Crane Squirrel on The Third Place

Arguably the single most important problem facing democracy today: getting humans from different segments of society (across political party, wealth etc) to spend any amount of time engaging in real time civil dialogue. I suspect there is just no substitute, and any democracy's ability to function at all will be severely limited without such dialogue. Possibly we could get by with high quality public quant polling data on truly broad set of subjects, supplemented with high quality qualitative polling data. But the time when social media could be a good windsock...I think that was just a fleeting blip. So, yes, LLMs will enable high quality corporate shadow censorship/propaganda and may generally make it harder to obtain social consensi that aren't horribly wrong---but it was going to be hard anyway and I'd say there's still even money we will actually figure it out if democracies keep tinkering for another couple centuries. On the other hand, non democratic power structures have completely different needs. Right now it still seems like such structures are even more susceptible to over concentration of power than democracies, leading to capricious decision making and poor decisions. I wouldn't have been as confident in this 10 years ago, but Xi Jinpeng's consolidation of power and subsequent incompetence has greatly reduced my fears of stable totalitarianism. Nonetheless, there may be mechanisms yet uninvented that yield a stable totalitarianism where LLM-based shadow censorship/propaganda leads to many profound misunderstandings about reality in the vast majority of humans. It is indeed a spooky thought.