Excellent landing at the end. You really stuck it.
Good quotes throughout, and good wrinkles on them.
Some more that might have fit are “We are as gods, we might as well become good at it.” (I forget who.)
And paraphrased from Douglas Rushkoff: yes a tool is only as good or evil as its user, but even though a pillow and a gun can both be used to kill someone, only the gun pulls you in that direction. It has a bias.
And from Naomi Klein: we’re not really in a friction free world, we’ve just externalized all our friction. Ordering Amazon is easy, but the warehouse workers and immigrant delivery drivers can’t even unionize. Having a phone makes life simple, but all the friction ends up on the lives of slave children mining lithium. We may have reduced our own experience of friction, but only by making others’ lives PURE friction.
That is, it’s frictionless to put a Twitter user in a bikini with grok, but only for the person doing the prompting. The misery of difficulty exists, amplified, in the victim’s experience.
The reframing of friction as both obstacle and safety net is the sharpest observation here. Silicon Valley's entire optimization ethos treats friction as pure cost, but you're pointing to something more fundamental: friction is the space where judgment gets exercised. The historical comparison to 2020 deepfakes is useful precisely because it reveals that capability advances faster than conscience - we solved the technical problem of making it harder, then rebuilt the capability to make it easy again, without ever addressing why people wanted to do it in the first place. The Schopenhauer-Einstein line cuts deep: you can do as you will, but not will as you will. The policy implication is uncomfortable - we can regulate action but not desire.
"[I]t’s yet another unforeseen effect of putting a cool innovation in the hands of idiots."
Watching the parallel rise of AI capabilities and human depravity, I’m starting to wonder if 'artificial intelligence' refers to the code or to us.
We are too hard on AI, given how soft we are on ourselves...
"Friction for thee, not for me."
Very interesting POV!
Excellent landing at the end. You really stuck it.
Good quotes throughout, and good wrinkles on them.
Some more that might have fit are “We are as gods, we might as well become good at it.” (I forget who.)
And paraphrased from Douglas Rushkoff: yes a tool is only as good or evil as its user, but even though a pillow and a gun can both be used to kill someone, only the gun pulls you in that direction. It has a bias.
And from Naomi Klein: we’re not really in a friction free world, we’ve just externalized all our friction. Ordering Amazon is easy, but the warehouse workers and immigrant delivery drivers can’t even unionize. Having a phone makes life simple, but all the friction ends up on the lives of slave children mining lithium. We may have reduced our own experience of friction, but only by making others’ lives PURE friction.
That is, it’s frictionless to put a Twitter user in a bikini with grok, but only for the person doing the prompting. The misery of difficulty exists, amplified, in the victim’s experience.
The reframing of friction as both obstacle and safety net is the sharpest observation here. Silicon Valley's entire optimization ethos treats friction as pure cost, but you're pointing to something more fundamental: friction is the space where judgment gets exercised. The historical comparison to 2020 deepfakes is useful precisely because it reveals that capability advances faster than conscience - we solved the technical problem of making it harder, then rebuilt the capability to make it easy again, without ever addressing why people wanted to do it in the first place. The Schopenhauer-Einstein line cuts deep: you can do as you will, but not will as you will. The policy implication is uncomfortable - we can regulate action but not desire.