I found that idea interesting. Will we consider it the norm in the future to have a “firewall” layer between news and ourselves?
I once wrote a short story where the protagonist was receiving news of the death of a friend but it was intercepted by its AI assistant that said “when you will have time, there is an emotional news that does not require urgent action that you will need to digest”. I feel it could become the norm.
EDIT: For context, Karpathy is a very famous deep learning researcher who just came back from a 2-weeks break from internet. I think he does not talks about politics there but it applies quite a bit.
EDIT2: I find it interesting that many reactions here are (IMO) missing the point. This is not about shielding one from information that one may be uncomfortable with but with tweets especially designed to elicit reactions, which is kind of becoming a plague on twitter due to their new incentives. It is to make the difference between presenting news in a neutral way and as “incredibly atrocious crime done to CHILDREN and you are a monster for not caring!”. The second one does feel a lot like exploit of emotional backdoors in my opinion.
I look forward to factchecker services that interface right into the browser or OS, and immediately recognize and flag comments that might be false or misleading. Some may provide links to deep dives where it’s complicated and you might want to know more.
Hüman brain just liek PC, me so smort.
It’s definitely an angle worth considering when we talk about how the weakest link in any security system is its human users. We’re not just “not immune” to propaganda, we’re ideological petri dishes filled with second-hand agar agar.
Perhaps we can establish some governmental office for truth that decides whether any shitpost can be posted without the sterilization and lobotomization of the poster
Or maybe some kind of “community value” score for people with the right thinking
Counterpoint: only allow elected governing bodies own or control media outlets, platforms, and critical communications infrastructure
Sounds like we’re reinventing forum moderation and media literacy from first principles here.
Kind of, but the guy being a prominent LLM researcher, it kind of hints at the ability of not inflicting it on humans nor suffering from having to design an apolitical structure for it.
I remember watching a video from a psychiatrist with eastern Monk training. He was explaining about why yogis spend decades meditating in remote caves - he said it was to control information/stimuli exposure.
Ideas are like seeds, once they take root they grow. You can weed out unwanted ones, but it takes time and mental energy. It pulls at your attention and keeps you from functioning at your best
The concept really spoke to me. It’s easier to consciously control your environment than it is to consciously control your thoughts and emotions.
In a way, the job of a teacher or journalist is to filter useful and/or relevant information for interested parties.
Do we have an iamverysmart community yet?
I’ve thought about this since seeing Ghost in the Shell as a kid. If direct neural interfaces become common place, the threat of hacking opens up from simply stealing financial information or material for blackmail; they may be able to control your entire body!
you already have that firewall. it’s your experiences and human connections, your understanding of media, your personal history and learning and the feelings you experience.
you don’t need a firewall to keep you from being manipulated, you need to learn to fucking read and think and feel. to learn and question, to develop trusted friends and family you can talk to.
if it feels like your emotional backdoors are being exploited then maybe youre thinking or behaving like a monster and your mind is revolting against itself.
Not really. An executable controlled by an attacker could likely “own” you. A toot tweet or comment can not, it’s just an idea or thought that you can accept or reject.
We already distance ourselves from sources of always bad ideas. For example, we’re all here instead of on truth social.
Jokes on you, all of my posts are infohazards that make you breathe manually when you read them.
Yeah the firewall is called “going outside more”
Trust me, getting your information “from going outside” is not the best either.
Leaving aside the dystopian echo chamber that this could result in, you could argue that this would help with fake news by a lot. Fake news are so easy to spread and more present than ever. And for every person there is probably that one piece of news that is just believable enough to not question it. And then the next just believable piece of news. and another. I believe no one is immune to being influenced by fake stories, maybe even radicalized if they are targeted just right. A firewall just filtering out everything non-factual would already prevent so much societal damage I think.
There are enormous issues with who decides what makes it through the filter, how to handle things that are of unknown truth (say ongoing research), and the hazards of training consumers of information to assume everything that makes it to them is completely factual (the whole point of said fake news filter). If you’d argue that people on the far side of the filter can still be skeptical, then just train that and avoid censorship via filter.
Yeah, I agree. it’s not easy to determine truth, and whoever decides truth might introduce bias that then gets rolled out to everyone. With ongoing reserach or unknown information, you could just have a “currently being researched” or “not confirmed yet” attached to the information. I’m just saying that in an ideal world where this does work, it could be safer than relying on people being skeptical, because everyone fails to be skeptical about something eventually.
Yes, lemmy too is that. We need to meet people and then form groups online. I had devised a solution for exchanging public keys in person and verifying each content thereafter with that key.
We already have a firewall its our thoughts. The information can nudge us but it’s fighting an uphill battle against everything we already know and believe.
Your thoughts (I guess you mean your past knowledge, intelligence and critical thinking) allows you to dismiss lies, but it does not shield you from the emotional charge of some news.
Reading, watching, and listening to anything is like this. You accept communications into your brain and sort it out there. It’s why people censor things, to shield others and/or to prevent the spread of certain ideas/concepts/information.
Misinformation, lies, scams, etc function entirely on exploiting it
I wonder if maybe it’s more apt a comparison to say that allowing raw comments to affect you in a strong way is like running a random program as root. To a certain extent you have to let this kind of harmful content in.
P.s. the short story sounds cool - is it available to read anywhere?
