The world where everything is the same

ChatGPT is making language the same
Schools are making children the same
Cars look the same
Phones look the same
Buildings look the same
how social media looks the same -https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

history of Economies of Scale

I use ChatGPT to help me "polish" my writing. If you are a non-native English speaker who has struggled with English, you would know exactly what I am talking about. You might have a great idea in your head but it looks so bad on writing. Firstly, writing is hard. Even so, writing in a non-native language is even harder. This write-up is not about writing though. lately, I am developing this muscle reflex to running everything I write through chat GPT to ensure that there's no grammar mistake and everything is "polished". It becomes even more pertinent in academic writing.

Most academic writing I do is so collaborative to the point that it's hard to pinpoint who wrote what. I have written together in teams where team members take the liberty of editing other team member's writing to the point that it is totally different from the original. And I am not complaining (okay maybe I am). I think this level of collaborativeness and co-creating is fantastic. In one of the recent writing projects my collaborator was editing my writing. I have to give so much context to set the stage so please bear with me.

I was going through my collaborator's edits and kept stumbling upon phrases that looked too familiar. Way too familiar that I have seen them every time I have run my text through ChatGPT for editing, which is way too many times that the chat bots would have consumed a family's month worth of water just for editing my text. That's when it occurred to me that probably my collaborator is also draining a family's month worth of water through their chatbot usage for editing a text that I already edited using chatGPT and did some tinkering here and there to sound more "human".
One might argue that this is just the result of algorithmic tools taking over our digital spaces. That is true but it is just an extension of the industrial processes happening in our society that is also now manifesting in algorithms.

Ford's supply lines and the mass production of goods. When did this happen?
This combined with marketing.
Incentives of politicians
It is easier to get money from one party than multiple ones.
Corporations Vs the association of businesses. (Fisher's book)

Quality Vs Availability -What's the counterfactual?

Reduction - an inevitable process that comes with the economies of scale.

Finding facets that can be scaled.

As researchers, we try and distill things. Distilling certain things and amplifying them. But it is the factors around them that make it work. We try to create a map for supporting people to navigate. Map that is exactly Captures all the details is the terrain itself.

I try to do it in my cooking. Measure everything to precision. I tried doing it even for biriyani. for eggs, certain appliances make it easier to do. But do I get the joy out of the perfect egg or the process of getting the prefect egg.

Cory Doctorow - lack of interoperability leading to too much reliance on monopolies and the rise of monopolies. Peter Thiel's zero to one. Affordance to scale. Certain groups of people exploiting that - give a name to this group. Example of a traditional business becoming monopoly. Naomi Klein's brands (read on this)

Everything need not be the same. People are creative. We need structures. It's already happening and we need to encourage it more. Obsidian example. UPI example.

Will AGI come at the expense of humanity? There are efforts to consolidate intelligence. Concentration leads to in balance. OpenAI trying to consolidate intelligence.

We need plurality. We need competition. We need truly free markets where One party doesn't unjustly dominate others with just the sheer use of money.

Tech bros might take immense pride in creating algorithms that appears to influence the fabric of the society in very fundamental ways.
We all are just accessories to people who have mastered the craft of amassing wealth recklessly.

In one of the