Sam Liebeskind

I worry about people being able to trust the kinds of material that they see online as emanating from human beings, and what it means to spend most of your day in an environment in which you’re never sure whether you’re surrounded by people or bots.

To understand the social consequences of LLMs and related forms of AI, we ought consider them as social technologies. Specifically, we should compare them and their workings to other social technologies (or, if you prefer, modes of governance), mapping out how they transform social, political and economic relations among human beings.

So we might all have the same needs, but the superficial markers for how we achieve these desires look very different. This is where people start misunderstanding one another, fighting. But these little big differences, our individual personality phenotypes, is where things get interesting.

Instead of firing off salvos on social media, find a local problem you’d like to work with other people to help solve. Like most communities, we need trails cleared, litter picked up, funds raised for cheerleading teams and brass bands and animal shelters. In my community, we have programs where residents help elderly neighbors get to medical appoi... See more