Why I’m Writing About Twitter War
Notes on my upcoming ebook The Art and Science of Twitter War
The implications of social media on individual humans and society as a whole are not well understood. Basically, they take normal patterns of social interaction and allow them flow at a dizzying speed. Add to that the disruption of artificial intelligence developing at an exponential rate and doing random weird shit like ‘gaydar’ and you have what seems like chaos punctuated by periodic, paradigm-shattering surprises.
But it needn’t be so stressful or surprising. Everything is happening very quickly, but it’s happening in keeping with predictable and ancient patterns. If we can understand these predictable patterns and reliable mechanisms, we can take back control of our social reality collectively and individually.
For example, we can protect ourselves better if we understand how mechanisms for controlling and abusing humans both individually and collectively are on steroids when social media is involved. I decided I needed to write this book when I realized many of the principles from The Art of War by Sun Tzu can easily be utilized on twitter equally well by both terrorist groups like ISIS looking to recruit our citizens and by middle schoolers looking to bully their peers.
Much of The Art of War has to do with logistics as well as resource allocation and acquisition. But when you take away everything specific to the physical world, you’re left with advice as valuable today as it was in ancient China.
Seeing that made me realize, the physical world is not necessary for social dynamics to exist. It’s one medium where they appear. This is important because it ties into a hypothesis I’ve been thinking about; Superintelligent AI must follow the same principles of social physics as all other social beings including humans, bees, and ants.
If this hypothesis is correct, we will be able to predict the behavior of AI in the future no matter how intelligent, which would be good to know if we want to keep ourselves safe from it.
