what we want, when there is something that offers us convenience, we will take it, use it, and love it, even as it takes away the very thing we have been striving for.
Once upon a time, we used to do things because they were hard. We sailed around the world, we dove into the seas, we went into space, which led to all kinds of innovation and growth as a civilization. When we do something hard, we will face a mountain of unforeseen challenges that we have to overcome in order to get to where we want to go. However, that spirit of adventure is gone, and now it is about hitting the numbers, meeting demands, and scoring points.
Even as our communities, cities and minds are breaking down.
We are no longer looking to solve the hard problems and instead raising the irrelevant problems as if they are high priority. It is busywork, irrelevant to our wellbeing, a distraction from what we could and probably should be doing, that digs us deeper into the quagmire of our controlled existence, churning profits for faceless organizations, that will continue to consolidate wealth and exert control over us, the more we proliferate their content.
People don't seem to see it yet, but it isn't the just the value of content that is going down, it is the value of human, the value of us. We are becoming increasingly expendable, because we are no longer able to add enough value to warrant our existence. They talk about reducing populations to save the world, but what that really means is, reducing numbers to save some of civilization, because the world would be fine without us, no matter what we do to it.
It is us who have the problems to face.
What does the AI suggest we do?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Posted Using InLeo Alpha
Mon ami, il me semble qu'au 22ème siècle, une personne raisonnable dans ce monde sera une rareté exceptionnelle.
We aren't likely to get there at this rate.
I agree. It seems stupid contents on Web2 social media platforms attract much more attention, and this reflects the level of the value of humans who watch them.
I think that there are generations of people who now believe that sitting watching something stream, brings value to the world.
I think it's just perspective, and where you put your attention to. There is so much information available, that depending on where you look, it might seem bleak. Think of it like TV with channels. If you watch slapstick and comedy, you might think the world is becoming stupid. But if you change the channel, you will see advancements in technology and humanity.
You mentioned sailing, and diving the seas. We pretty much conquered those, so there's not much to do there. We have deep sea cables, underwater tunnels, submarines that can reach the deep sea, etc. You mentioned space. There is still a whole lot of things being done with that. Private companies are trying to get the costs down by improving the materials and recycling them. Japan recently did an unmanned precise landing on the moon. We made a vaccine against a global pandemic in record time. People are still trying to find a cure for cancer, dementia, and other illnesses. We are developing AI and Robotics which were just imagined in fictional books before.
You just have to change the channel.
There is something like 600k species that they think lay undiscovered in the ocean. Isn't that crazy?
There is a abundance of information, content etc, but what percentage is valuable, what is being consumed, and most importantly, how is it being applied. Without application, it is just consumption, and useless.
Unfortunately, me changing the channel doesn't stop me being affected by all those who don't. We live in a society and being surrounded by addicts will impact on those who are not. I think we are heading toward even more division and class systems.
Some say 86% of land species and 91% of sea species are undiscovered. Most are tiny microbes and insects. If we relate it to what you're saying, not all of them are valuable to us. I think you answered your problem, if we are heading into division and class system, there is even more reason to change the channel and let those who watch the stupid videos spiral down, while you find like minded people that value the same things as you do.
I'd say it's never been more available. Think supply and demand. This stuff will collapse.
Also, I believe there's some stochasticity in that homogeneity that will lead to creativity.
I think that this is due to boredom. However, people aren't "bored" like they were before, as they can still feel entertained. With AI and AR getting so much better, people won't feel bored, as they will be immersed into worlds that that accept. Look at the extreme gamers who end up malnourished because they don't eat.
Preface: This is a mangled mess of what I'm actually trying to say. Most of it won't probably make sense because of me not having it completely figured out. Also, it's coming out of left field.
Maybe some magic is taken out of creativity when described this way, but couldn't creativity be described as novelty generated by the stochasticity of individualism/experience?
If we had unlimited understanding, possibilities would be discrete. Creativity would have zero magic.
Sure there's the old "if monkeys had mashed buttons eventually they'd write Shakespeare" but reality has limits (lifespan is a good one). What if every time a monkey types a particular sequence a new key appears? Imagine a progression where these novelty generating sequences increase in length and difficulty. What would the happening to the rate of novelty? I think it would look like logarithmic growth.
Since we have an intellectual boundedness linked to our limited processing ability, we attribute this to magic or randomness. Until the ultimate limitations of humanity is realized/defined, this will remain true. I'm fine with that. I like my delusion of free will and appreciate the cleverness of novelty. However, if this can't ever be defined, we are stuck with operating like novelty is being mined. The domain in which all possible things can be created is mined and expands when each new thing is found.
That said, I think no matter how you look at it, logarithmic growth is going to stick around as the natural order.
Speaking of documents, you would be floored at just how much people print. It drives me crazy. I started tracking printing just to our copy machines a year or two ago and these people are single handedly decimating entire forests.
Yeah, there are a few countries in Europe that still use paper. For you, it is because of teachers who grew up loving worksheets :)
Ugh, it's horrible. My top user has printed close to 56,000 pages over the last two years.
If we stay below replacement fertility level, there'll be fewer and fewer eyeballs to chase.
It collapses eventually.
A friend was saying that one possible reason for no alien contact is that they got to a point in AI that they could immerse themselves completely, and never travel again.
There's such a human community to be found on a certain planet in a sci-fi book from a series called...wait for it... Requiem for Homo Sapiens. And in an episode of Star Gate. And I guess in many other pieces of fiction created decades ago. We're just, for some reason, chasing after some ideas of the past already proven to be bad. Or was it the inevitable evolution?
Death imitating art.
Ah, we need instances of life imitating death to complete the cycle... What aspect should we focus on? Decay? Or stagnation? Or anything else?
It's more about what definite trend or pattern it(tons of data over the internet) is forming, if yes, then it is always valuable for a myriad of entities including corporations and Govts.
Obviously yes, because they will have a propensity to produce those types of content which has a demand, even though creativity has a generic demand, it is not that straightforward, creativity can be artificially created, and as long it pays it will have a supply side.
"as long as it pays"
That is the point, isn't it? It keeps people trafficking, and drug cartels in business too.
Absolutely.....technology might have changed.....but not the gross consciousness.....
Human nature is predictable. The larger the group, the more accurate the prediction.
Only 5% lead it......rest 95% are followers, we are still shaped by herd mentality as social animals.......however, it is warranted by faculty of reason
It's definitely an issue that the value of content is dropping. A lot of people want to be content creators but the amount of people who can make a living off of it is a minority. It makes me wonder what will happen as AI gets more rampant and that value goes down even further. In a way, I don't see it as us winning and I have a feeling that we are moving towards a society where a lot of us won't really have a job.
And when we don't have jobs, people think the government will look after us. They don't seem to understand how the economy works, or governments. If we can't add value, there is no value in keeping us.
I think the value is in the people not rioting. If people can't survive, I don't think the people up top will have a good time either because people can get desperate. I feel that they would appease people by just giving people money and wait till people die off normally.
AI has its flaws and some of gradual convenience and from your write - this is exactly demonstrated.
I am not to see it happen to values slow down gradually, but we could still innovate and find out systems differentiating what bots are sharing and rest of what is human crafted.
What I think that Human mind has genuine innovative mind,other than to think anew, act differently and make different approaches. Contrary, the bots are programmed and manufactured by humans to work on specific functions, not else .
Thats the difference on the way.
Yes, because now everything is around make money, spam content to get views, get followers, get money...make trash content so little effort, and why not now that there is ai, remove even that little effort, just set a prompt and let ai farm money for you, basically you are printing money
It's a sad but true thing to say, my chest burns because I have been an active member of such for a long time, the adventitious attitude now belongs to the few who are the ones truly living and the others are just puppets to that existence.
The quality of content matters and as you said, for the value to be transmitted there have to be a reader, so what do you have to those out there putting in there effort and not receiving recognition enough to earn a living because they aren't hitting the numbers to be recognized?.
In my opinion your writing relates closely to the quality of life you keep I think that should be spread out there and the drive of creativity too should, AI's learn everyday a lack of creative will eventually put all fakes out of business and the real hustle begins, how do we prepare for that?.
I think the fact that we raise problems that are not important as high priorities is the fact that so many of us have misplaced priorities. If you ask so many people about the problem they’re going through, we’d realize that they are unreasonable. I think that’s where we all have met ourselves though
You are right to point the finger at this development, which, while offering advantages in terms of efficiency and convenience, also presents considerable risks for privacy and individual freedom. We need people who can innovate in content creation, but also think critically about what content really attracts attention in a crowded and increasingly homogenized digital world.
Human values are changing rapidly. There's a passage from the series "The Three-Body Problem" that I really liked. It's in episode 5 and I don't want to spoil it for you, so if you're interested, you can watch it. I think you'll easily see what I mean when you watch the scene.
Artificial Intelligence shouldn't replace human judgment, but it already does for many people. Developing a critical mind is no longer so easy, but it's still possible. You do it very well, and you're far from alone.
My main point is that there's going to be an even bigger gap between people who have developed critical thinking and others who, on the contrary, have lost all critical thinking.
The sad thing is, even good books are getting extremely hard to pay some attention to. Especially because of the slower pace of consumption and the requirement to be fully focused on reading. And I used to love to read books. I still do but I can hardly make ( consume) five to ten in a year :(