Programmer Humor

I see the debate happening in here, and I honestly think the way this really works is a lot weirder and at a bigger scale than what most of us might imagine. We've had pretty strong machine learning for quite a while... we still don't know exactly how it works, but these models have reasoning, pattern recognition and the ability to classify data which improves every day.

The likes of Google ingest all manner of disparate data points, buying and selling them to each other, responding to the push and pull of markets and trends. These players have a realtime profile on every single person who touches their platform. Users touch that platform with almost everything they do. These touch points where data get gathered are not just users' own personal devices, either. They increasingly happen via corporate and state-controlled devices and networks out in the built environment.

We feed these entities continuously with our actions, whether we know it or not. They continuously map all the intersections of millions of data points across billions of profiles, theoretically getting as granular as needed. It's picking up patterns that humans would never think to look for, and then feeding it back to us. Generative agents fit into this framework, hand in glove.

At this scale, these entities can derive trends, interests, motivations. They create massive feedback loops, driving trends as it suits them and they predict - or try to - what we'll do, wear, buy, eat. Where we go online, and IRL. And what we search for.

This is a massive, largely invisible, endlessly adaptable machine they've created. No one person can fathom the entirety of it. Even for the engineers who contribute, they only know their one small piece, and they may be unaware of how it contributes to the whole.

The only ceiling to it is data storage, compute, and access/adoption. They're obviously working to massively raise that on all fronts.

This is becoming the mycelium beneath our forest floor. Like trees, we find it convenient and practical to know each other's statuses and whereabouts, to converse, and to get things. We eat from it, or it feeds us. Meanwhile, it shapes the environment itself, deciding who rises and falls, spreading, terraforming the earth and transforming the substrate of life according to its own alien logic. Unlike a mycelial network, it has our own hubris reflected and embodied. It's not self-limiting, not in a way that means anything to the well-being of most of us. The end result here won't exactly be balance and homeostasis in the ecosystem.

They don't need our microphones. They may have needed them at some point. And don't get me wrong - they'll definitely still listen in when it's convenient for them. What they have at this point though, and especially in the very near future, is already exponentially more efficient and powerful than bulk listening. Let's recognize it for what it is!