#this scenario doesnt even require full AGI

[inbabylontheywept]

My thoughts on this are a little fuzzy, but it's a sort of AI-fucks-up-the-world scenario that I call The Cacaphony. And I just wanted to share what it could look like.

Imagine a world where the chatbots have gotten good enough that it takes 10 minutes for the average person to spot them. We're getting there already. Once that happens, companies and governments will start releasing instances of these things onto forums to try and push their products and ideologies.

Now imagine that these bots are cheap. Less than $500 a year kind of cheap. Suddenly, you're reaching into an online space where you know that humans are outnumbered.

What happens then? Do we see the rise of a twitter blue-checkmark system for every single social media site? Do we see large platforms break irreparably in favor of small isolated discord cliques?

I don't know. It fascinates me. I can see some sites that just absolutely would never be able to survive. Reddit and 4chan would be obliterated. Twitter would die unless it went back to its old blue checkmark system - and even then, the only people that would ever be taken seriously would be the blue checks. Even tumblr would find itself in a tough position. Imagine how many fewer people you would follow and reblog if you had to spend 10+ minutes checking them to make sure that they were absolutely a real person. Imagine a tumblr where self-doxing started to become the norm. There would be a set point where the site just crystallizes, and it would basically never recover from it.

It boggles me, to see companies that would get rekt by this scenario pouring money into making it happen. Twitter should not want The Cacaphony. Nor should Reddit. Nor should Google, if we're being honest. And yet each of them lines up to cheerfully sharpen the sword that will one day strike them down.