The reality, risks, & consequences of scaling consumer-entertainment technologies to a global population with little cognitive security. [mirrored from Substack]

Western, American culture will be in frontier language models’ training data.
Most other cultures will not.
If nobody steps in, ~90% of mankind's culture could die quite soon.

Globally, indigenous cultures face an unprecedented threat to their traditional heritage.

The Marubo, a 2,000-member tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, recently made headlines: they received Starlink in September 2023. Within 9 months, their youth stopped learning traditional body paint and jewelry making, young men began sharing pornographic videos in group chats (in a culture that frowns on public kissing), leaders observed "more aggressive sexual behavior," and children became addicted to short-form video content. One leader reported: "Everyone is so connected that sometimes they don't even talk to their own family."

Marubo people carrying a Starlink antenna stopped for a break to eat papaya.

Cultural diversity is already experiencing a mass extinction at rates comparable to our biological, Holocene extinction ֊֊ up to 10,000 times the natural background rate. Yet unlike species loss, which triggers conservation efforts, cultural extinction largely remains unnoticed.

Approximately 50% of the world's population was not online 10 years ago. In 2010, only 30% of the global population used the internet, while by 2020, that number had doubled to 60%.

The mechanism is straightforward: providing internet access to previously offline populations overwhelms users with enticing, addicting, and viral stimuli. The entertainment is far greater than anything indigenous, pre-digital lifestyles can offer.

This cultural erosion has profound implications beyond the communities themselves: the internet that's replacing indigenous knowledge systems is also feeding the artificial intelligence that will shape humanity's future. Large language models learn from text scraped across the web ֊֊֊ and if a culture doesn't exist online, it effectively doesn't exist to AI. Every traditional practice abandoned for TikTok, every oral tradition left unrecorded, every indigenous language that goes unwritten represents not just a loss to those communities, but a permanent gap in the knowledge systems that will guide our AI-mediated world. The internet homogenize...

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