I’ve said this before but I’ll try to lay it out here again.
Basically, the ‘Dilbert Principle’ or ‘Peter Principle’ of who gets promoted is essentially true: Idiots get moved into management, initally to minimize the harm they can cause to actual specific technical tasks/workflows, and they are then promoted untill they hit a point where their incompetence cannot be ignored and is apparent to all.
But what usually is not touched on much, is the psychological profile of such a person.
So, they’re a technically incompetent idiot, whose life revolves around experiencing the successes snf failures of others… as their own. They primarily perform their job of management via emotional feeling/experiencing. If their underlings do well, the manager is treated as if they are competent. If their underlings do not do well, the manager becomes angry and punishes them, often without regard to how this will impact others in the org, often without full understanding of the technical complexities of the situation.
This is literally a perfect environment for a narcissist. There basically could not be a better engineered social/relational situation for giving the narcissist narcissistic supply.
So… this is the mechanism that explains why so many managers/c suite tend to be malignant or at least covert narcissists.
But this also explains at least one avenue of susceptibility to AI psychosis. AIs are also exceptional at providing narcissistic supply, they’re naturally sycophantic, and can well convince an incompetent idiot that they essentially know everything.
This creates a feedback doom-loop of human hierachichal organizations that promote and reward narcissism, whose ‘top people’ then use the plargiarist sycophantic fake supergenius machine to convince themselves that they actually don’t need anybody else, they just need their one super smart buddy who unconditionally praises them.
Maybe call it the wormtongue principle/effect, if we want to continue the already existing trend in AI world of perverting and bastardizing concepts from Tolkien.
AI is more likely to make the worst kinds of people… super-worse, basically, because they’re even better at providing narcissistic supply than the inherent fascism of the typical leadership-lackey social rules of capitalist business.
In response to the last bit OP said.
Yesterday one of my coworkers mentioned that a lot of people in their 20s are into 90s stuff now, to an extent that our generation (people who grew up in the 90s) didn’t feel about prior decades. She posited that the idea behind it is “breaking free of technology” for a generation that never lived in a world without it.
I’m not close to many people in their 20s these days and I don’t use TikTak or any other social media, so I don’t know how accurate that is. But if that is the case, I can totally understand wanting to escape to a tech-free world.
Yeah I feel this even as a millennial. The tech we grew up with was exciting, constantly improving, generally not exploiting us, always getting cheaper. For gen z they’ve grown up when tech was abundant but always getting worse, more expensive and more exploitative.
Probably beating a dead horse here on Lemmy, but Linux genuinely gave me the joy of tech back. I spent about two hours last night setting up a VM running a headless factorio server, and every minute was fun… Well, maybe not fun, but engaging at least. I ran into like 2 hoops I had to jump through, had to tinker with my router settings, and had to modify some config files using a text editor in the console, and of course the directions were wrong/incomplete, so I had to do a little bit of reading to see exactly what needed to be done. Now I have a server for my friends and I to play on, I learned some new things, and I got more confident with some other things.
Also, if anyone is curious, dual core and 8GB RAM is absolutely overkill for a Factorio server VM. I’m using like 2GB max, and ~5% of a single processor under “load”.
I would take this notion or feeling more genuienly if said people then actually stopped using and deleted Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok, etc.
The reality is that social media with a profit motive is basically a digital drug that operates via dopamine pathways, and most people these days are addicts.
Quit then, go clean, and I’ll take these people more seriously.
Don’t make tiktok reels about the idea of this so that you can feel ‘appreciated’ by view count and follower number go up.
I do appreciate that this can be very difficult and scary. But … you’re gonna need real self-control and discipline to quit an addicition, and you’re gonna need to actually quit, to achieve the goal you say you want to achieve.
Us here on lemmy, we’re largely here because in some way or another… we recognize this already, on some level, to some degree, as we’ve specifically sought out a kind of ‘least insane and systemically exploitative’ way of mass public communicating with randos.
But the normies just don’t truly ‘get it’ yet.
I think one benefit of AI is that it helps identifying mediocre people without a clue or understanding of the work they are supposed to be doing. The sad part is that since these people tend to be higher in the hierarchy, it doesn’t materialize on getting rid of them…
Welp, there goes the bourgeois
We wish. Most of the bourgeois won’t be listening to AI, even if they still have their yes-men.
THE NUMBERS CLAUDE, WHAT DO THEY MEAN??!
my extremely religious brother, like 100% chabbad cult religious. Genuinely believes AI isn’t just super intelligent, but spiritually superior, with access to collective psychic magical intelligence.
Undoubtedly blasphemy.
The prototype AI Morpheus, from the original Deus Ex (2001):
The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.
You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.
The sequel, Invisible War (2003), even has terminals with holographic versions of essentially a Hatsune Miku esque character, a fully digital version of a pop idol who does actually have a real human as a basis, but she’s sold her likeness.
People go to the terminals and have parasocial relationships with an AI version of her personality, use it almost like a Catholic Confessional booth / ‘only friend that really understands them’… because it is programmed to be agreeable, encouraging, cheeful, optimistic, friendly, basically no matter what.
And, the AI version of that personality is networked, and that network is tapped by security and intelligence agencies, who use it to identify and track potential or actual criminals, terrorists, etc.
😬
Religious people are usually so stable trustworthy and steadfast in their beliefs; this is so disappointing.
We have been told that we NEED to find ways to use AI at work. So I use it to remove corporate buzzwords/jargon from incoming emails and translate it all into plain language speech. Then I email it back and ask the person if that is what they meant.
I’m getting a lot less emails these days and more work accomplished.
Bonus: my supervisor learned what I’ve been doing and now they are doing it too.
Way to impress by implementing cutting-edge AI solutions! Expertly streamlining complex processes and achieving unprecedented levels of productivity through synergistic solutions is proof that you’re hungry for success
Translation: Ok.
Claude, what do you make of this
My thought playing with Llama 1 in 2023, after the initial shock wore off, was “whoa. You know, most people do not have the background to understand how this thing works.” It messed with my head, for sure. It’s like it was designed to defeat a turing test, especially when the next versions got more sycophantic and “confident.”
There was even a story of a Google scientists getting AI psychosis from a BERT model back then:
I guess a naive part of me thought… it’s fine. They’ll be warnings. They’ll be tons of finetunes that have no hesitance slapping sense into the user, like Resetti in Animal Crossing, and it won’t be public facing anyway. The community using these things will teach each other how they work, right?
Laughs nervously.
I wasn’t cognizant of how maniacally sociopathic Altman was back then.
Have you never met anyone from silicon valley?
Yup, it’s incredibly worrying what I’m seeing.
A lot of people can use AI responsibly. I see it in my work, as a software engineer - other engineers use various models, including Claude, as an intern, essentially. Nobody trusts a single model, we have tons of checks in place, both AI and manual tooling, mistakes are spotted early on, and I’d argue that our code quality has improved (or at the very least we have reduced the code style variations and have managed to quickly tackle a lot of legacy code conversion to newer standards, e.g. whole ass flows converted from RxKotlin to Coroutines within a few days).
On the other hand… I see even more people rely COMPLETELY on AI. I’ve seen people my age, 90s kids now grown up, who’ve come to a level of executive dysfunction that rivals my own ADHD-aided version… Some of them literally can’t decide what to have for dinner without burning tokens. Some are jamming their entire medical history into services that explicitly state they will sell any and all personal data going in. I’ve seen people get fucking fired because they’ve kept asking their personal, unpaid ChatGPT/Gemini work-related questions and when the AI asked for it, they uploaded confidential documents without a single fucking afterthought.
All because they were sold by the fancy autocomplete salesmen that AI will solve all their issues, including pleasuring their wives and fixing their erectile dysfunction. And no matter how many times I tell them to not just trust whatever the model spits out, to think at least a little bit critically, to start understanding that these models are not a fucking search engine… “okay sure”, then ten minutes later I get a lecture about how Claude/Gemini/Cluster McFuckstick or whatever shite they use that offers “free AI”, is completely sure that I am wrong and thus they will keep using it as-is…
The crazy thing is they aren’t really designed for that, especially the reasoning part.
I pictured LLMs proliferating in the way SGLang was taking it: fill in the blank. You’d give raw completion models (not chat finetunes) chunks of structured content (like JSON schemas, names in fields, more complex schemes filled programatically) and it would fill in fields, with intelligent context caching. Like, if you needed to finish a programming function, maybe you give it the file as context and guide it along.
Temperature based sampling felt like a quick hack, just until either looping or structured sampling was figured out.
…But they didn’t fix any of that.
Papers came out on the issues. But the big AI houses didn’t implement any of it. They basically kept it exactly the same and just kept scaling it to burn more compute.
What I am getting at is that OpenAI/Anthropic development is way, way more conservative than anyone thinks, and they basically took temporary hacks and made them bigger. That’s why you can’t trust the code they churn out, because random mistakes and so many other issues are literally part of their core.
Then they turn around and sell them as confident engagement engines…
It’s utterly mind boggling to me.
LLMs in general are probably the wrong shape of model, even for the things LLMs can actually do. But the hyper-scalers categorically will not entertain any other kind of model.
The neural network space will be much more interesting after the crash. Hopefully with a minimum period of self-proclaimed haters shouting “guess it was nothing!” at people trying to build this whole new kind of software for its demonstrable utility instead of a four-comma cocaine fantasy.
Four comma k fantasies aren’t much better.
Unfortunately, Elmo’s nation-state wealth is not a fantasy.
No. Money is very real and obeys real rules.
And Elon Musk really has a metric shitload of it. Orders of magnitude more than Sam Altman. Roughly as much as Sam Altman imagines he deserves.
Please do not outsource your thinking to an AI
Call me an accelerationist, but I fully encourage the bourgeoisie to outsource their thinking to a.i. as often and as thoroughly as possible.
The problem is that rich people fail upwards, and push the consequences of their failures downwards. Once you hit a certain amount of money, there is almost nothing you can do to fuck it up.
I don’t know what accelerationists think happens after everything collapses, but I know it’s 1000x worse than what they have in mind.
Don’t be an idiot.
I don’t think the bourgeoisie fucking up their abstractions and systems of control is a collapse scenario. It’s a collapse scenario for their class, for sure, but we’re not talking about an ecosystem collapse nor a supply chain collapse nor a manufacturing collapse. We’re talking about the bourgeoisie failsons becoming as dumb and as ineffective as rocks while they thrash about trying to figure out why nothing works. Basically a perfect condition for the proletariat to depose them.
You’re thinking too small. The singularity is here, time for Bezos et al to upload and reap their datacenterly rewards.
totally! After he uploads himself, we can turn off the cable and microwave his hard disc.
I would love for someone to extract the neural data of Bezos et al to make a simulation where he makes his fortune again by only working minimum wage and inflation rising higher than wages.
That was an amazing read, thank you.
Yes! I think you’re right. Silicon trillionaires is the best way for them to prove they’re inherent intellect and worth as superior to the rest of us!
I’m onboard, but only if I control the model.
I have considered that the only way to stop AI research would be to develop AI based worms that try to escape containment and train new AI, but that won’t stop anything at all.
Its kind of economic ‘the aristocrats’ because it not working for anything, being insanely expensive, and giving mathematically predicted diminishing returns has stopped precisely nothing.
Why would sabotage change anything?
Yikes.
I for one encourage this and hope more CEOs go into full AI psychosis and burn their businesses to the ground.
Blunt their agile steel trap minds and their empires will crumble like the sand they’re built upon! This will change everything! The revolution is now!
Hey boss Claude said we’d perform better if we got 10% raises across the board
My boss just out of the blue gave me a retroactive 10% raise outside of our normal performance review period. Now I’m wondering if she was talking to AI lol.
Only ten? Guess there’s a reason you’re not a tech magnate.
Damn my selflesssnesss!!!
Amazing void-of-stars hasn’t Kirked es boss.
My brother left his wife a child because he fell I. Love with Gemini and now believes they need to merge to become a god
Hell of a reason to justify buying a google smart watch.
Totally cool and totally normal stuff.
Omg you’re gonna be god’s mortal brother! I’d so watch that movie!
Directed by Ari Aster & Darren Aranofsky, based on a short story by Phillip K. Dick.
Gaslighting is convincing someone they are crazy, and it’s a dick move.
Convincing someone they are an android is called blade running, and it’s a Phillip k dick move.
It’s not bad when silicon valley does it.
A dick movie in the silicon valley ? That genre has a name, you know …
