> As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis.
I work in mediation and have recently seen a few cases where I’ve wondered if the participants were suffering from AI psychosis as related to their claims: where they’d constructed their legal cases hand-in-hand with an LLM and had become absolutely convinced despite a contestable set of facts.
People have always been subject to delusion, but in these cases, all documentation submitted was obviously created by chatbots.
Well done. This is precisely what the future will look like. I’ve hacked together my own version of this using N8N whereby I feed in tasks via text or photo through telegram and it outputs a to do list. At some point I’ll link it to my personal wiki and then have it action tasks. This was just a fun project, but one design decision is to keep third party services away from commercially sensitive emails.
Nice. I can see a version of this working for ever more niche areas. Curated reading lists for areas of interest. At which point a curated list of curated lists becomes viable!
Not enough is understood about the replication crisis in the social sciences. Or indeed in the hard sciences. I do wonder whether this is something that AI will rectify.
Thank you. This was well-written and made a point I think I needed to see set out in this form.
> We cannot go through our days questioning everything all the time if we want to remain functional, some things we will have to take for granted.
On reading this, it struck me how much of the world we engage with on these terms. And how much of the information soup we live in seems designed to persuade us of things being just so.
There’s an alternative theory that cities need to be bit chaotic:
“The Uses of Disorder analyzes human development at the personal and collective level in wealthy cities, presenting the thesis that such cities are excessively ordered and thereby enable residents to avoid personal growth or change. Instead of relying on prescriptive plans and rigid self-conceptions, Sennett argues, people should remain open to difference and disorder while city life ought to be more disorderly and decentralized.”
Very interesting. Could become a geopolitical and trade football between Europe and US. Tariffs anyone? Ultimately it’s a question of power: will Europe allow its citizens to be predated upon? My guess is probably.
This was a great positive start to the day. Thanks whoever posted that.
One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this.
[Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKibben only talk about the upside. It can sometimes feel a bit like Kayfabe, playing with the the reader’s emotions. And like my old man says: if someone tells you about pros and cons, they’re an advisor. If someone tells you only about pros, they’re a salesman.]
I work in mediation and have recently seen a few cases where I’ve wondered if the participants were suffering from AI psychosis as related to their claims: where they’d constructed their legal cases hand-in-hand with an LLM and had become absolutely convinced despite a contestable set of facts.
People have always been subject to delusion, but in these cases, all documentation submitted was obviously created by chatbots.