You are absolutely right. The algorithm went from feeding on outrage to just pure rage.
Discussion
I think the grand irony of the entire enterprise of Musk's is that he has become the mind virus. He's not actually the one fighting it. Sad way to bookend one of the greatest entrepreneurial careers in human history.
I think about this meme all the time 
This all feels like a weird experiment. And it is very sad to witness the unraveling.
I hope the unraveling means the damage is self-limiting.
Time will tell the true cost.
My biggest worry is not even about AI or fiat or war or whatever. It's really an abstract worry about the human predilection for simple, concise, models and rules to explain and govern the world. When what we've done is built a society of such complexity, that there's no stable set of parameters within the limits of human cognition that is stable.
Some libertarians and anarchists think that formulation is the non-aggression principle, self-ownership and homesteading. Some progressives think it's about taxing the rich and deconstructing all aspects of culture and society. Religious conservatives think it's a set of divine rules.
I happen to think they're all wrong, and for similar epistemic reasons, setting aside the very fun metaphysical assumptions creating the various axiomatic groundings for this normative systems of mediating social conflict.
These are not my words but I agree with them:
The civilization-level issue I'm most concerned with is the ongoing, slow motion collapse of our collective sensemaking capabilities. Our biggest and most costly coordination failures are downstream of this problem.
That's right. I think the insistence by many ideologues that there's a very simple way out, and if the world just adopted that thing, all of these problems would fade away, as vestiges of a tired, corrupt system, where an elite manufacturer these problems that otherwise wouldn't exist.
Sometimes things like that are true. They're certainly true in many respects with regards to human rights and flourishing in autocratic regimes. They're also true to a lesser extent with examples of political-economic capture in liberal democracies. But this is all besides the point.
Whenever people think about "the system" as an obstacle, the important implication is that system is a obstacle to a thing. What is that thing? Often, the assumption is that thing is a state of nature of organic human flourishing that would happen absent these imposed constraints. But that's a implicit statement about the shape of the state of nature that has no empirical grounding whatsoever. Which I think, generally makes it fair to characterize such belief systems as utopian and/or fanatical.
You’re a very good writer and clearly a skilled conceptual thinker.
I agree completely. I particularly like your description of the imagined utopia of “organic human flourishing.” As you say, that’s debatable.
Don't give me too much credit. I'm cribbing heavily from Hobbes and Locke right now.
Interesting worry.
Thinking about the end of antibiotics working and emergence of super bugs usually keeps me up at night.
I believe many of the societal issues we are facing are technology based. Technology is outpacing human evolution, and our brain’s capacity to interpret the changing world around us. Ideologies and information are colliding. The old way vs. the new way. Who’s right vs who’s wrong. People are being forced to join a side as all around us the tears in the tapestry of the illusion we agreed on as a shared version of reality are starting to show.
Yeah, almost all of our problems to some extent are problems of our collective making. There's certain things we cannot be said to hold collective accountability for as species. We don't control the weather. We don't control the movement of plate tectonics. We cannot control whether some celestial event such as a massive asteroid impacts renders the planet uninhabitable -- although our technological capacity for planetary defense is advancing.
But everything we create introduces problems. Even the simple invention of software. It created the problem of programming errors -- which today could have civilization-scale consequences and has made cybersecurity such an important problem.
I could be wrong of course, but I'm not sure we could have had an alternate history where we reached the levels of prosperity we have, and avoided the emergence of system-dependent problems, and the compounding of systemic risks that propagate through the interplay of these systems.
I think there's reason to believe that this universal reality can be found in the second law of thermodynamics itself.
And it may, among other things, be the resolution to the Fermi Paradox. Which would be a scary thought.
What do you mean by “it?”
The metastability envelope being limited in civilizational systems at a critical complexity threshold -- where corrective mechanisms for coordination cannot cope, leading to the self-destruction of all technological civilizations. This is referred to as the "Great Filter" resolution to the Fermi Paradox.
Correct. We’ll be outsourcing our thinking and decision making to AI or augmenting ourselves for cognitive upgrades. This is Musk’s worry.
Yes I know. I recognized it. It’s a skill to put it in your own words. And it’s a skill to apply it to 2023.
As long as people who can't call a man a man and a woman a woman are allowed to be in charge, we're going to go nowhere good.
I think the other things potentially extinguish humanity faster but what you’ve articulated is right in there at the top of the list.
If we can’t recognize, as a species, that our simplistic models don’t have sufficient explanatory and predictive power and that we must grapple with complexity then we’ll just continue tearing each other apart. We’ll continue to tribe up and battle it out.