I agree with all of this, except 4 years is a lot of time lately and the empirical record from here to 2015 (in 2015 I don’t think there was much capabilities at all aside from bots drowning out voices and things like clown attacks, Yann Lecun wrote a great post on how these systems are hard to engineer in practice) suggests that the rate will continue without big increases in investment, especially since compute production alone can generates a large portion of that OOM every 4 years, and a fixed proportion of compute will be going into psych research, and there’s also stuff like edge computing/5G.
I don’t have good models on the Arab Spring other than that authoritarian states face pretty strong incentives to blame all kinds of domestic problems on foreign influence ops from the West. It’s a pretty bad equilibria since influence ops actually do come out of the West.
I agree with all of this, except 4 years is a lot of time lately and the empirical record from here to 2015 (in 2015 I don’t think there was much capabilities at all aside from bots drowning out voices and things like clown attacks, Yann Lecun wrote a great post on how these systems are hard to engineer in practice) suggests that the rate will continue without big increases in investment, especially since compute production alone can generates a large portion of that OOM every 4 years, and a fixed proportion of compute will be going into psych research, and there’s also stuff like edge computing/5G.
I don’t have good models on the Arab Spring other than that authoritarian states face pretty strong incentives to blame all kinds of domestic problems on foreign influence ops from the West. It’s a pretty bad equilibria since influence ops actually do come out of the West.