this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Thanks! I'll try longer showers.
So.... there was some kind of thought experiment about an AI that was optimized for making paperclips and it took over the world... I never really got the point of that one.
But if you've ever called tech support at a big company, at some point you realize you're not talking with people, but with scripts that someone wrote and are forcing the people to read. So: how about a steampunk novel in which a company becomes "sentient" because everything is automated through business processes, including executive decisions? This sounds like something that might already have been done, so you'd have to do some background reading.
Alternately, I believe sophisticated algorithms are used to predict market trends... but imagine if one of those algorithms begins defining itself in such a way that "something happens".... I dunno this one requires a bit more thought...
I think that's already uncomfortably close to reality.
A fully AI company was already tried as an experiment. There is also a company that appointed an AI CEO but I suspect this one is a publicity stunt. The experiment was a "failure" by the way, with AI agents only completing less than 20% of the tasks in the fake company and with some hilarious mishaps. But 20% of a company tasks being done in full autonomy by (not specifically trained) AI is scary.
Right now, various socials are full of AI generated fake engagement, images and videos. Meta is offering AI-powered ads. The obvious question I see asked every time, also here on Lemmy, is: if most of Facebook becomes a zombie world where comments and fake engagement is all LLMs, who would buy those Meta ads? That question was actually what inspired this wildly successful (-27 votes and counting!) showerthought of mine: this fake engagement only makes sense if Meta thinks we'll give AI more and more agency to choose the products we buy and (eventually) buy them on our behalf. So it's going to be AI convincing other AIs to buy. Our money becomes sentient, so to speak,
Crazy talk, right? Well....
Awesome! Facebook becomes nothing but AI, undergoes a singularity, and sucks capitalism in with it. Then we can just put it all in a box, bury it, and the rest of us live in utopia.