#massdelusion — Public Fediverse posts

#AI Is a #MassDelusion Event

Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.

"Who thought this was a good idea?"

By Charlie Warzel, August 18, 2025

Excerpt: "The interview triggered a feeling that has become exceedingly familiar over the past three years. It is the sinking feeling of a societal race toward a future that feels bloodless, hastily conceived, and shruggingly accepted. Are we really doing this? Who thought this was a good idea? In this sense, the Acosta interview is just a product of what feels like a collective delusion. This strange brew of shock, confusion, and ambivalence, I’ve realized, is the defining emotion of the generative-AI era. Three years into the hype, it seems that one of AI’s enduring cultural impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it."

Read more:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/ai-mass-delusion-event/683909/

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/KBAez

#ThePlan #BattlestarGalactica #AreYouAlive #AISucks #TechBros #TechAddiction #Chatbots

"What if generative AI isn’t God in the machine or vaporware? What if it’s just good enough, useful to many without being revolutionary? Right now, the models don’t think—they predict and arrange tokens of language to provide plausible responses to queries. There is little compelling evidence that they will evolve without some kind of quantum research leap. What if they never stop hallucinating and never develop the kind of creative ingenuity that powers actual human intelligence?

The models being good enough doesn’t mean that the industry collapses overnight or that the technology is useless (though it could). The technology may still do an excellent job of making our educational system irrelevant, leaving a generation reliant on getting answers from a chatbot instead of thinking for themselves, without the promised advantage of a sentient bot that invents cancer cures.

Good enough has been keeping me up at night. Because good enough would likely mean that not enough people recognize what’s really being built—and what’s being sacrificed—until it’s too late. What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet, reorient our economy and leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics and culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises? What if we spend so much time waiting and arguing that we fail to marshal our energy toward addressing the problems that exist here and now? That would be a tragedy—the product of a mass delusion. What scares me the most about this scenario is that it’s the only one that doesn’t sound all that insane."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/ai-mass-delusion-event/683909/

#AI #GenerativeAI #MassDelusion #AGI #AIHype #AIBubble #OpenAI

*Nice bloody-shirt article about AI driving literally everybody nuts here. #massdelusion

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/ai-mass-delusion-event/683909/

Malaysian tech insanity:
- Nothing exists other than Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe CS costs expensive annual fees
- Everyone runs pirated software

This is how I'm constantly ridiculed, discriminated, and yes, lost jobs, for refusing #piracy in #Malaysia

This is the country that now takes pride in being the dumping ground for the world's cheap data centers.

#techtyranny #massdelusion #DunningKruger #knowledgecrisis

Hydroclimatic whiplash events and hypernormalisation

The Nasa report: “...is a stark reminder that a hotter planet means more severe floods and droughts. This has long been predicted, but is now being seen in reality."
>>
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/17/nasa-data-reveals-dramatic-rise-in-intensity-of-weather-events

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
#FossilFuels #HydroclimaticWhiplash #floods #drought #ExtremeHeat #climate #MassDelusion #reality #RealityDenial #hypernormalisation

#MassDelusion

The one belief that predicted Trump voters with scary accuracy https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/the-one-belief-that-predicted-trump-voters-with-scary-accuracy/

#ResistFascism #SupportPeopleInPain #NaziTrump #GOPWeirdos #RacistGOP #DonaldTrump #Project2025 #NoRepublicansEverAgain #VoteBlueUpAndDown #USPol

The cover of the July-August issue of Christianity Today.
. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2024/july-august/

#Trump #Republicans #FauxReligion #MassDelusion #authoritarianism #strongman
/12

Charles Marsh in his book Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (NY: Knopf, 2014), p. 176, on the situation in Germany in June 1933 as Hitler consolidated his power.

#Trump #Republicans #FauxReligion #MassDelusion #authoritarianism #strongman
/11

"A big chunk of the public actually wants an authoritarian leader. This is true worldwide, according to research, and no less so in what many Americans like to describe as the world’s greatest democracy."

~ Susan Milligan

#Trump #Republicans #FauxReligion #MassDelusion #authoritarianism #strongman
/10

https://newrepublic.com/article/183866/americans-want-authoritarian-president-trump

"Republican candidates and activists often try to sell synthetic blends of faith and politics. It’s a move that makes the political cause seem greater and more consequential—that its significance is eternal, not temporal. The assassination attempt against Trump sent this tendency into hyperdrive."

#Trump #Republicans #FauxReligion #MassDelusion #authoritarianism #strongman
/9

"Since arriving in Milwaukee, I’ve heard convention attendees and speakers articulate a position that many Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians have held since early 2016: Trump was sent by God to carry out his will."

~ Joe Perticone

#Trump #Republicans #FauxReligion #MassDelusion #authoritarianism #strongman
/8

Like everything that Trump touches, the tone of all of this had an unreality to it that can only be described as camp, further proof of something we already know; that there is no event grievous enough to flip these clowns into serious political people, fit for stewarding the most powerful country on Earth.

~ Emma Brockes

#Trump #Republicans #FauxReligion #MassDelusion #authoritarianism #strongman
/6

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/18/near-death-experience-donald-trump-occupying-the-moral-high-ground

"After the shooting, there was no mention of a platform. There was no reference to the political party. Trump had not simply survived crucifixion. He was not only resurrected. He became his own second coming. He was washed in his own blood. Divine intervention proved he was destined to return. All that is required from followers are declarations of faith."

#Trump #Republicans #FauxReligion #MassDelusion #authoritarianism #strongman
/6

"The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has transformed the theology of Trump. He has long portrayed himself as an innocent lamb falsely accused, the target of slings and arrows to bear the suffering of believers. Now the bullet and the blood of Butler, Pennsylvania, have sanctified him for the faithful and brought forth a new gospel."

~ Sidney Blumenthal

#Trump #Republicans #FauxReligion #MassDelusion #authoritarianism #strongman
/5

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/18/to-his-supporters-trump-is-a-martyred-messiah-resurrected-after-crucifixion

@faab64

I agree! It's truly sad and upsetting.

Religion is #MassDelusion that harms us all, and for some it brings death, grief and destruction.

#AntiTheism

#AntiReligion

#NoGodsNoMasters

I miss the people who once were
in a world that once was.

#Covid #Pandemic #MassDelusion