reality

You can now use AI to build impressive representation as if with legos, however, a Lego car is not the same as a real car. You get to feel like a car inventor while completely oblivious to the wide range of requirements and skills needed to build a car.

Representation has become so cheap, responsive, and convincing that we get a lever to receive the psychological feedback of acting on reality without ever touching reality.

The distance between intention and representation has been shortened, not so much the distance between representation and reality.

We’ve been trained for this by social media, which has been replacing real human connection with abstractions and symbols that compress things like approval, interaction, closeness, and give us levers to try and affect our access to those symbols. These levers are also removed from the actual thing, people follow trends specifically to get more views or likes, not because they have any relation with the shape of the trend. We depersonalize the experience and it becomes another lever.

This has wide and fundamental implications that can impact our relationship with reality. When you’re able to create the same psychological feedback as reality, you’re able to replace reality and the way people adapt to it.