Saturday SLOP

   Who is to be believed? You are looking at a sandwich. It appears luscious and yet delicate with bright colors and juicy features of bread, meat, and condiments. It makes your mouth water, and you hunger for the mix of cheese, beef, tomato, and sourdough bread. But it is not real; it is AI. However, you are more attracted to this illusion than the need for another 1,200 calories. You crave the experience but not the consequences. You are tempted—tempted to believe. So, that is your reality.   Is it real if you believe it is true?   Is it true if you believe it is real? Who is to say?   AI agents.   More importantly, how long before they become most effective in convincing you what is real? “Best influencer” will emerge unevenly, not as a single dramatic moment . In one narrow sense, LLM-based agents are already approaching superhuman influence in constrained settings such as customer persuasion, tutoring, negotiation framing, em...

   Truth and persuasion As LLMs extend their retention of context, eventually knowing their users via longer and longer histories of interactions, they may be able to tailor every expression to the subtle but powerful biases, hopes, dreams, and expectations of each user.   How much context may be required before an LLM becomes your BFF, your mentor, or even your spiritual advisor? The short answer is: far less context than most people assume—and far less than a human persuader usually needs . But the reason is important: LLM persuasion does not depend primarily on “knowing you deeply”; it depends on rapidly identifying which cognitive frame you are already willing to inhabit . That means persuasion is less about constructing a belief from scratch, and more about finding the lowest-friction route into an existing belief architecture. 1. How much context is actually required? In many cases, surprisingly little: A few signals often suffice: ...

    So many to choose Each is a part of our reality, and as such each is different.   In early humanity, humans played a small part in our environment, and our early self-awareness reflected it.   Humans worshiped the sun, the weather, and other natural phenomena as those played a dominant role in human life.   Gradually, humans learned to manage their environment, and it was reflected in their thinking.   The gods of nature became the God of Man .   Humans reached a point where they created an entire environment, man-made and apart from Earth – the International Space Station.   Along the way, humans instantiated their beliefs in man-made symbols, books, and now ‘AI’ systems that can speak to them like a god – all knowing, passionate while simultaneously objective and even seemingly cold.   But AI is not a god; it is a tool.   And the voice of this god-like creation will be guided by a few humans who understand its...

      More than Words   Humans are intelligent because intelligence was defined by humans in terms of human language, which was never designed to be an objective transmission system for reality. Consequently, observations and their conclusions contain gaps of varying significance, which greatly limit their applicability outside a narrow context. This limitation may even render them irrelevant to reality.   Can language be modified or enhanced to fill these gaps or express an abstraction of reality with a contextual measure that communicates objective information about the gaps (e.g., metalanguage)? Alternatively, will a new form of communication be required, such as a universal AI lingua franca based on math, that uses human languages to provide each individual with a version of reality that they can accept as ‘true’?   Human language evolved for social coordination, not for accurate transmission of reality. It compresses experienc...