A few years ago YouTube (of course others joined in and followed but I think YouTube was a leading force here) established the term “content”. It was no longer about the actual qualities of the medium, not about videos or music or stories or essays etc. Everything one made was just content.

So I kept thinking about why that is. Like: Are these people just willing or clueless PR people for whatever capital wants to push on people (usually through their employers or sometimes even governments)?

People who effortlessly shift from “web3 is the future” to “I will explain to you why ‘AI’ will replace you”, people who get fame by talking about self driving cars and jump to superconductors the next week depending on whatever is sticky in the news.

The Grift Shift is a new paradigm of debating technologies within a society that is based a lot less on the actual realistic use cases or properties of a certain technology but a surface level fascination with technologies but even more their narratives of future deliverance. Within the Grift Shift paradigm the topics and technologies addressed are mere material for public personalities to continuously claim expertise and “thought leadership” in every cycle of the shift regardless of what specific technologies are being talked about.

Newbies are welcome 👋

What’s next? What about Python? Pandas? dbt? Rust? Airflow? Spark?

if code is law

Focusing strictly on transhumanism as the only moral path forward is an awfully anthropocentric view of intelligence; in the future, we will likely look back upon such views in a similar way to how we look back at geocentrism

This is a byproduct of Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection, which states that the rate of change of average fitness in a population (of any collection of organisms) is proportional to the variance in fitness. As such, maintaining variance is key to maintaining adaptability

Life emerged from an out-of-equilibrium thermodynamic process known as dissipative adaptation

Maeve against that, she can’t let her daughter go. She had the ‘choice’ to choose for the world hereafter or to save her daughter. She chose her robot daughter. This meant death to her.

It can be difficult when you realize how much misery and evil there is in the world. At times it seems there is little light on the horizon. But the story doesn’t stop here. The realization is just the beginning.

Bernard seems to address this issue, he says that the journey itself can spiral downwards, lead one back to the beginning, or even to a complete mental breakdown. Self-realization is scary, the mind has many tricks to bring one back to the start, breaking down your own existence is a deep thing one can face. When realizing that the center of the maze, the conclusion, the answer, is present in the man that is searching is terrifying. Facing this truth is requires looking not outward but inward. The Man in Black, Maeve, and Dolors become dangerous. They go around killing people for the sake of getting out of their loops and trying to understand the Maze. It because delusionary to the point William kills his daughter.“Time to write my own fucking story” (Maeve, episode 8).

Real world is just chaos. It’s an accident. But in here, every detail adds up to something.

He becomes self-aware and enters an unending quest of trying to figure out the end game of West World.

“Each choice could bring you closer to the center [ie: consciousness] or send you spiraling towards the edge [ie: further from consciousness, and even towards complete mental breakdown]

Dores pricks through that and wonders “why people come to her world when in the real world everything is so much better.” William comes to an understanding and sees that he cannot answer this. This realization leads to a long search.

Maeve found the center of her maze on her own. Yes, Ford did engineer her actions, but twice (both relating to her daughter) we saw that it wasn't the insurrection against the makers that drove Maeve to self-awareness, it was a search for her daughter and to revive that connection.

she must leave sweet Dolores Abernathy behind to become her real self.

As hard as it would be to translate any insights from this into actionable results, I can imagine textual analysis of ad copy into separate categories in order to identify opportunities for parasitism, or comparing lexical choices of various people in one’s twitter feed as a barometer of egregoro-dynamics.

So it’s far simpler to take egregores as the main unit, and tulpas as just a shorthand for anthropomorphic egregores, more intense because we encounter them more often.

egregores. Egregores don’t necessarily map onto humans. Rather than a hard-and-fast distinction, it’s more helpful to think of tulpas as a subtype of egregores, perhaps of the highest intensity. This is because egregores leech off of our tulpas. They are artificial entities that feel real (like actual beings), precisely because they’re parasitic. So brands, for instance, are egregores. An organization (workplace) or symbol (flag) or abstract idea can be egregoric. Fictional characters seem like tulpas insofar as they’re ‘people’, but they’re also egregores in that they’re not ‘real’.

This gives 3! = 3*2*1 = 6 combinations, so paired with the enneagram it’s 6*18 = 108. That’s a reasonable degree of fidelity, with 42 tulpas left over for Deleuze and my mum or whatever.

Enneagram

(like diplomats) are professional networkers, forced into elaborate mnemotechnic encodings.

I’m sure there’s a whole subliminal network of irrational behaviour that tulpas account for.

Tulpas give a finer view of this divide, where extroverts enjoy shuffling their internal social representations, while introverts focus more on high-fidelity.

A tulpa is an internal representation of another person.

I’d like to take what I’ve learned in the first half of my life to complex systems, and apply them in the real world.

summoners

how I get things done that I want to do and why I choose to do the things that I do.

There’s two ways out. He hits rock bottom and climbs out, or he's buried alive in what looks like a multi decade suicide, assisted by the collapsing psychosocial landscape.

Every 10 minutes on his game boy is another shovel of dirt he throws out of the deep hole he lives in.

I can hear him hootin and hollerin on his game boy. He’s talking to a wall.

Humans who suffer, are also motivated to survive. Without suffering, you don’t get organisms. You can’t have progress, you can’t have any form of functionality, without suffering. That is to say any form of negative feedback.

The most likely scenario, A.I. dramatically consolidates power.

Treating children like human pets and a partner like a concubine. The criteria for a partner used to be, value-aligned, willing to work with.

You’ll be able to simulate Andrew Tates lifestyle in a VR environment.

If just five families, from each low birth rate culture, that is endangered, is able to build an intergenerationally durable culture, it will survive. We don’t need everyone to have kids. We need a few people to figure out. There will be a big choke point. A lot of people aren’t going to make it through. That’s OK. The future is going to be bright.

You don’t notice… the population does not begin to rapidly drop until after it cannot be fixed.

We think too much and feel too little.

remaining mothers

The meme that hormone therapy to eliminate 6 fertile days per month is a good idea.

Will you be an old person in a ghost town, dependent on robots for food?

An Earth with 1 billion people could be fine, but the transition phase from 9 billion humans to 1 billion humans is a hardcore culling. Earth with 1 billion humans is a global graveyard of towns, cities, countries and cultures.

The kingdom of God is in man. Phones crowd it out. A phone is a sterilizing meme package. Thousands of cultures are amusing themselves to zero.

Cell-phone addicted, birth-control cultures are on their deathbed. They don’t know it because they’re too busy watching 5 second videos.

A godless, tech-ridden, over-educated culture fails to procreate. Rocks are secular. Secular cultures do not endure the test of time. Find me one.

Hungary spent a good chunk of its GDP trying to raise the birth rate and it failed. The promise of a third child’s baptism by a famous holy man is more effective than paying people cash for kids. '

Natural selection weeds out the weak and the cowards - the ones who can’t get off contraceptives, the people who fail to live a fertile lifestyle. Cultures who fall prey to global secular techism die in adult diapers.

Birth control is a vice.

Procreation trends inversely with wealth and education, and correlates with religion.

We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

Davos, SwitzerlandFebruary 8, 1996 Back to top

Mind in Cyberspace

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

memeplex

The term meme was defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene as "a unit of cultural transmission".

n our tulpa theory of mind, each tulpa is such an agent.

Minsky

a collection of autonomous agents

occult terms to refer to real psychological and sociological phenomena.

Scott Alexander's

Tulpas

Complexity science is a field which aims to understand systems composed of many interacting parts.

The cozy web works on "(human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams", hopefully one day evolving "from cut-and-paste to a personal blockchain of context-permissioned, addressable, searchable, interlinked clips" as Venkat puts it.

This is why we see such vast oscillations of hiring and firing - because these companies are never, ever punished for failing to operate their businesses in a sustainable way, or even with a view for the future, particularly when it comes to macroeconomic trends that literally everyone else saw coming.

“Google Search, what many consider an indispensable tool of modern life, is dead or dying.”

that user-created links should be bidirectional.

which in 2007 evolved into a web app named “nStudy”. This software provided integrated tools to support and study self-regulated learning: a web browser, a note-taking tool, a word processor, an editable glossary tool, a tagging tool, a concept mapping tool, a chat tool, an index, along with logging, analysis, and other facilities.

Switching contexts, even to search for information, interferes with flow while consuming precious mental capacity, brain energy and time.

Connected knowledge enables people to create great products, solve important problems and improve themselves.

We recognize that an immense amount of useful information is available digitally, and that tremendous value can be gained by connecting this information.

“There is very little left to conserve, but that in turn means there’s everything to build.”

Marriage should be viewed not as romantic fulfillment, demanding emotional intensity with minimum commitment and the continual option of exit, but “an enabling condition for building a meaningful life,” with very limited options for exit.

“Trying to squeeze a few more drops of freedom from the rotting carcass of the industrial era is not going to help us abolish human nature.” (Sometimes, reading this book, one wishes for a conversation between Harrington and Ted Kaczynski.)

“majority-female mid-tier knowledge class.”

she links the destruction of men-only spaces to deaths of despair.

The iron core of this book is sex role realism.

they just get used and then thrown away, while they pursue hypergamy and end up with nothing.

we get transactions as an ideal, with self-actualization as the goal of the transaction.

— the treatment of women as “Meat Lego,” to be manipulated by the demands of “bio-libertarianism” in the service of ever-more atomization.

but commodification and the intrusion of market imperatives into every nook and cranny of how men and women interacted.

The 1950s “tradwife” is merely a descendant, and just as artificial.

What ultimately destroyed this “new normal” of romantic marriage was chemical birth control.

systematic oppression only arose with industrialization

Contrary to the myth we are fed today, most early feminists fought this reduction of women’s status, not some imaginary patriarchy.

This was not only a result of technology, however, but also of the ideology that grew like cancer during the Industrial Revolution, the so-called Enlightenment, which among other atomizing demands exalted autonomy-granting measurable economically-productive work

The Industrial Revolution, the first widespread application of technology, destroyed this partnership by exalting the market as the talisman of every man and woman’s worth.

“Progress Theology,” the idea that mankind is progressing, through the adoption of principles of emancipation and egalitarianism, to an Omega Point of perfection.

Harrington therefore demands “reactionary feminism,” meaning truly reactionary, reversing the errors introduced in the 1800s. It is not the 1950s we need back, but the 1700s.

Her baby’s breath blew away the final mental cobwebs of feminist fantasy.

Judith Butler’s enormously influential (among the powerful) and enormously corrosive (among all of us) claim, first broadcast in 1990, that both sex and gender are social constructs,

“the equal right to self-realization.”

In pursuit of this goal, reality must and will be bent to our desires.

disordered youth aiming to atomize unchosen bonds

even in this age of liquid modernity

Harrington shows how so-called feminism destroys women, body and soul. Unhinged worship of unfettered autonomy

We are not doing the effective thing with our lives, we are drifting, we are being hoodwinked and bamboozled and misled by those who trade upon the old traditions.

And meanwhile war, which was once a comparative slow bickering upon a front, has become war in three dimensions; it gets at the "non-combatant" almost as searchingly as at the combatant, and has acquired weapons of a stupendous cruelty and destructiveness. At present there exists no solution to this paradoxical situation. We are continually being urged by our training and traditions to antagonisms and conflicts that will impoverish, starve, and destroy both our antagonists and ourselves. We are all trained to distrust and hate foreigners, salute our flag, stiffen up in a wooden obedient way at our national anthem, and prepare to follow the little fellows in spurs and feathers who pose as the heads of our states into the most horrible common destruction. Our political and economic ideas of living are out of date, and we find great difficulty in adjusting them and reconstructing them to meet the huge and strenuous demands of the new times. That is really what our gramophone politicians have in mind—in the vague way in which they have anything in mind—when they put on that well-worn record about moral progress not having kept pace with material inventions.

Everyone was taught a history glorifying his own state, and patriotism was chief among the Virtues.

The young were trained to be loyal, law-regarding, patriotic, and a defined system of crimes and misdemeanours with properly associated pains, penalties, and repressions, kept the social body together.

We are coming to see more and more plainly that certain established traditions which have made up the frame of human relationships for ages are not merely no longer as convenient as they were, but are positively injurious and dangerous.

What does moral mean?

"moral progress has not kept pace with material advance."

There is a sense of profound instability about these achievements of our race. Even those who enjoy, enjoy without security, and for the great multitude of mankind there is neither ease, plenty, nor freedom. Hard tasks, insufficiency, and unending money worries are still the ordinary stuff of life. Over everything human hangs the threat of such war as man has never known before, were armed and reinforced by all the powers and discoveries of modern science.

The biological sciences have undergone a corresponding extension. Medical art has attained a new level of efficiency, so that in all the modernizing societies of the world the average life is prolonged, and there is, in spite of a great fall in the birth rate, a steady, alarming increase in the world's population. The proportion of adults alive is greater than it has ever been before.

They changed a world where there had never been enough into a world of potential plenty, into a world of excessive plenty.

If the "Seven Wonders" had vanished or been multiplied three score it would not have changed the lives of any large proportion of human beings. But these new powers and substances were modifying and transforming—unobtrusively, surely, and relentlessly—very particular of the normal life of mankind.

enormous increase in the substances available for man's purposes

a progressive conquest of force and substance was going on.

The attention of young people was not drawn to them; no attempt was made, or considered necessary, to adapt political and social institutions to this creeping enlargement of scale.

"the abolition of distance"

They are more or less interdependent changes; they overlap and interact.

We are getting our minds so clear about them that soon we shall be able to demonstrate them and explain them to our children in our schools. We do not do so at present. We do not give our children a chance of discovering that they live in a world of universal change.

And now we are beginning to see how these changes are connected together and to get the measure of their consequences.

with no means of measuring the increasing swiftness in the succession of events.

So for instance, if I review a patient’s blood test and see high levels of hemoglobin A1C, then I diagnose them as likely to have the early stages of diabetes. But what if I could keep track of the countless variables about the person’s health and compare them with other people who were similar across all the millions of variables, not just based on their hemoglobin A1C? Perhaps then I could recognize that the other 100,000 patients who looked just like this patient in front of me across that wide range of factors had a great outcome when they started to eat more broccoli.

My experiment illustrated how the vast majority of any medical encounter is figuring out the correct patient narrative. If someone comes into my ER saying their wrist hurts, but not due to any recent accident, it could be a psychosomatic reaction after the patient’s grandson fell down, or it could be due to a sexually transmitted disease, or something else entirely. The art of medicine is extracting all the necessary information required to create the right narrative.

My fear is that countless people are already using ChatGPT to medically diagnose themselves rather than see a physician. If my patient in this case had done that, ChatGPT’s response could have killed her.

about 8% of pregnancies discovered in the ER are of women who report that they’re not sexually active.

“I think we have the embryonic stage of some amazing invention here”

And what do LLMs need again? You, in the front row. Yeah, you.

Put another way, you need a sidecar database. The data moat needs to be fast and queryable. This is a Search Problem!

all the winners in the AI space will have data moats.

In an ideal world, you’d just pass your entire code base in with each query. In fact, Jay Hack just tweeted a graph showing how the latest context window size in GPT-4 compares to some popular code bases:

You talk to LLMs by sending them an action or query, plus some relevant context. So for instance, if you want it to write a unit test for a function, then you need to pass along that whole function, along with any other relevant code (e.g. test-fixture code) so that it gets the test right.

A raw LLM is like a Harvard CS grad who knows a lot about coding and took a magic mushroom about 4 hours ago, so it’s mostly worn off, but not totally.

At this point we’re more limited by imagination than by technology.

Congrats, you’re all caught up on the history of LLMs.

When was the last time you got a 5x productivity boost from anything that didn’t involve some sort of chemicals?

software engineering exists as a discipline because you cannot EVER under any circumstances TRUST CODE.

If you can build something as big as Amazon Web Services with a stack based on a simple service call, or whole social networks and customer service suites based on simple browser-to-browser communication, or a robust way of delivering and managing software based on a little process isolation code, then just imagine how big a thing you could build – bear with me here – if you had the goddamn Singularity as your starting point?

What about Kubernetes? I remember seeing a demo of that early on, on Brendan Burns’ work laptop, when it was called mini-Borg. Entire industries are being built on Kubernetes, and it’s not even very good either. 😉 Or look at Docker! Something as innocuous as linux cgroups, a little process-isolation manager, became the technical foundation for containers, which now utterly pervade our industry.

Identity encompasses the memories, experiences, relationships, and values that create one’s sense of self. This amalgamation creates a steady sense of who one is over time, even as new facets are developed and incorporated into one's identity.

the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains.

provide channels of communication through which organisms can stay in touch at a distance.

Before the general acceptance of the Big Bang theory in the 1960s, eternal laws seemed to make sense. The universe itself was thought to be eternal and evolution was confined to the biological realm. But we now live in a radically evolutionary universe.

Social groups are likewise organized by fields, as in schools of fish and flocks of birds. Human societies have memories that are transmitted through the culture of the group, and are most explicitly communicated through the ritual re-enactment of a founding story or myth, as in the Jewish Passover celebration, the Christian Holy Communion and the American thanksgiving dinner, through which the past becomes present through a kind of resonance with those who have performed the same rituals before.

The resonance of a brain with its own past states also helps to explain the memories of individual animals and humans. There is no need for all memories to be "stored" inside the brain.

This means that new patterns of behaviour can spread more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.

I suggest that morphogenetic fields work by imposing patterns on otherwise random or indeterminate patterns of activity. For example they cause microtubules to crystallize in one part of the cell rather than another, even though the subunits from which they are made are present throughout the cell.

But switching on genes such as these cannot in itself determine form, otherwise fruit flies would not look different from us.

if you are an American in the 2030s, is the same as the old reason to move your money to gold in Switzerland, if you are an American in the 1930s.

The unstable dollar economy is always about to collapse. Without informal action, it will collapse—instantly. But only downward. And this will never happen, because no one has any reason to let it happen—as we saw during an exogenous crisis, Covid. Look on the graph above to see how much “value” Covid created.

Inflation is a function of too much spending power “chasing” too little productive power.

Historically, the stablest sovereigns both trade and save in an exogenous currency, such as gold or Beanie Babies. A sovereign company whose people must save in its own sovereign equity is weird; one which buys imports in its sovereign equity is weirder. The former is as if Microsoft made an online game whose currency was MSFT stock. The latter is as if Microsoft bartered MSFT stock for office chairs.

caesaropapist

The whole crypto financial system remains parasitic on the legitimate financial system—there is no end-to-end chain of production in the crypto economy.

As for stablecoins and other asset-backed coins, there are two kinds: legitimate, like USDC/Circle; funky, like Tether. While USDC is more serious about blacklisting, all these coins have circulated freely through the black economy. The regime will seize their assets and use them to allow non-criminal coinholders to be made whole. Any criminal funds will be confiscated and remitted as reparations to Black Lives Matter.

We find that crypto is a vast hive of scum and villainy. To the extent that there are legitimate players, they make all their money from illegitimate players. So, if you have any connection to crypto, don’t be shocked when we shoot you in the head.

Now, due to the failure of FTX, there is now an anti-Bitcoin lobby—a constituency for a lethal strike on crypto as an industry. Of course the press has been trying to gin this up for ages—now they have powder in their guns.

Till now, the main shield of the crypto world has been the image of “blockchain,” a genuinely revolutionary new technology—but one which our political and economic system may be no more ready for, than the Roman Empire for semiconductors.

(The clever way to shut down crypto without deflation or political blowback would be for the Fed to both ban and buy back all crypto. If you have crypto, send it to the feds. They will figure out if you are a criminal. If not, they will pay you for it, in new dollars, at the closing price. Since we do not live in a clever world, nothing like this could possibly happen.)

The kernel module that manages userspace applications is named Gall. Each application is called an agent.

The traditional UNIX command line is a showcase of small components that do exactly one function, and it can be a challenge to discover which one you need and in which way to hold it to get the job done. Piping things into awk '{print $2}' is almost a rite of passage.Another example of the single responsibility principle is git. Although you can use git checkout to do six different things to the repository, they all use similar operations internally. Despite having singular functionality, components can be used in very different ways.

Everything can be broken into smaller parts—the trick is knowing when it’s an advantage to do so.

When it comes to breaking a larger service into smaller pieces, one idea is that each piece should only do one thing within the system—do one thing, and do it well—and the hope is that by following this rule, changes and maintenance become easier.

Gather responsibilities to simplify interactions between them

If you haven’t built something useful with your library yet, it is unlikely anyone else will. Code reuse isn’t a good excuse to avoid duplicating code, and writing reusable code inside your project is often a form of preemptive optimization.

As Sandi Metz put it, “duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction”.

“Don’t Repeat Yourself” turns into “Always Use an Abstraction”.

Never rewrite your code from scratch, ever!.

badrabbit 16 minutes ago | prev [–] From what I tried last year, the old VPS days are over. Anti-fraud has ruined it. Having valid payment and email is not enough, and even with that it will take days to provision one. I tried digitalocean, OVH and several big names and wasted a ton of money for a VPS I needed right away.Just get a gcp,azure or aws compute instance. Hassle is all you'll get with VPS these days.I can't believe it is so hard to pay someone to provision a VM. They need my phone, i have to go through approvals and so much other bs. 4-5 years ago I was able to get a VPS and a domain with some bitcoin within a few hours. Now some places have the audacity to ask for ID verification.

ufw allow OpenSSH ufw allow "Nginx Full" once NGINX is installed. ufw enable

Obsidian sync also comes with 1 year of version history for your files. Yes, the history is also encrypted.

Perkeep’s data model is based primarily on nameless objects. Perkeep can model traditional files with filenames and a POSIX filesystem, but it can just as happily represent a tweet or a “like” with no name. Perkeep is built as something you casually throw data into and don’t worry about organizing too much. It’s all indexed so you can search for it later. Or you can give it a name (or multiple names!) if you prefer, but you can do that whenever you want later. You can even have objects or files with multiple parent containers.

Then the zookeeper asks: how, within the operating constraints of a real-world zoo—which does exist for the animals, but cannot run out of money for them—can she ameliorate this diminution?  This amelioration is her definition of the salus animalium.Her caged lions will always be less than real lions. But what can she do to make the lions as real, as liony, as possible? Certainly, if she had the budget, she would make the lions hunt zebra for their lunch. Certainly, if the lions had to choose, they would prefer buckets of ground chuck. (All cats are lazy; and the lion is the laziest of the cats.)It turns out that a big part of making a lion into a real lion is presenting it with the real challenges of being a lion. These challenges are expensive, often prohibitively so. It is much cheaper for the zookeeper to not challenge the lion—for its so-called life to be ground chuck, catnip and cat videos. This is the happiness that any lion would pursue; any lion would choose this cat prison over the wild, unforgiving veldt. But in the zoo, pleasure is cheap and difficulty is expensive. To exercise the lions and keep them from becoming bored and neurotic, on a budget, without the use of catnip, lion porn, or any other degrading stimulus, is a constant challenge of ingenuity that makes any Gerald Durrell memoir entertaining.

Are You a Bromide?

Ginsberg’s poem famously begins “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. I am luckier than Ginsberg. I got to see the best minds of my generation identify a problem and get to work.

Bertrand Russell said: “One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.”

To expect God to care about you or your personal values or the values of your civilization, that’s hubris. To expect God to bargain with you, to allow you to survive and prosper as long as you submit to Him, that’s hubris. To expect to wall off a garden where God can’t get to you and hurt you, that’s hubris. To expect to be able to remove God from the picture entirely…well, at least it’s an actionable strategy. I am a transhumanist because I do not have enough hubris not to try to kill God.

The opposite of a trap is a garden. The only way to avoid having all human values gradually ground down by optimization-competition is to install a Gardener over the entire universe who optimizes for human values.

I accuse Hurlock of being stuck behind the veil. When the veil is lifted, Gnon-aka-the-GotCHa-aka-the-Gods-of-Earth turn out to be Moloch-aka-the-Outer-Gods. Submitting to them doesn’t make you “free”, there’s no spontaneous order, any gifts they have given you are an unlikely and contingent output of a blind idiot process whose next iteration will just as happily destroy you.

“nations stumble upon [social] establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”

Capturing or creating God is indeed a classic transhumanist fetish, which is simply another form of the oldest human ambition ever, to rule the universe.

Warg talks about trying to avoid “a future of meaningless gleaming techno-progress burning the cosmos”. Do you really think your walled garden will be able to ride this out?

Suppose you make your walled garden. You keep out all of the dangerous memes, you subordinate capitalism to human interests, you ban stupid bioweapons research, you definitely don’t research nanotechnology or strong AI.

telos

Suppose that in fact patriarchy is adaptive to societies because it allows women to spend all their time bearing children who can then engage in productive economic activity and fight wars.

The liberal counterargument to that is that evolution is a blind idiot alien god that optimizes for stupid things and has no concern with human value. Thus, the fact that some species of wasps paralyze caterpillars, lay their eggs inside of it, and have its young devour the still-living paralyzed caterpillar from the inside doesn’t set off evolution’s moral sensor, because evolution doesn’t have a moral sensor because evolution doesn’t care.

VI. Warg Franklin analyzes the same situation and does a little better. He names “the Four Horsemen of Gnon” – capitalism, war, evolution, and memetics – the same processes I talked about above. From Capturing Gnon: Each component of Gnon detailed above had and has a strong hand in creating us, our ideas, our wealth, and our dominance, and thus has been good in that respect, but we must remember that [he] can and will turn on us when circumstances change. Evolution becomes dysgenic, features of the memetic landscape promote ever crazier insanity, productivity turns to famine when we can no longer compete to afford our own existence, and order turns to chaos and bloodshed when we neglect martial strength or are overpowered from outside. These processes are not good or evil overall; they are neutral, in the horrorist Lovecraftian sense of the word […] Instead of the destructive free reign of evolution and the sexual market, we would be better off with deliberate and conservative patriarchy and eugenics driven by the judgement of man within the constraints set by Gnon. Instead of a “marketplace of ideas” that more resembles a festering petri-dish breeding superbugs, a rational theocracy. Instead of unhinged techno-commercial exploitation or naive neglect of economics, a careful bottling of the productive economic dynamic and planning for a controlled techno-singularity. Instead of politics and chaos, a strong hierarchical order with martial sovereignty. These things are not to be construed as complete proposals; we don’t really know how to accomplish any of this. They are better understood as goals to be worked towards. This post concerns itself with the “what” and “why”, rather than the “how”.

At some point, somebody has to say “You know, maybe freeing Cthulhu from his watery prison is a bad idea. Maybe we should not do that.”

Land argues that humans should be more Gnon-conformist (pun Gnon-intentional). He says we do all these stupid things like divert useful resources to feed those who could never survive on their own, or supporting the poor in ways that encourage dysgenic reproduction, or allowing cultural degeneration to undermine the state. This means our society is denying natural law, basically listening to Nature say things like “this cause has this effect” and putting our fingers in our ears and saying “NO IT DOESN’T”. Civilizations that do this too much tend to decline and fall, which is Gnon’s fair and dispassionately-applied punishment for violating His laws.

The sacrifice looks even less appealing when we reflect that the superintelligence could realize a nearly-as-great good (in fractional terms) while sacrificing much less of our own potential well-being. Suppose that we agreed to allow almost the entire accessible universe to be converted into hedonium – everything except a small preserve, say the Milky Way, which would be set aside to accommodate our own needs. Then there would still be a hundred billion galaxies dedicated to the maximization of [the superintelligence’s own values]. But we would have one galaxy within which to create wonderful civilizations that could last for billions of years and in which humans and nonhuman animals could survive and thrive, and have the opportunity to develop into beatific posthuman spirits.

It is conceivable that optimal efficiency would be attained by grouping capabilities in aggregates that roughly match the cognitive architecture of a human mind…But in the absence of any compelling reason for being confident that this so, we must countenance the possibility that human-like cognitive architectures are optimal only within the constraints of human neurology (or not at all). When it becomes possible to build architectures that could not be implemented well on biological neural networks, new design space opens up; and the global optima in this extended space need not resemble familiar types of mentality. Human-like cognitive organizations would then lack a niche in a competitive post-transition economy or ecosystem. We could thus imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children.

Or it can end in Robin Hanson’s nightmare (he doesn’t call it a nightmare, but I think he’s wrong) of a competition between emulated humans that can copy themselves and edit their own source code as desired. Their total self-control can wipe out even the desire for human values in their all-consuming contest. What happens to art, philosophy, science, and love in such a world?

So I agree with Robin Hanson: This is the dream time. This is a rare confluence of circumstances where the we are unusually safe from multipolar traps, and as such weird things like art and science and philosophy and love can flourish.

A couple people asked me what I meant, and I didn’t have the background then to explain. Well, this post is the background. People are using the contingent stupidity of our current government to replace lots of human interaction with mechanisms that cannot be coordinated even in principle. I totally understand why all these things are good right now when most of what our government does is stupid and unnecessary. But there is going to come a time when – after one too many bioweapon or nanotech or nuclear incidents – we, as a civilization, are going to wish we hadn’t established untraceable and unstoppable ways of selling products.

But coordination only works when you have 51% or more of the force on the side of the people doing the coordinating, and when you haven’t come up with some brilliant trick to make coordination impossible.

(alternate phrasing for Chomskyites: technology increases the efficiency of manufacturing consent in the same way it increases the efficiency of manufacturing everything else)

The worst-case scenario is that the ruling party learns to produce infinite charisma on demand. If that doesn’t sound so bad to you, remember what Hitler was able to do with an famously high level of charisma that was still less-than-infinite.

The point is – imagine a country full of bioweapon labs, where people toil day and night to invent new infectious agents. The existence of these labs, and their right to throw whatever they develop in the water supply is protected by law. And the country is also linked by the world’s most perfect mass transit system that every single person uses every day, so that any new pathogen can spread to the entire country instantaneously. You’d expect things to start going bad for that city pretty quickly.

“Believe this statement and repeat it to everyone you hear or else you will be eternally tortured”.

It looks a lot like even though they are outbreeding us, we are outmeme-ing them, and that gives us a decisive advantage.

Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point. In the earlier stages of the process, capitalism becomes more and more uncoupled from its previous job as an optimizer for human values. Now most humans are totally locked out of the group whose values capitalism optimizes for. They have no value to contribute as workers – and since in the absence of a spectacular social safety net it’s unclear how they would have much money – they have no value as customers either. Capitalism has passed them by. As the segment of humans who can be outcompeted by robots increases, capitalism passes by more and more people until eventually it locks out the human race entirely, once again in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that we are still around.

As always when dealing with high-level transhumanists, “all available hardware” should be taken to include “the atoms that used to be part of your body”.