One of the weirdest parts of being on the internet today is the rush of advertising masquerading as “content” in the form of reviews, articles, backstories, etc that get generated whenever something needs to be uh… advertised. This used to be purely a political thing, we’d get bombarded decades ago with a bunch of different sounding opinion pieces and news clips that all somehow came to the position that we, the consumer of this advertainment was supposed to arrive at. But now, it’s just everywhere, all the time, and so indistinguishable from “organic” work that even the content producers themselves seem completely oblivious that they are being manipulated into producing this content on behalf of whoever.
After you’ve gotten off my lawn and I’m done yelling at the sky, one of my kids was watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvkgmyfMPks which is sort of a man on the street review of the Apple ™(r)(this writer has no current relationship with Apple Inc.) Vision Pro headset, and I was struck by the end when the reviewer notes that after a period of adjustment, the headset itself is normalized away cognitively and this completely artificial experience becomes indistinguishable from “reality” (there’s an angry grammar teacher out there somewhere, let the hate flow through you). They go on to note that this technology is the MOST intrusive/obstructive it will ever be, and from this point out it will only get “better”.
And wow, it immediately brought me back to the evil angel/brain in vat concept, the idea that the magic of the mind somehow has this magical ability to pierce the veil, that our innate desire for “gods” reality would allow us to see through the illusion.
Fucking nope.
Our processing is purely stimuli against prediction, and if you manipulate the stimuli long enough prediction will either match or the machine will break.
Now this is normally where I get all freaked out about how often humans tend toward using things like this for the absolute worst purposes, but the obverse of this is that after a few dozen generations from this technology, it will be the closest thing to utopia we will likely be able to achieve.