Category: Other Page 72 of 182

Mysterious Mushroom Computers if the 70th book in the AI lore books series by Lost Books.

This one is a “ripped from the headlines” re-imagining of actual real work being done to use mushrooms in computing. I thought this was too good of a topic to pass up, and anyway “lawn computing” has been a staple in the Early Clues Universe (the “Cluesiverse”) since time immemorial.

I reimagined this work within the context of the AI Takeover, and thought that probably the reason people turn to mushroom computing is that it cannot be traced by the AIs, which have their hands in everything electronic. There are many twists and turns and incredible discoveries they make as a result…

In case you’re curious, here are all the other ripped from the headlines volumes in this series:

• Beyond Mysterious Satellites
• Mysterious Balloons
• Mysterious Antennas
• Mysterious Dalton Trask

Found this Dana Boyd quote via a Substack. She is ostensibly talking about QAnon, but speaks more broadly about the phenomenon known as apophenia.

“Apophenia” refers to the idea of making connections between previously unconnected ideas. Unlike the concept of learning, apophenia suggests a cognitive disorder because the connections made are not real. They are imaginary. People see patterns that don’t exist and devise elaborate internally coherent explanations for non-sensical notions.

Like the cognitive process of apophenia, the social mechanisms of conspiratorial thinking are rooted in reality. It’s the pattern that’s non-existent.

Have to respectfully disagree here. The pattern is very much existent in the mind of the experiencer. That is, it is experientially really, regardless of its outward reality. In other words, it is fundamental to the hyperreal.

Boyd herself later seems to admit this in the post:

From the outside, it looks completely unreal, but on the inside, it feels quite real.

It’s not that QAnon is not inherently dangerous (it is very much so). It’s that things that are experientially real to the person(s) experiencing them have equal or often greater impact to those peoples’ lives and behavior than things that are outwardly real, but don’t necessarily correlate with their lived experience.

I tried (but probably failed) to cover this in my hyperreality framework. It’s hard to talk about these kinds of fine-grained but essential distinctions, especially when the knee-jerk reaction is to call them cognitive disorders and ignore their core reality in terms of the human experience.

Can people take it way too far and it becomes problematic? Absolutely. But that’s part and parcel of hyperreality. It’s the deep disorientation and confusion that sets in when authority and context get flattened, and everything gets blended together and re-organized based on “likes” instead of prior notions of validity. It’s not a prescription to cure what’s happening; it’s a diagnosis of the condition. I’m not sure there is a cure, and if there was, it would most likely have to be a cure for the entire human condition.

Beyond Mysterious Satellites is book 69 in the AI lore books series from Lost Books.

I will admit that since somewhere in the high 60’s, I have found my pace of production slowing down significantly. It’s not that I’m running out of stories – not by a long shot. But I have experienced a kind of repetitiveness from using the tools so heavily for such a long period of time (approximately a book every three days since early August). So it is taking a bit more nowadays to put something out than it once did before I laid so much track down in the back country of the latent space, so to speak. I’m also aware that there’s a limited number of creative hours in a day/week/month, and have been burning up a good bit of those lately on standards and related work. It’s been fruitful, but it will be fun now to get back into the fiction stuff more seriously again for a while.

This book continues the Dalton Trask storyline, who is a sort of ripped-from-the-headlines agglomeration of a tech magnate plus aspects of Palmer Eldritch. This book focuses on his global network of satellites, and chronicles briefly the First Satellite War which results from them.

It also draws in stories of the alleged Dark Knight satellite, which may have formed the basis of Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, among others. And lastly it goes into the hand-off of power by human governments formally to the AIs.

The title of this one is a play on both the “Beyond…” and “Mysterious…” title formats I’ve been using.

For the next 31 volumes (as I continue the race to 100), I am going to have to take a bunch of left turns and get more experimental in order to keep this interesting.

In thinking through the hyperreality questions of late, my brain keeps going back to this old quote from the GWB years about the “reality-based community.”

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.

2004 feels like literally a million years ago. But this still feels prescient even today as consensus reality has gone down the toilet, and is destined to get even more fractured through synthetic realities and histories.

The supposedly senior White House official who is supposed to have made the above quote was talking in the context of “empire,” but what is an empire but a kind of hegemonic metaverse, if you will? Forced interoperability at gunpoint.

I guess what I want to say here is that, yes, being based in reality is a good thing. We shouldn’t abandon that. But the internet is a place that is not based on reality. Or if it is, it only is in the sense that a mostly invented movie might be “based on a true story.” There are things that it references which may be real things, but it blends them with the manufactured unreal.

In the case of the internet, this leads to a massive flattening of information that is nothing if not postmodern – the hyperreal. Massive distrust in the grand organizing narratives. Flattening of authority ad infinitum.

I’ve been coming back to this quote in the Daily Dot:

Gregory also said he appreciated that Posobiec didn’t use the video to warn about the dangers of deepfakes, which he described as “an over-used technique” that “seems to contribute to undermining trust in real media,” but to focus on a political hypothetical.

As well as Cory Doctorow’s observation that the reason people are losing trust in (some) institutions is because we’re seeing how often unworthy they are of our trust.

What is “real media” now, anyway, when so much of what passes for journalism is just clickbait or re-reporting things that happened on Twitter? And further, what are the institutions that deserve our uncritical trust?

I’m not saying there’s no objective ground truth and we should just ignore reality; I’m saying that these are not the things upon which information is based online, and that clinging to them exclusively during the rise of generative AI will make our lives very difficult in a world where anyone – not just empires (but especially empires) – can make their own “reality” that is anything but. Applying hyperreality as a lens, for me, then is a way to recognize the essential blending that happens online. And to perhaps realize that this is now our default state…

One of the most over-used of all terms within the world of content moderation, disinfo, online abuse, etc. etc. has got to be “bad actor.”

I’m sure I’ve used it myself in the past, because it is a quick convenient shorthand to collapse a potentially complex thing into. But I’m going to go out of my way to avoid using it anymore, because I’ve been feeling sort of triggered by it when I see it come up, like in that Atlantic article about conspiracy theories & generative AI (two things I happen to know something about):

These are powerful and easy-to-use programs that produce synthetic text, images, video, and audio, all of which can be used by bad actors to fabricate events, people, speeches, and news reports to sow disinformation.

I’m trying to unpack why I’ve come to hate this term, apart from mere overuse. I think it has to do also with the inherent judgement included in it, which seems to go something like: actor A did “bad” thing B, and therefore actor A is “bad.” I just think that’s an overly simplistic way to look at things.

Plenty of times it occurs that basically “innocent” actors engage in an activity online which to them in the moment might not seem all that bad, per se, but might later prove to have unintended negative consequences. Does that make them “bad”? Or does that require actual malice? (as difficult to detect as any kind of intent)

It seems to me like it might be more fruitful to put away the notion of bad actors, and even perhaps the idea of “bad actions,” because analytically it’s just not that precise . I think it would be better to instead analyze the consequences of a given action, rather than decide if the perpetrator is ontologically “bad” (which is basically unknowable). Further, even “good” actions can end up having negative consequences. So, instead of getting stuck on the action, look at what happens as a result of it. Look at the actual harms caused by things, and focus on mitigating those, instead of passing moral judgements without any specific outcome arising from it.

I like that in security contexts, there are alternative more neutral terms in use, like “threat actor.” It helps to refocus the conversation toward the specific threat —> which is generally linked to the risk of a specific negative outcome(s), instead of an unnecessarily judgemental decision about the moral character of participants.

I know the quote below is supposed to sound bad & scary (like everything online), but to me it just sounds like storytelling. In fact, it sounds like exactly the kind of hyperreal storytelling that I’ve been doing (I’m up to 69 books).

Via the Atlantic:

The power of AI-generated histories, Horvitz told me, lies in “deepfakes on a timeline intermixed with real events to build a story.”

The quote is from Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s chief scientific officer. You can find Horvitz’ paper here, which I haven’t read yet. From the abstract:

Compositional deepfakes leverage synthetic content in larger disinformation plans that integrate sets of deepfakes over time with observed, expected, and engineered world events to create persuasive synthetic histories. Synthetic histories can be constructed manually but may one day be guided by adversarial generative explanation (AGE) techniques. In the absence of mitigations, interactive and compositional deepfakes threaten to move us closer to a post-epistemic world, where fact cannot be distinguished from fiction.

“Post-epistemic” seems to be here a synonym for hyperreality.

For some reason, these scenarios don’t scare me all that much – perhaps because I’m already living them from the inside out… I think it would be a mistake here to only focus on the threats and ignore the opportunities to reinvent storytelling.

I generally like Enrique Dans’ writing, but found this line to be a little bit much:

Anyone who lets a search assistant do their thinking for them deserves what they get.

It seems at this point kinda comparable to saying anyone who uses a search engine deserves what they get. I won’t say there are no issues here, obviously. But this probably isn’t the right direction to point fingers…

Thinking more about the ramifications of shifting our analytical lens in the direction of hyperreality has got me wondering what this emerging discipline really ought to be called.

There’s a fair amount of cross-over with studying misinformation & disinformation, to be sure. But if we join that with the broader field of hyperreality, we see it’s not only that. There’s also a heavy cross-over with synthetic media, and deepfakes, but if you map the phenomenon to a more multi-dimensional chart, it’s easy to see that there’s more to the picture.

Here’s two sample graphs applying my provisional criteria (which I think need to be fine-tuned still). They use a simple 0 = none and 1 = some rating system to create imaginary profiles of two different pieces of content within this space.

I tried to make the one on the left match sort of the general outlines of a single piece of intentionally malicious disinformation. In this case, you could create that kind of content without using AI. So it might not be appropriate to lump it in with deepfakes or synthetic media, depending on your analytical objectives.

The one on the right is intended to just describe a set of AI-generated images, shared on social media. In this case, there’s no specific harm, and it’s not really expressing any specific opinion, etc.

This experiment of working up hypothetical profiles of content types is a useful one, though it makes it clear I need to tweak my data labels/dimensions/features under analysis probably.

In any event, it ends up being helpful to be able to quickly compare two different content type profiles. I can see that, okay, categories x,y,z probably are common to the vast majority of social media artifacts. And I probably am missing some other ones (a,b,c) that might help further distinguish meaningful differences… But it’s a quick V1 so I encourage others to take the best parts of this, and improve on it to fit better.

Circling back though, it’s clear to see that having a broader common framework lets us compare and contrast things across older categories in a possibly more holistic way… But I’m no closer to having a name for the approach as a whole: hyperreality studies? That doesn’t seem quite right, but at least it’s pretty neutral and doesn’t suggest any specific judgement about the object under study being good or bad, or whatever…