Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean

In the novel ‘the three body problem’ , aliens send an ai to corrupt the scientific method so humanity will remain conquerable by the time they arrive. Today our own creation , LLMs and other AI agents, is accomplishing this. I can hardly believe what i read anymore. Two forces are tearing at us. First, the output of ‘science’ is ‘click bait -ified’ for financial survival and AI is amplifying this process. Second, layers of abstraction and commenting on these ‘facts’ further clouds the discussion and prevents actual progress.

I feel like the aliens are here and have subverted humanity already. When will the ‘rest of us’ wake up to act instead of just talk?

SPOILER:

It did actually.

Ah. Looks like I completely missed or forgot.. Wikipedia has this in Episode 5

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_Day_(3_Body_Problem...

> The avatar details how crippling Earth's scientific advancement will prevent humans from technologically surpassing them before they arrive

Not spoiling a 17 year old book isn't a reasonable expectation.

Especially since the series continually reaches for increasingly gimmicky "Ah ha, but no one expected ____" deus ex machina to keep its plot moving.

A story that is ruined by "spoiling" isn't worth watching anyways.

I share your worries about the state of science, but the broad strokes of global warming have already been worked out - the absence of action is not because of quibbling over subtle details, but because of the prisoner's dilemma nature of the problem, and because the oil lobby is politically well-connected.

Yes it is.

You should always preface with a spoiler tag when writing about about a piece of fiction

O_o That is insane.

We can quibble over a reasonable length of an embargo, but it's not infinite.

Snape killing Dumbledore or Leia being Luke's sister or Paul Atreides becoming God-Emperor shouldn't shock anyone.

Media is released. People consume media. At some point, everyone who is interested can reasonably be expected to have consumed it.

A lot of people haven’t seen or read any of these books.

Randomly revealing key plot points in a discussion is just a dick move.

It should be amazing to everyone that we've invented perpetual motion machines, and corporations are trying to suppress them for profit - exactly the same as certain conspiracy theorists predicted - and those conspiracy theorists are also trying to suppress the machines.

The only difference between current reality and the predictions of past conspiracy theorists is that the perpetual motion machines only work in direct sunlight.

LLMs offer us a chance to combat misinformation. A double-edged sword for sure, but they do offer hope in the post-truth of age where the amount of information you need to make an informed choice is more than you could possible discover, filter, ingest and internalize without assistance. They offer us a way to learn deeply about things with a customized learning style.

Gilgamesh doesn't find eternal life. Oops, should have had a spoiler tag.

You aren’t commenting on the state of “science”, you’re complaining about clickbait journalism and failing to recognize that the two are not the same. With that said, I have to agree that the current state of the world is indistinguishable from what you’d expect to see if a hostile AI had taken over in 2011 and was working behind the scenes to systematically extinguish human civilization.

We've been doing this for decades. LLMs may have automated it, but the plain human version was pretty cheap and plenty effective.

So we're not going to act. Actions are hard enough when everyone is in touch with reality. All potential solutions have trade-offs and everyone wants somebody else to pay the costs.

Add in a smallish but highly influential set who are convinced that the entire thing is a hoax, and progress maxes at zero. You'll be lucky if the problem doesn't accelerate. (Which is indeed what it seems to be doing.)

The part that is truly baffling to me: one of those corporations has a large perpetual-motion-machine division. And it doesn't seem to have the faintest interest in pushing to advance that.

It's not my problem if people don't stay current on media.

And if someone cares that much about consuming something that already exists in another form... maybe also be curious enough to consume it there?

I'm certainly not going to censor myself for people who are a decade+ late to the party and refuse to read a book.

What do you mean, ~problem~?

Nobody is asking you to censor yourself. I am simply asking you to preface a plot spoiler with something.

I get Forbidden Planet feelings since we invented social networks. It all started when the Krell invented Facebook.

OTOH, the present audience is uniquely well positioned to build the opposite of this, and, with the clever use of AI, automate massive campaigns for accurate information.