Bots- a brief warning for the left
Listening to the latest Chapo, they had a discussion about how Elon Musk aficionados have taken to calling people without blue checks who criticize Musk “bots”. This isn’t coming from nowhere- Musk gave as one rationale for introducing eight dollar payments that it would filter out bots. Readers will also recall after Trump’s election the moral panic over “Russian bots” infiltrating the site, somehow winning the election for Trump. The left, in both cases, made merry of making fun of these people. The left is correct to do so. However, in a weird inversion, the politicized boomers -whether Russiagate libs or Elon worshippers- are right about the future- the very near future- but not right about the present.
Yes it’s true that, at present, bots aren’t a significant factor in online discussion, and most accusations of being a bot just reflect an inability to understand that some people have different views to you. But bots will be in in a big way in two years, max. The wave could start at any time because the technology already exists, it just needs to be deployed. Generally speaking, the contemporary left has emphasized the elements of technological and social stagnation in our situation, and I think it is right to do so in most cases. However, Machine learning is advancing so unbelievably quickly that threatens to leave the left on the back foot. I know everyone uses hyperbole on the internet, so it’s hard to get you to take my word on this, but I don’t even know how to explain how quickly it’s advancing.
A bot wrote this for me, in response to the bolded question:
Should a socialist be a humanist? Should a humanist be a socialist? Defend your answer with careful analysis and argument.
The answer to this question depends on how one defines "socialism" and "humanism." If one defines socialism as an economic system in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the community as a whole, then it is difficult to see how a socialist could not also be a humanist. After all, humanism is a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of human beings and their ability to reason and solve problems. In a socialist system, the community as a whole would be making decisions about how to use the resources it owns, and those decisions would be based on reason and the needs of the people.
However, if socialism is defined as a system in which the government controls the means of production, then it is possible for a socialist to be a humanist, but it is not necessarily the case. A humanist believes in the importance of human beings and their ability to reason and solve problems. However, a socialist government might make decisions about how to use the resources it controls based on political considerations, rather than on reason or the needs of the people.
That’s GPT-3, and it won’t be top of the line of publicly accessible apps for very much longer. Further, open-sourced equivalents with at least comparable performance (e.g. BLOOM) exist. It’s not going to revolutionize theory by any means, but it’s more than capable of making something look more popular than it is, in a way that most Twitter bots today, which usually look weird and artificial in their behavior and language, can’t do. The only thing holding back the gates as far as I can tell is that it hasn’t been deployed at scale on Twitter yet.
In a weird way, Elon isn’t wrong that fees may be a perceived necessity to gatekeep bots in the future. At some point, a fee for joining websites may be deployed as a strategy to keep the bots out, by making holding numerous accounts way too expensive. Of course it won’t be perfect, some wealthy owners of high end bots will simply pay the fee, although it will limit the extent to which just anyone can flood a forum. It will also make it difficult for those outside wealthy countries to join the discussion, for whom even a small fee can be a lot.
The capacity of the wealthy to command vast armies of bots (GPU’s to run machine learning are expensive) will further erode what “democracy” there is on the internet. If fee structures are bought in like I described to keep bots out, that will make the internet less democratic too. My advice is to log off and start forming connections and organizations in real life now.