this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
615 points (93.4% liked)

Technology

58184 readers
3175 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Found it first here - https://mastodon.social/@BonehouseWasps/111692479718694120

Not sure if this is the right community to discuss here in Lemmy?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] hex_m_hell@slrpnk.net 1 points 8 months ago

I don't think that's the implication here. Following the metaphor, pottery and arrow points have been waste products for a while. Prior to the industrial revolution, and specifically prior to the chemical revolution, industrial waste streams haven't been as major of a problem (ignoring cholera for a bit). It's been the development of selling chemicals for profit and the extensive use of petroleum that's really caused massive problems threatening humanity as a whole.

The implication then is that people should be responsible for their memes. Corporations are inherently irresponsible because there exit economic incentives to externalize costs, be that environmental or informational. AI garbage as a waste stream would be fine if the data was clearly labeled as such. Unfortunately at least some AI garbage is intended to be deceptive. There exists an economic incentives to produce AI garbage that is hard to distinguish from human output. Since AI garbage can be produced at an industrial scale, there's a massive waste data stream that's able to overload the systems we've built to parse and organize data.

There are probably a lot more implications here, but "what are we doing with our information world" is something worth thinking about before we make it completely unusable.

This feels like the precursor to the information Apocalypse referenced in the comic Transmetropolitan.