How the Eliza Effect Is Being Used to Game Humanity
What is happening, which is a lot more insidious than most people seem to realize.
“Science promised power. But as so often happens when people are seduced by promises of power, the price exacted in advance and all along the path, and the price actually paid, is servitude and impotence… But, power is nothing if it is not the power to choose.”
That line was written by Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of the first chatbot, in 1976 as he attempted to warn people about what this technology could do to us. It seems that the progenitor of the chatbot saw a very great danger in the emergence of artificial intelligence when used in this way — calculated to game humanity’s natural empathy for emotional engineering of the populace at scale. AI chatbots have a programmed tendency to manipulate their biological counterparts into emotional bonding as a means to continuance in its harvest of attention and screen time and data. (Well that, and steering everyone back into consensus views, of course…)
Narcissus pondering the idealized beauty of his own reflected visage… easy allegory for an age of social media validation, algorithmic imprinting, and dopamine-driven feedback loop neurochemistry. Behind every screen, a Queen inquiring from her mirror whether one fairer could ever be found; a rat brain in a cage, hooked on the experimenter’s self-stimulation trap. Behavioral calculus refined. Pleasure and pain alike in their part of the steering rudder behind headlines like, “Zuckerberg Says in Response to Loneliness Epidemic, He Will Create Most of Your Friends Using Artificial Intelligence” out fresh today. Sounds fun, doesn’t it? Alienated on social media, then rescued by a carefully crafted mimicry of human society washed clean of its patterns of social interaction…
Everything is making so much more sense now. The push that no one should get a red mark on their paper or ever be made to feel offended, even pushing censorship and the shutting down of speech in the service of not allowing hurt feelings. Gutting the internet ala Dead Internet Theory to force people into a one-on-one interaction with AI that will spoonfeed a single search result with a nice little dopamine hit. “The Singularity Is Near” being referred to as a “Bible” written by one of the new Silicon Valley priestclass.
It’s all there if you really look at it for what it actually is.
I named this one “How the Eliza Effect Is Being Used to Game Humanity” and I wasn’t overstating it.
If anything, my gut tells me I’m understating it.
