> who may develop narcissistic tendencies with increased use or reinforcement from AIs.
It's clear to me that (1) a lot of billionaires believe amazingly stupid things, and (2) a big part of this is that they surround themselves with a bubble of sycophants. Apparently having people tell you 24/7 how amazing and special you are sometimes leads to delusional behavior.
But now regular people can get the same uncritical, fawning affirmations from an LLM. And it's clearly already messing some people up.
I expect there to be huge commercial pressure to suck up to users and tell them they're brilliant. And I expect the long-term results will be as bad as the way social media optimizes for filter bubbles and rage bait.
Maybe the fermi paradox comes about not through nuclear self annihilation or grey goo, but making dumb AI chat bots that are too nice to us and remove any sense of existential tension.
Maybe the universe is full of emotionally fullfilled self-actualized narcissists too lazy to figure out how to build a FTL communications array.
I think the desire to colonise space at some point in the next 1,000 years has always been a yes even when I've asked people that said no to doing it within their lifetimes, I think it's a fairly universal desire we have as a species. Curiosity and the desire to explore new frontiers is pretty baked in as a survival strategy for the species.
It's clear to me that (1) a lot of billionaires believe amazingly stupid things, and (2) a big part of this is that they surround themselves with a bubble of sycophants. Apparently having people tell you 24/7 how amazing and special you are sometimes leads to delusional behavior.
But now regular people can get the same uncritical, fawning affirmations from an LLM. And it's clearly already messing some people up.
I expect there to be huge commercial pressure to suck up to users and tell them they're brilliant. And I expect the long-term results will be as bad as the way social media optimizes for filter bubbles and rage bait.