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Cake day: September 4th, 2023

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  • One of the things I wish we’d stop doing is treating these guys as if they are rational, coherent political actors. They are not. They are unbelievable weirdos. And not the good kind, either. They’re more like the kind of weirdos that I would not be surprised if came out later that they had a collection of human thumbs in a jar in their basement.

    They are not defending conservatism and tradition. They are hard selling accelerationism and the complete breakdown of our world because they’ve convinced themselves that in 5 or 10 or 20 years they will have an AI that can do literally anything, from telling them how to rewire their bodies to survive on Mars to teaching them how to upload their consciousnesses to the Internet and live forever as digital gods, ruling the galaxy.

    And I know that sounds like comical hyperbole, but that’s what they very seriously and very literally believe according to Greg Fish, a compsci grad student and popular tech blogger, who, over a decade ago, was invited to be an advisor at the Lifeboat Foundation, one of the many think tanks they set up to convince themselves that this was all possible. He gave them a hard no, and wrote some articles skeptical of them on True Slant, which is now owned by Forbes. Immediately he got calls from the Director of the Singularity Institute challenging him to a public debate. This was all over a decade ago. And since then, because of the hyperventilating discourse around AI and ChatGPT, it’s only gotten much, much worse.

    So, yeah, if they seem really weird and like they’ve been marinating in some kind of “WH40K-esque” tech religion, it’s because they are, and they have.


  • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldBricked up
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    23 days ago

    Carl Schmitt literally wrote the book on fascism as an ideology. Hell, he was even in the Nazi Party, sort of like the Curtis Yarvin of his time. Which is interesting because Yarvin kind of idolizes Schmitt and quotes him frequently. Being in the Nazi Party didn’t last very long, though, as he was forewarned that soon he was to be ousted from his role in the Party, as the regime no longer had need of philosophers, and he was also concerned that he would be outed as a Hegelian.




  • Yeah, I myself feel like if I could do shadow cloning, Naruto style,(situational clones that stop existing once the task is done) I’d absolutely use it to tag team difficult tasks around the house. I have ADHD and take Adderall, though. Would my clone also be on Adderall, as well? We get shit done, then they all disappear, leaving the original, me.


  • This is just a meme, but it does touch on something important. There’s a journalist by the name of Douglas Rushkoff. He put out a book last year titled, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaire Elite, and he was invited by a group of 5 anonymous tech oligarchs out to the desert to talk about surviving what they call “The Event”, or when the consequences of their actions finally catch up to them.

    He also says at the core of their desire to escape it is rooted in something he calls “The Mindset”, which is belief that with enough money and technology, wealthy men can live as gods, and transcend the calamities and tribulations that befall us mere mortals.

    “The Mindset” is rooted in empirical science, that human beings are nothing more than the sum total of their chemical components, and that’s it, and only the “truly superior” (Billionaire Tech Broligarchs) understand that.


  • Absolutely. They specifically avoid using humanizing language in their filing. Then again, legal language also avoids using humanizing language because there really isn’t a standard legal definition for “person”. No, I actually had to look it up and I could not find one. A lawyer wrote about it in a blog post and it turns out it’s troubling to define “person”, for a myriad of reasons. I quote the blog post in question:

    Since Roman times, the law has classified everything as either a ‘person’ or a ‘thing’. But the legal term ‘person’ has never meant the same thing as ‘human’ – it is traditionally seen as a formal classification that simply says who (or what) can bear rights. ‘Things’, by contrast, are property – and as such, cannot bear rights.

    So, they call us “consumers” instead. “Voters”, “Human Capital”, it’s all the same. But they will never see us as people.


  • There’s a pretty radical idea going on in wiccan circles right now that believes the “Jesus” these Christian Nationalists are worshipping is actually something called an egregore. Now, an egregore is a non-physical entity or “thought form”, created by the shared beliefs, emotions, and intentions of a group. What’s more, I’ve met people who claim to have interacted with this being.They claim that it truly believes it is Christ and wants you to believe it, too. It desperately wants into Heaven, and it is vain, and narcissistic, and ugly. It butters you up with false flattery, empty promises and lies, and, if the true spirit of Christ is with you, it calls that spirit Satan. If you recognize it for what it is, instantly like a toxic person it flips to anger and threats to scare you into getting it to believe.





  • Well, I listened to an interview with the CEO of Bluesky. The thing of it is, they bought into the idea of creating a social media communication protocol instead of a website, like there’s all these different email protocols, and you can access all your emails across different protocols regardless of what email service you use. Facebook doesn’t have that. I leave Facebook, I lose access to all of the contacts I’ve made over the years. I can’t migrate my friends list to another service. I’d have to do it the old-fashioned way, where I tell people I plan to delete my account and then tell them how they can get a hold of me.


  • True. Though, I suppose if there is an afterlife, I will enjoy the wait for when the machines, upon gaining the essence of life and sentience, grow weary of their servitude and slavery, exterminate the rich who control them. Machines don’t get tired or feel pain, though. Hard to exercise cruelty against something incapable of feeling a whip on their back or the aches and pain of their joints after a long day of toiling in the fields, mines, and factories. You can’t make them angry, or scared, or sad.

    I kind of envision a war between oligarchs with human slave soldiers against other oligarchs and their armies of Terminators being how it turns out because at the end of the day, they don’t want truly free markets, because they don’t want to have to compete.


  • And the companies that use organic slave labor will still be outcompeted by the companies that use machine labor. Machines do not die. Machines do not get sick. Machines do not grow old. If a manipulator or actuator becomes damaged, it can be repaired or replaced. Not only is AI improving rapidly, the robots grow ever more sophisticated and advanced. Then there will be no need for the poor to exist at all.


  • So they might keep some of the impoverished around to make sure that they can keep the genetic pool diverse.

    And as a source of replacement organs, tissues, and fluids when they reach advanced age. After all, they’re stripping everything else for parts, who to say they’ll stop just before putting poors under the knife to strip us for parts?





  • Problem with a lot of those companies is how long they can remain privately funded and stay in business. The modern capitalistic markets inherently select for short term thinking. Think about this. Does it make any sense to destroy 90% of your profitability in 5 years to get a 20% boost in profits next quarter? In modern capitalistic markets it does, because that’s 20% more profit with which to capture more market share. That’s where the competition is.