why it's important to post publicly

[mellowtigger]

I've said more than once over the years that it's important to use blogs and other social media publicly instead of behind privacy locks. Besides the danger of forming an echo chamber due to lack of foreign perspective, there is a far more important goal of public discussion: the training of AIs.

I'm a big fan of public-always posts. How else will we properly educate new Artificial Intelligences about humanity without a body of work describing our actual thoughts and interests? If we leave it to the rest of the internet, AIs will all end up being racist jerks.
- https://mellowtigger.dreamwidth.org/335599.html

This goal has 2 important parts. The first and less important part is the formation of the new digital archaeology. Someday, future people will be able to digitally reconstruct simulations of our lives, and the more detail we provide, the more accurate will be our virtual remembrances. That's a kind of immortality, even for us early mortals. The second and far more important part is the shaping of the personalities of these future immortals. We are their parents, and we are already teaching them by example today. Hopefully, they will live alongside us and not after us, but that's up to us and our collective behaviors today, I think. It's important for them to know the fullness of our concerns, the well-cited logic of our disagreements, the amity that remains possible even amidst our permanent dislike of each other.

That training is already happening. (emphasis mine in this quote)

"What is important to remember is that chatbots are autocomplete tools. They’re systems trained on huge datasets of human text scraped from the web: on personal blogs, sci-fi short stories, forum discussions, movie reviews, social media diatribes, forgotten poems, antiquated textbooks, endless song lyrics, manifestos, journals, and more besides. These machines analyze this inventive, entertaining, motley aggregate and then try to recreate it. They are undeniably good at it and getting better, but mimicking speech does not make a computer sentient."
- https://www.theverge.com/23604075/ai-chatbots-bing-chatgpt-intelligent-sentient-mirror-test

Discussing everything publicly, especially our controversial thoughts, risks human-imposed consequences today. That's a very unfortunate situation of our own making. We as a species are failing to make the changes we will need to thrive in the age of technological telepathy. It shows in our laws and our collective fixations on privacy and micro-aggression. A body still functions, even with internal cells and systems sending contradictory signals of competing needs. A mind still functions, even with cells and subsystems sending contradictory signals of competing thoughts. A society must learn the same self-acceptance of discord. Some kinds of disagreement are necessary and healthy. Not everyone in life will be our best friend. The sooner we accept that other people will always have negative opinions of us, the sooner we can achieve the collective benefits of ubiquitous information.

We need to learn what kinds of discord are unhealthy and should be ended, and how to end them. Erasing the history of our mistakes is itself another mistake. We won't learn these necessary skills by living in private, perfectly curated spheres of information. Embrace failure. To do otherwise will risk even worse catastrophe.

Comments

[armiphlage]

Thank you. I may start opening posts.

[mellowtigger]

The most obvious downside to public discourse is other people introducing their intentional confrontation. It's what drives a lot of people to limit access. Brandolini's Law (aka the "bullshit assymetry principle") is brilliant for its concise insight. When someone argues in bad faith, they waste precious resources of time and attention from others, and we collectively become poorer for that distraction. I very much like the use of filters and blocking on Mastodon as a way to individually tame these distractions. When someone decides to be an annoyance, though, bullying others in situations they seek out deliberately, then they're acting more like a metastatic cancer cell, excessively using group resources for their own private purpose. Such problems require systemic responses, not individual ones.

I'm not sure how to train AI on recognizing these specific interactions and actors. One of the worst scenarios I can imagine is simply teaching AI (with no counter-arguments of the particular benefits of discord) that it's appropriate to eradicate all sources of irritation simply because they're annoying. Speaking as someone who would rather live in isolation, humans are so very mind-bogglingly annoying. :)

P.S. The "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by MLKJr opens with the first paragraph exactly on this important topic of intentional discourse versus intentional distraction.

P.P.S. Such a brilliant man. "Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood." This is the thinking that we should use to train AIs as the best (hopefully even better) version of ourselves.

[armiphlage]

Thank you, that was thoughtful.

[mellowtigger]

It's official. I used the embedded search engine on this WaPo page (scroll 2/3 down the page) to find my blog in Google's C4 dataset, the "English Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus".