Elon turned Grok into Mecha-Hitler.

Trump is telling the Smithsonian museum to ignore slavery, or to cover slavery as a positive.

The domestic appetite for propaganda is huge. Prager U is American.

Let’s not center foreign countries when we have so much work to do at home.

I have seen some people talk like that, and it strikes me as a religion. There’s euphoria, zeal, hope. To them AGI is coming to usher in heaven on earth. Singularity is like rupture.

Sam Altman is one of the preachers of this religion.

How indeed. It’s probably a multi-factor phenomenon which requires an anthropological study for a serious answer. (Good luck trying to get the necessary access to study them.) My guess for one factor in this, is that they have more money than they know what to do with.

As an assist to an actual oncologist, only.

I can see AI as a tool in some contexts, doing some specific tasks better than an unassisted person.

But as a replacement for people, AI is a dud. I would rather be alone than have a gf AI. And yes I am taking trauma and personal+cultural baggage into account. LLM is also a product of our culture for the most part, so will have our baggage anyway. But at least in principle it could be trained to not have certain kinds of baggage, and still, I would rather deal with a person save for the simplest and lowest stake interactions.

If we want better people, we need to enfranchise them and remove most paywalls from the world. Right now the world instead of being inviting is bristling with physical, cultural, and virtual fences, saying to us, “you don’t belong and aren’t welcome in 99.99% of the space, and the other 0.01% will cost you.” Housing for now is only a privelege. In a world like that it’s a miracle the people are as decent as they are. If we want better people we have to delibarately, on purpose, choose broadbased human flourishing as a policy objective, and be ruthless to any enemies of said objective. No amnesty for the billionaires and wannabe billionaires. Instead they are trying to shove down our throats AI/LLMs and virtual worlds as replacements for an actually decent and inviting world.

A narrow purpose AI trained to recognize tumor growths early is the kind of AI that makes sense to me.

The “owners” of our world want us to be passengers, not drivers. They own the carusel, and we rent our rides.

They say we have no skin in the game. Truth is, SKIN is ALL we have in this game. We must have assets in the game as a birthright to make it worth playing in good faith. If most are landless and assetless, sorry, the game sucks. That means untill we get the rules that protect all of our interests, as opposed to protecting massive wealth accumulations at everyone’s expense, we will ignore the rules, the norms, decorum, civility, etc.

If the hoarders break the social contract repeatedly, like they have since 2008, it takes people some time to internalize and digest the fact of what it means for none of us to be bound by a social contract. Once people catch on, there will be hell to pay.

Of course the power dynamics cannot ever be eliminated (either by breeding or enculturation) from the interpersonal relationships.

Instead, power can be regulated and managed, to maximize distributed decisionmaking, and to protect those decisionmakers who could not or would not protect themselves.

In a free for all, feudalism will always result. The strong and the willing will rule over the weak and the unwilling.

There have to be limits to the power dynamics. Those limits will have to be enforced to protect the vulnerable, the gullible, and the unwilling (those who have the capability to exercise power, but refuse by choice), etc. This requires advanced democratic governance with a very strong government.

Doing away with the government is just a speedrun toward technofeudalism.

Working to create a protected space that selects for distributed decisionmaking is the actual project. That’s an actually sane, worthwhile and achievable goal.

When democratic governance withers what fills the power vacuum is feudalism.

Technofeudalism is feudalism with computers.

Ironically, to create a space that selects for and protects distributed decisionmaking (the desire of most sane anarchists), you need a strong government!