> The big AI labs are building a single mind for everyone
Reminds me of Pluribus
(I just started watching it on Apple TV so maybe this is a late realization for me)
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> Reminds me of Pluribus - I just started watching it
It is astoundingly good. A contender for the best show I've ever seen (and I saw the 1st run of Star Trek TOS).
It's a well-made show, for sure. Expertly crafted, visually, and very well-acted. Though I found the pacing questionable - there were (generously) 6 episodes worth of plot spread out over a 9-episode season.
Absolutely riveting! And the casting is so good. Rhea Seehorn has killed it. I really loved her in Better Call Saul but this role is even better suited for her.
The AI writing thats ubiquitous these days - on my company email and slack, on random quotations in the newspaper, blogspam, even narrated by youtubers on camera (!) - is exactly like the Pluribus hive mind. Everywhere on the internet you encounter the same entity.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ig5qohlny4csxs2lu3dyvhp5/po...
I watched it maybe 12 months ago and had a similar 'parallel to AI' realisation.
A singular voice for all of humanity.
Gives me the creepy-shivers.
Pluribus is a collective intelligence/virus which forcefully (leads to hundreds of millions of deaths) injects itself into biospheres and then blissfully experiences itself without, of course, hurting itself in any way. Then it might eventually start starving to death because of that prime directive.
That is positively utopian compared to AI where 99.9% of humanity gets to experience a hall of uncanny valley mirrors until they are shipped off to the scrapyard or get artificially augmented with some AI mindfuck and start thinking “you’re absolutely right!” themselves. (I mean that’s the dystopian version. But if you are comparing AI to that show then presumably you think that AI is at least a little bit dystopian.)
The virus in Pluribus can even be talked with and reasoned with like a distinct entity that is real and has its own thoughts. Oh boy, much better than a million pastiches of a million echoes of the past where there is no original thought to be traced back to after 2022.
The motivation for the virus is also completely different to the motivation of the AI Overlords.
But it’s that pretty typical lack of popular imagination. Some individual/collective narrative is presented. The flawed but autonomous individual rebelling against the flawless but enslaved collective. But dang it, I’m an American and I value my freedoms. Released forty years ago and people would rave about how it aptly critiqued the Soviet Union.
I understood Pluribus as a metaphor for what AI is to us today / what it is becoming. Really great show
Or the "unicontext" that Derek Thompson recently wrote about.