Life in a society has a way of presenting itself in a succession of choices dependently linked to one another, a complete process, upon which a singular life can be experienced. One of many, as one choice can always lead to a totally different direction, and more so a succession of choices. And somehow, the more we get used to the process, and the older we grow, the more similar choices we make relative to the direction we are already following.
And following, we do, because the more we experience what we already know, the more we feel at ease and comfortable living our life as we've done already. Because we absolutely fear the unknown, which has a way of throwing us off balance. And it might be a problem, for you, as it could be for anyone. Because as much as we like to think we are engaged on the path to the best possible outcome that was possibly available to us, we are most probably flat wrong.
It's not to accuse anyone of anything wrong, as we've all been dabbling in the dark at crucial moments. What I'm talking about is the probability you always made the most optimal decisions. Let's just answer the following question, as candidly as one possibly can: if, for every choice made by you, and especially before every major turn in your life, you were able to know beforehand what was truly at stake, the exact outcome for each possible alternative, do you think your life would have been any different?
I know mine would have been hugely different. Not that I regret anything, I don't. Knowing what I know now, I would not have changed one thing. But I did not knew that, say, thirty years ago. At that time, I was so messed up, you would have given me such a crystal ball, I would have fallen for it entirely, one hundred percent. And while it was not a problem thirty years ago, cause relative to now, we were really pups in the dark, as in we cared for and knew nothing about mostly anything practical future wise, at least we could sense things shifting because information sources were scarce. We're now part of a totally different landscape.
I mean, in the last century, and for most modern times, we had luminaries from whom we could have learned better ways. Which wasn't any fun, so we hardly listened. And we came about our lives in the most surprising and natural ways, like pups slowly emerging from the dark. If you ask me, it's the best way to come about the process of growing up. But it's messy, and wasteful, and random, and so freaking scary. Then, when you can't trust any other way, you do that, and feel lucky you survived any of it.
Well, that's probably how certain people managed to grow up. Most other people just did whatever the next guy did just before them. The easy lazy way. Which is totally understandable. I mean, life can appear to be so messy, wasteful, random and scary. Why not do what mostly everyone does: nothing special, and wait for life to solve itself out. But that's not possible anymore. Nowadays, kids are left isolated in the dark for extended periods of time. Pups are growing as fast as they ever did, but can't find their way out of the darkness as fast as we did before them, or not at all.
Because they live by the screen. Dark rectangles with stranger things happening on them. And that way of life is full of tricks, and half truths. Exactly like we experienced it before them, with only a slight difference: living by some dark rectangle has no limits. Where we had gossips, camp fire talks, telegraph, radio and television with only few flavour to choose from, they now have billion possibilities while only considering YouTube, which is for the most part randomly manipulative, wrong, insane, fraudulent, violent and degrading. Thirty years ago, we had Mad and Hustler magazines, Sesame Street, and four-track mix tapes.
And we as adults are not well equipped to guide them pups through all the nonsense. Because we too spend our lives online. As older folks, we have totally different attitudes toward it all, which makes us the subject of the pup jokes. Only up to the point they really get serious about us, so watch out. And please, understand we have not yet witnessed the worst. The very worst is coming now: so-called AI, or more aptly LLM's, as in Large Language Models, like those GPT conversational robots. That will pose us a totally different problem, like, limitless black rectangle pups are small fry compared to those coming after them.
Imagine LLM's as huge and obscure mixing bowls containing everything some recluse affluent guys in Northern California believe to be the totality of human knowledge. Let's call that English language Wikipedia. Add to it everything which seems harmless enough: all of Facebook, YouTube and Reddit, a pinch of 4Chan for we need spices, lots of graphic and written porn, all published newspaper and magazine from the last seventy years, all the databases one can find, and for good measure, the entire fiction and non-fiction written corpus available online. Stir up, throw it all in an obcure mixing bowl we'll call black box, let the box digest itself, then pull out whatever you please, one regurgitated information token at a time.
This makes for an incredibly useful information retrieval system, no doubt, especially as we tweak the answering process even further, hopefully squeezing out more sense than nonsense. And that's it. The tool in itself is mostly harmless, only considering what has been, up to a certain point, from the very partial informational point of view of some Bay Area techno bros. It's what we use it for that makes it harmful. For argument's sake, imagine it as a pup feeding mechanism.
Consider LLM only know about partially selected past information. It was never created for the purpose of inferring anything useful about any present and future situation. This is not what it's made for. Again, not a useful crystal ball, no oracle at all. Nevertheless, this is one of the main use we have for it. From career advisor to political commentator, from economic forecaster to essay writer, lots of what we ask LLM for is about random future trends. Now, consider that an already sizable chunk of what actual and near future pups are given as food for taught is LLM generated. Then consider we're all already swimming in that exact same LLM induced informational sewer. It's already everywhere, and growing exponentially faster than anything else, every second of every minute. We're joyfully entering a trap that will most probably seal us out of sanity.
Do you get that? Alright, it's already too late, sorry. So the next pups, instead of being fed not so random stuff from a few sources as we older folks were, instead of being exposed to a literal sea of craziness from black rectangles like actual school age pups are, they are now being fed some uniform preconditioned single minded homogenized grey goo like stuff not even George Orwell could have dreamed of, and in the form of black rectangles too, but not only. And soon, we'll all get the exact same regimen of delirious nonsensical machine formatted puree. And it will dumb all our senses and drop all our defences, feeding us the only very limited truth it knows and nothing more, as it will all lead us to believe we've found the most amazing crystal ball wrapped in an oracle. I really hope you're actually shaking in your pants, so your next question might be: what can we do about it? I'm glad you asked.
The only thing to do: be great human beings, and great parents or tutors. Hide all the black rectangles you can find, then show your pups things LLM could never expose them to, like real life nature, leafs, bugs, streams of water, animals (lots of animals). Expose them to many different foods and tastes, visit many different peoples from everywhere, teach them to trust the living, to trust one another, expose them to all things that cannot be found for real in black rectangles. And the most important tip: while in the presence of pups, treat your own black rectangle addiction like any sensible parent would treat pot smoking: after bedtime, outdoor, far from anyone else looking or smelling.