Post #3786337

2026-07-13 13:58 UTC

airplane. Nikola Tesla rejected quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity and argued that future human civilization would run on the energy of the Earth through “earth resonance.” And Percival Lowell used his telescopes to map “canals” on the surface of Mars that he claimed were alien irrigation ditches. These are all examples of the overcommitment, and overdevelopment of an idea, far from the territory in which an idea once grew and flourished or from which it was unceremoniously banished. Artificial intelligence is by design the most powerful cognitive artifact ever created. It is engineered to minimize user effort by performing tasks that humans would otherwise find time consuming or impossible. The problem of course is that the better the tool gets the less the user needs to think for themselves. And in a vicious spiral, the less the user thinks the more dependent they become on their tools. That is until the tool disappears and the whole system collapses.

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@anna_lillith@mas.to 2026-07-13 14:00

If intelligence is a necessary precondition for stupidity, and intelligence and stupidity scale together such that it takes real intelligence to be spectacularly stupid, then super-intelligence will be the opening act to an era of super-stupidity. AI hallucination might be the first evidence of this dynamic. Large language models produce fluent, confident, detailed text that is, with some regularity, factually wrong. And this is not a simple bug but a structural feature of systems that optimize for appeal and plausibility rather than truth. And the danger is not that the AI will be wrong, after all, humans are wrong all the time, but knowing this, humans have invented means to detect and correct errors. We call this the scientific method. The danger is that an AI will be wrong in ways humans can no longer detect because the very capacities that would catch the error have been outsourced to the machine or exceed the capacities of human minds.

Open ##3786336