Post #1423704

2026-04-19 14:34 UTC

These days, so much of our lives and work and relationships are mediated by screens. I think this is a big part of why folks think AI is approaching human capacity. It's important to remember: we choose to interact through this narrow, impoverished interface. It is not normal or healthy for human beings, just convenient for our mechanized society. It limits us, captures only a small sliver of our humanity, and makes building relationships hard. Deep learning can do amazing things with text and images, but those are vastly easier than the messiness and complexity of real life. We talk about AGI, but these systems can only compete with us when we hobble and contort ourselves to play the machine's game. AI systems don't even attempt to play our game, to live a human life. They simply could not. Nor do their makers want them to. An LLM with feelings, aspirations, free will, and meaningful relationships would be a disaster! They want a multipurpose digital slave, not anything like a human being. #ai

Replies (2)

@dalias@hachyderm.io 2026-04-19 14:47

@ngaylinn Seeing "screens" as a narrow, impoverished interface is ableist and NT-supremacist. For a lot of people, it is completely liberating being able to function in the world without having to physically move from place to place or show our bodies and faces and voices to strangers we interact with. "AI" is absolutely garbage but this doesn't mean the way we made the world accessible to people who are different prior to the "AI" scam was wrong.

Open ##1490095
@maxy@sigmoid.social 2026-04-19 15:42

@ngaylinn But no other animal commits to such a narrow, impoverished interface. We have invented audio and video calls but use written language for our cultural laws and to communicate across continents and generations. This is not natural for primates. But it is very much a human thing. We are not playing the machine's game, we invented this game. And now we try to build a machine to play it, pretending that "cumulative culture" is just another of those number games better left to machines.

Open ##1490097