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  • Hacker News
  • “Cyclopes branches at the neck into several squabbling bodies that give the impression they don’t get along, but … they clearly do”

    Such a great visual metaphor.

  • Brilliant piece by Booker Prize winning author, Arundhati Roy. She manages to lay bare the entire global politics of AI, starting with the seemingly inconsequentual em-dash.
  • > quit his job, saying that his conscience would not allow him to work on a project that could potentially annihilate the human race.

    > No apologies were offered, because no one did it. Machine-planned murders come guilt-free.

    > needs to strip-mine and stockpile everything that human civilisation has ever achieved.

    > humanity may have to die

    Hit the nail on the head. It's like knowingly walking into the gas chamber, as if oblivious or uncaring of what was planned and what's about to come next.

  • It's weird reading articles like this where every paragraph contains a reference to some surface level news soundbite entirely devoid of analysis and context. Maybe I should have heeded the warning at the start and assumed this was a generated article. It's like being subjected to a sports highlights reel of the author's algorithmic feed. The only conclusion I can draw is that they're suffering from Gell-Mann Alzheimer's
  • AI would have gotten to the point more quickly.
  • This is THE great filter that all carbon-based civilizations need to go through. And that's probably why we don't see a lot, if any, aliens out there.

    I suddenly have a Lovecraftian orgasm.

  • How do you write an entire article about on this subject without mentioning Nick Land? Especially the Hyperstition[0]:

    >One of the CCRU's predominant ideas is hyperstition, which Nick Land referred to as "the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies" where, by means of esoteric cybernetic principles, certain ideas and beliefs that are initially incomprehensible (akin to superstitions) can covertly circulate through reality and establish cultural feedback loops that then drastically meld society, which they also referred to in total as "cultural production".[1]

    I also very much enjoyed this podcast, which argues that the current global economic system is already a misaligned superintelligence, and that AI will simply accelerate and amplify the existing issues.[2]

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperstition

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Un...

    [2] Moloch, AI & Capitalism: The System Eating Itself | Daniel Schmachtenberger & Liv Boeree

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc

  • > the Age of AI – Actual Idiocy, Actual Super Idiocy, Recursive Snowballing-Idiocy – is upon us.

    At the risk of sounding derivative: She's absolutely right.

    After being drowned ad nauseam in a deluge of refuse and bullshit day after day for years now, it is so good to read the writing of a true master once in a while. Not to mention: The truth. For a change.

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