The Midas Plague is a 1954 novella by Frederik Pohl that imagines a world of plenty, in fact, a world where abundance has become a problem. There is rationing – but rations are the minimum that you can consume. Those with low status (the “poor”) have to consume more than those with high status. The story’s protagonist finds himself married to a higher class women not used to consuming all this stuff. The inversion of war rationing and the satire of the emerging consumer society of the 1950s is obvious and Pohl himself was a former member of the Young Communist League. Unfortunately form matches content, and the narrative itself is overstretched and voluminous (it could afford to lose 80% of its weight).
In some ways, the Midas Plague came true – obesity rose from 10% of the US population to closer to one third. A mark of wealth has become to option of opting out of consumption. To be rich is to be thin and toned and to consume inconspicuously.
We now on the verge of a Midas Plague of information and content. The internet revolutionized the volume of information that is available to us. This has, however, not necessarily made us more informed. The ease with which marketing messages can be sent to us does not make those messages any better and it makes each individual message less impactful. The profusion of ads has led to ad-blocking software. The same is true of CV-based job applications – so easy to create and send that recruiters now use CV scanning software.
All of this is getting supercharged by generative AI. Huge volumes of human-seeming content can now be created at a single sentence prompt. Marketing brochures, CVs, social media posts, academic research papers. You need never read anything by a human being again.
How to respond? In The Midas Plague, our protagonist ends up using robots to consume the goods that mass production now presses upon him. Generative AI content creators will require AI content consumers. The ad blockers, CV scanners, and essay plagiarism software will need to evolve. Which in turn will drive the content generators to evade detection. Which in turn… The result is an escalating attention arms race. Where will it all end? Doubtless in the Recycling Bin Folder, with everything else.
Another response will be humans gradually disconnecting from this hypercontentified world. If it’s all content, all the time, then what a blessed relief to be free of it. And people may end up paying for this privilege. Online publications and communities already offer paid-for subscriptions that allow you to consume and interact ad-free. Why not expand that to all ChatGPT content? Pay to not play. Again, very Midas Plague.
The Midas Plague of Content that the creators of generative AI have unleashed on the world will stress test our communication systems, our content filters, our very sanity. Some of these systems will break under the stress. I think that the academic publish or perish system is already at breaking point and will buckle under the intense strain. In doing so, it may force the academic community to revisit their incentive structures – are more papers really better for individuals, institutions, or society at large? Programmatic advertising and job application processes are similarly unstable. If they cannot be reformed then they will be broken. Generative AI will transform our information and attention economies as much as the coming of HTML. Strap in.
BTW I kinda had to prompt ChatGPT to see what it could come up with. I’ll leave it to you as to decide who you prefer to read*.
Prompt: How is does the Midas plague relate to chatgpt
Reply: The Midas Plague is a science fiction short story written by Frederik Pohl in 1954, while ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model created by OpenAI. There is no direct relationship between the Midas Plague and ChatGPT, as they are two completely different entities.
However, both the Midas Plague and ChatGPT involve the concept of technology and its impact on society. In the Midas Plague, technology has advanced to the point where it has become a burden on humanity, as people are required to consume more and more in order to keep up with the demands of the automated economy. In the case of ChatGPT, it represents the latest breakthrough in natural language processing, and its development raises important questions about the future of artificial intelligence and its role in society.
Overall, while there may not be a direct relationship between the Midas Plague and ChatGPT, both works raise important questions about the impact of technology on human society, and offer insights into how we might navigate the challenges of technological progress in the future.
*I was hoping it would win with a straight knock out but I feel like it fumbled this one.
Thankfully ChatGPT is (as yet) no match for your own insightful analysis Matt. Thanks for this, it's the first time of heard of The Midas Plague, fascinating concept.