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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
Hex@kolektiva.social ("hex") wrote:
A couple of billion years ago, cyanobacteria evolved the ability to photosynthesize. Suddenly they could turn the abundant atmospheric C02 into carbon for replicating themselves. The only side effect was the release of oxygen.
It was a monumental success, but it ended up turning Earth's C02 centered atmosphere into an Oxygen centered one, leading to what may have been the first great extinction event. Cyanobacteria still exist, but they are no longer the dominant life on Earth.
Some things that thrive in one environment also change that environment such that they destroy the resource they need to thrive. We're seeing this today with #LLMs They were only possible to create given massive amounts of clean human-generated content. As they dump their memetic effluent back into the data they feed from, they produce statistical distortions that degrade models trained on the same data. Like the cyanobacteria, they poison the air they breathe.
I encourage everyone to think in terms of systems, not simply components. Because, though this lens, it becomes obvious that some systems include within themselves the logic of their own collapse. And, like a Greek tragedy, it is often precisely a system's strength that leads to its collapse.