Actual humans, meanwhile, are treated more and more like infrastructure: not as citizens, but data-producing substrates, behavioral scaffolds for algorithmic systems.

One very real future being pursued right now looks to turn LLMs into a universal operating system, and thus the friendly assistant — the weaver, the chatbot — would be the universal interface for all “smart” infrastructure, utilities, appliances, tools, household objects, automated machines, etc. Accordingly, one can easily imagine a version of the... See more

There will only be vibes and feedback loops in a permanent ahistorical present.

The main point, though, is that control, as such, over others, will be exercised more and more through ambient forms of algorithmically mediated behavioral engineering, adaptive control systems programmed to nudge, herd, and condition populations toward the achievement of the policies and goals — monetary, sociocultural, militaristic,... See more

To the extent that writing creates a form of non-biological memory — an external system for storing symbolic information — to roughly the same extent, I think, many forms of AI constitute forms of non-biological attention, external systems for selecting, ranking, filtering, and reweaving fields of information around what's salient or important.