AI 威胁论的质疑
本文开篇即抛出一个近期关于AI的论文观点：“AI机器人蜂群威胁要破坏民主”。然而，演讲者对此反应强烈，认为这是一种“后知后觉”的担忧，并直言不讳地指出，美国民主制度早已在长期、深刻的危机中摇摇欲坠。他警告听众，无论其政治立场如何，所处的“信息泡沫”很可能充斥着虚假信息，并预告本视频将挑战现有认知，甚至可能因此失去部分订阅者。演讲者强调，理解当前局势的关键并非依赖于所谓的“新闻饮食”App，而是需要回归阅读书籍这一更深层次的求知方式。他自称为“Bug互联网”的软件专业人士，致力于让网络环境更安全。
Original English
Today, I want to touch briefly on a recent AI paper, and then I'm going to use it as a springboard to go on a rant about the intersection of technology and current events. Fair warning, I'm going to be spending some time putting the current American societal situation in some historical and technological context. And if you're looking for a video that won't challenge your existing beliefs, you should move on. I don't care which side of the political divide your online information bubble is sitting in, that bubble is almost certainly floating in a sea of bovine excrement, and this video is going to offend you. Now, if that sounds like I'm setting up an ad read for some app that talks about improving your "news diet", I'm not, because apps like that won't really help. If you really want to understand what's going on now, you need to - horror of horrors - read a book. Pretty sure I'm going to lose some subscribers over this one. But what the F---- This is the Internet of Bugs. My name is Carl. I've been the software professional since the 1980s, and I'm trying to make the Internet a less buggy and all around safer place. This is from a recent paper from Chatbot Skeptic, Gary Marcus, who I often agree with, called, quote, "AI bot swarms threaten to undermine democracy." And while this paper does have citations to some really interesting research that I'm going to be pouring over for some time, and while this paper also is correct that AI is a very powerful tool to manipulate people, my overwhelming reaction upon seeing this paper was, "Where the F#@$%$# have you all been?" "Threaten to undermine democracy?" Are you kidding me? Have you been living under a rock? America's democracy has been undermined for a long, long time.民主制度的侵蚀与裂痕
演讲者认为，美国民主制度的“被侵蚀”并非近期现象，其根源可以追溯到很远的过去，尽管精确的起始时间难以界定。他列举了一系列令人警醒的统计数据：约三分之一的美国人认为2020年总统选举存在舞弊，72%的人认为1月6日事件是对民主的攻击，仅有6%的美国人相信司法部门在处理涉及已故人口贩卖者的案件时遵循了法律。此外，对最高法院在堕胎问题上判决的争议性看法，几乎涵盖了所有美国人。这些事实表明，绝大多数美国人认为民主在至少某些情况下已经失败。演讲者以自身观点为例，主张执法人员不应隐藏身份，拍摄警察应始终合法，任何非直接威胁生命的枪杀行为都应被视为犯罪并受到起诉。他还批评了共和党在移民与海关执法局（ICE）问题上的做法，认为其非法且应被制止，并指责民主党为赢得选举而纵容这种行为。他断言，认为当前状况是“前所未有”的观点，是未能关注历史真相的表现。
Original English
Honest people can argue about precisely when it started, but I don't think it's possible or necessary to pick an exact point in time. Something like a third of Americans think that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate. 72% think January 6 was an attack on democracy. Only 6% of Americans believe that the Justice Department is following the law with respect to the releasing of the files related to a now-deceased convicted human trafficker, and if you add up the Americans believing the Supreme Court was wrong when it legalized abortions, and the Americans believing the Supreme Court was wrong when it made them illegal again, you get a fair approximation of everybody. I'd argue that between all of those and a bunch of other controversial issues that the vast majority of Americans believe that democracy has failed in at least some cases. And I'm absolutely one of those people. For example, I believe that law enforcement officers should never be allowed to hide their identities. I believe that filming the police is and should always be legal, and that any law enforcement officer who shoots and kills a person that is not directly threatening immediate harm to themselves or other persons is guilty of a crime and should be prosecuted. I think that what the Republicans are currently doing with ICE is absolutely illegal and should be stopped, and that what the Democrats are doing is encouraging it because they think it's their best chance to win the next election. And that said, if you think this is unprecedented, the way most of anti-MAGA Internet bubbles keep saying, you haven't been paying attention. But I'll come back to that. First, though, I want to talk about a more foundational lie that Americans, like me, were taught in school from a young age, the lie that the American Constitution makes sense, that the checks and balances in it are effective, and that the people who wrote it did a good job. Depending on how you phrase the question, something like 70 to 95% of Americans have a favorable view of the Constitution. I'd argue the Constitution is fundamentally flawed, and the people creating it knew that and just pretend it otherwise. And I'm not talking about the contradiction between "all men being equal" and the disenfranchisement of African Americans, although that was horrific and it will be a stain on America forever. If you read the writings of the Founding Fathers discussing the Constitution, you'll find a lot of concerns about what they call "factions", what we've come to know is political parties. Federalist 9, written by Hamilton and Federalist 10, written by Madison and Federalist 51, written probably by one or the other, and they all made assertions about how the checks and balances of the Constitution would protect the Union from factions. This, of course, didn't happen. The famed checks and balances of the American experiment have been Trumped, pun intended, by officials being more loyal to their parties than to the Constitution or the people - virtually since the inception of the Republic. The purpose of the Federalist Papers in the first place was to promote the arguments of the Federalist faction and counteract the arguments of the Anti-Federalist faction. And it's not like this was a new concept. The tendency of people to form factions was described by Plato in ancient Greece. And factions were something the founders were all familiar with. There were active parties in the English parliament before, during, and after the American Revolution. And within a decade of the ratification of the Constitution, Hamilton and Madison had each joined opposing factions that were warring for control of the fledgling Republic. It was obvious to all of them at the time that factions were becoming a problem, and they found themselves having to create the 12th Amendment to the Constitution to address the problems inherent in having a president of one party, and a vice president of an opposing party. Here was ample opportunity to try to further address the obvious failure of the Constitution to, as was asserted in the Federalist Papers, use checks and balances "as a safeguard against domestic factions." And yet the drafters did nothing of the sort. And I've watched this failure getting worse and worse my entire life. I really became aware of people putting party over country with the big government shutdown in the mid 1990s. It has escalated pretty consistently ever since, with the exception of immediately after September 11th, 2001, when a brief period of unity resulted in wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, extinguishing hundreds of thousands of human lives, including at least 10,000 Americans, more than three times the casualties from 9/11.技术如何加剧分裂
演讲者指出，尽管他本人是软件专业人士，但他认为技术，尤其是信息传播技术，在加剧社会分裂和政治极化方面扮演了关键角色。他回顾了技术对 partisanship（党派性）兴起的影响，认为在20世纪90年代中期，除了互联网的初步存在，最主要的推手是呼叫式谈话广播（call-in talk radio）。这得益于长途电话交换技术的进步、AT&T在1984年的拆分以及1987年FCC（联邦通信委员会）公平原则（Fairness Doctrine）的废除。他将其比作早期版本的社交媒体信息泡沫，人们通过收听广播来制造愤怒和党派对立，而非像现在这样进行“末日式滚动浏览”（doom-scrolling）。随着信息泡沫在技术上变得更加复杂，党派对立也愈演愈烈。他解释说，试图控制“新闻饮食”并不能真正解决问题，因为当前媒体环境充斥着各种信息源和影响者，它们各自挑选最能支持受众既有偏见的新闻事件，并以最具煽动性的方式呈现。尽管左右两派的宣传都比只接触单方面信息要好，但本质上仍是宣传，且会遗漏重要的背景信息。演讲者通过列举政府在街头“抓人”的事件，以及逮捕记者（如Don Lemon）的例子，说明这些行为并非如某些“反MAGA”信息泡沫所宣称的那样是“前所未有”的，而是有着历史先例（如2014年奥巴马政府时期的弗格森事件，以及里根、老布什、克林顿总统任期内对外国领导人的干预）。他强调，规模和专制程度可能在增加，但这是一种“渐进”而非“突变”，当前政府并非问题的开端。
Original English
But despite the last couple of minutes, this channel isn't about politics. I'm here to talk about technology, and although the internet did exist in the run up to the mid 90s, it hadn't yet become widespread enough to impact society. The primary tech fueling the rise in partisanship was actually call-in talk radio, believe it or not, enabled by improvements in the software switching of long-distance telephone calls, along with the breakup of AT&T in 1984 and the removal of the FCC Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Most of you probably can't imagine that would be a big deal, but I assure you it was. And in many ways, it was a primitive precursor to more recent social media information bubbles, just instead of doom-scrolling for hours, reading people trying to make you furious and partisan, people doom-listened for hours to people trying to make them furious and partisan. And, as the information bubbles have gotten more sophisticated technologically, the partisanship has only gotten worse. I said earlier, the trying to control your news diet doesn't help, and that's because the current landscape has made up of various outlets and influencers, each cherry-picking the current events that best support their audience's existing biases, and presenting them in their most inflammatory way they know how. Consuming propaganda from both the left and the right is slightly better than only consuming either one in isolation, but it's still just propaganda and you're still missing out on any useful context. For example, the government currently has mass agents grabbing people off the streets. This is horrific and should definitely be stopped, and the people doing it should be held accountable. But, despite what I've seen people claim over and over in left-wing bubbles, this isn't unprecedented. Here is a picture of a bunch of masked thugs in their official government capacities, snatching a man off the street in broad daylight, but this isn't recent. It was back in 2014 during the Obama administration in Ferguson, Missouri. It's not okay now, and it shouldn't have been okay back then either. The government, at the time I'm writing this, has also just arrested an African-American journalist for the crime of being a journalist. This time it's Don Lemon, formerly of CNN, in 2014 it was Wes Lowery of the Washington Post. Again, this is horrific and we should all object, and the same was true in 2014. I could go through a laundry list of other precursors, like the similarities between the removal of the President of Venezuela and the removal of the leaders of Granada, Panama, and Haiti under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, respectively, but hopefully you get the point by now. The scale is bigger now, and the government is more authoritarian now, but the scale gets bigger every time, and the government gets more authoritarian every time. This is just a progression, not something this administration just started. That's not to excuse it, it's inexcusable, but the narrative that this is just a thing that the current administration does is just not true, which means that the idea that if the other team gets elected, democracy will be saved is just a lie.从AI反感到寻求真实
演讲者进一步质疑，鉴于当前政治环境的局限性——右翼的“残忍与怯懦”，左翼的“共谋与无能”，以及普遍存在的“煤气灯效应与宣传”——民主制度究竟还剩下什么部分可能被AI威胁或侵蚀？他认为，无论谁掌权，国会都拒绝立法，政府对民众生活的影响主要通过总统行政命令或最高法院的任意裁决实现。整个体系似乎都在鼓励人们“选边站”，并将所有精力投入到争论细枝末节的新闻报道中，从而无暇或无力去要求真正的改变。然而，演讲者表达了一种“微弱的希望”：人们对AI生成内容的厌恶和反感，或许能为摆脱这种困境提供一条出路。随着媒体环境日益充斥着违背我们意愿的、无意义的表演性“垃圾信息”（AI slop），一种反弹正在形成，一些人开始寻求真实（truth）与真诚（authenticity）。如果足够多的人这样做，就有可能形成足够的临界质量，实现真正持久的改变。因此，他恳请听众尽可能多地、大声地表达对AI“垃圾信息”的厌恶。他相信，如果人们足够努力，并且足够幸运地让足够多的人开始拒绝这些“垃圾”，AI或许最终能改善我们的生活，尽管这并非其制造者所期望、设计或希望从中获利的方式。