GODSPEED - Polygon1993 - veni, vidi, glitchi.
I use Grammarly.
Here’s a scary stat I derived from its regular deployment: The last report I received shows that I “use more unique words than 97% of Grammarly users”. Why is this scary? Because I don’t think the words I use are so unique. If I’m in the 97th percentile, we have a problem.
If our society produces people that can’t properly articulate their thoughts, we have a problem. If our vocabulary has shrunk to such a dangerous degree that it impedes us from reasoning about complex concepts, we have a problem. If AI assists us in writing almost every text we need to compose in our daily jobs and in calculating almost every scenario we need to complete in our daily tasks, we have a problem.
Our brains are atrophying.
The irony of it all is that AI needs inputs from very articulate beings to be able to deliver its very best outcomes. The best prompts are psychological exercises that trick, lower, or eliminate the barriers that language models (LLMs) have created to shape their responses to align with the broadest range of sensibilities, with the intention of achieving tedious politically correct results.
The irony of it all is that we need to rethink our approach to learning and to what matters most:
In the era of AI, superintelligence, blockchain technology, and surveillance states, what matters most is the ability to formulate and articulate complex thoughts. Those, and those alone, are the actual levers to succeed in our present future.
We need to read more, and more intelligent books.
The best prompt engineers will be those who have studied literature, psychology, philosophy, and human sciences — not just code or math.
And if you’re one of those embarking on this fascinating journey, you need an edge to compete with your other 24 million fellows.
In fact, things are already moving in this direction, although for the wrong reasons: Gartner recently named influence engineering one of the four emerging technologies expected to significantly impact digital advertising.
These algorithms apply behavioral science techniques to induce specific online (compulsive) behaviors.
Influence engineering is part of what is surreptitiously called the Emotion AI meta-trend, which should instead be called the Brainwashing AI mega-trend.
Searches for “emotion AI” have increased by 525% over the past five years:
This AI branch is designed to determine and sway user choices at scale. A task that it’s not particularly daunting in the era of atrophying brains and dopamine addiction.
The market for AI-powered emotion recognition is forecasted to grow 4 times in the next 8 years. Examples? Check out Beyond Verbal, Evrmore and Emotech.
But instead of realizing what is happening to all of us, what seems to matter most is the preoccupation with maintaining an undisturbed connection of our umbilical cord to transient, futile dopamine hitters:
The gamification of everything, the commoditization of happiness, the idolatry of epicurean, incessant distractions are the lifeline of the current dopamine-induced, conscious, and subconscious malaise that afflicts the world, which both the corporate and the public sectors use to their advantage.
The evil combination of atrophying brains and futile dopamine hitters is what’s killing our contemporary societies, reducing them to overweight amorphic blobs randomly excited by influencers and commanded by corporates and states.
What we need is a deeper appreciation for the vastness and complexity of existence.
We need a circuit breaker.
Covid has taught us what that means. We need to put a spoke in this illusionary wheel.
Today’s newsletter will be about three such spokes. Three books that can act as a shake-up, a reality check, and a sorely needed wake-up call for the many of us daydreaming under the spell of the hypnotic mantra of 21st-century’s paper gods: