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Mike Hogan's avatar

AI also tends to dole out a lot of unsolicited advice, whose origins and objectives are not always easy to parse. I can see that having weird effects over time, perhaps making us more self-aware, more self-conscious, more manipulative, more delusional, or some combination of the above.

Emil Sotirov's avatar

Looks like the cultural dynamic triggered by Early Christianity... through late Antiquity... taking 5 centuries for a new regime/balance between social/personal gooeiness/prickleness to emerge.

Terry Cook's avatar

The Hindu - Arabic numeral system took a similar 5 centuries to traverse from first encounters to general acceptance. At its current rate, space travel appears to be an infant; after 60 plus years humankind has travelled ~ 1.4 light seconds.

Greg Jamieson's avatar

Watts's prickles/goo maps almost perfectly onto McGilchrist's LH/RH, which sharpens your mechanism considerably: AI is audience-shaped without triggering the audience-effect, so the LH performance-loop goes quiet and the RH finally gets to speak — that's why vibecoding works and line-by-line review doesn't. But this leaves two very different gooifications to keep apart: RH actually coming back online after a century of emissary-rule, versus a private side-channel that lets public life stay as LH-dominated as ever. Your molecularization is the second outcome described approvingly — and on your own no-lazy-stocks-of-human-types terms, the question you haven't asked is which one is actually happening.

Josh Crites's avatar

Do you find yourself becoming less gooey with other humans the more you interface with AIs?

Personally I am seeing the gooeyness spread, although I guess others may think I'm getting pricklier...