If TV is the opiate of the masses
Social Media would seem to be the Fentanyl thereof, but what are LLMs
and AI slop in general?
I propose PCP: I'm no psychonaut nor entheonaut nor practiced chemical
self-alterer but the following is my layman/outsider's review of
possibilities - again, those here with (much) more grounded knowledge
may debunk it all:
*AI as PCP: *a peculiar *confident detachment from epistemic ground*
while feeling like enhanced capability. You're not consuming someone
else's reality passively. You're /co-generating a reality/ that
feels personalized, responsive, intelligent — and which may be
confabulated throughout... up to acute danger to self and others -
** I (and you) can fly!* - *maybe this is how Antropic helped
Hegseth and Trump believe they could do something with Iran other
than make a big mess for everyone involved (up to WWIII scenarios)?
*Nitrous Oxide* - mild analgesic effect, genuine short-term
cognitive alteration — but is fundamentally /shallow/ and /brief/.
*Steroids* - the /performance enhancement that degrades the
underlying system/. You get genuine short-term capability increase.
The muscle is real. The output is real. But the endocrine system is
being quietly undermined,
*Adderall* — or amphetamines generally — Produces genuine focus and
output in the short term. Is prescribed and normalized within
productivity culture. The long term costs — to sleep, to baseline
affect, to intrinsic motivation — are real but diffuse and deniable.
*Alcohol* captures the /social lubrication and lowered inhibition/
dimension that the others miss. (LLM engagement like drinking alone?)
*Caffeine* might be the most honest analogy for the */best/* case of
LLM use — a mild cognitive enhancer that works roughly as
advertised, has real but manageable dependency properties, doesn't
produce significant dissociation from reality, and has been
integrated into human cognitive practice for centuries without
catastrophic effect. (But it can make your breath and teeth brown
and your affect jittery and your blood pressure spike?)
*Ketamine* At low doses, dissociative but functional — you can still
navigate the world, you're just slightly detached from it. At higher
doses, the k-hole: complete dissociation, internal reality entirely
self-generated, profound subjective experience of meaning with zero
tether to external reference.
*Benzodiazepines* — and specifically their effect on memory
consolidation. Benzos don't just sedate, they interfere with the
/transfer of experience into long-term memory/. You can function,
apparently normally, during the experience — but the experience
doesn't consolidate. (we already have trouble learning from our
experiences?)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to Tainter and Scott — a population that is cognitively functional
in the moment but not consolidating adaptive capacity across time is
accumulating a kind of hidden fragility that won't be visible until the
infrastructure is unavailable and the lower scales turn out to have
nothing to run on.
And in the meantime, each of us in our own individual altered state of
confident detachment and withdrawal from the social commons?
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