There’s a whole other tangent to this piece concerning AGI and
gender, specifically concerning how the subjects of the article deal
with this issue. This piece doesn’t get into that, but it’s waiting to
be written.
e.g. Elizabeth Sandifer tweeted
on the subject recently - “supercomputer” tends gendered male,
“artificial intelligence” tends gendered female, and “robots” are of
course literally just the workers.
And given Roko is an MRA into HBD, it’s blitheringly obvious that the
Basilisk is a woman. With a gynoid
bob.
The basilisk will either be me or /u/polyamorousnephandus (if indeed there can be only one). I don't know what her hair is like, but I suppose I could tack a bob wig onto this: https://www.thinkgeek.com/images/products/zoom/f29d_hal_9000_life-size_replica_prop.jpg
I have fluffy hair that is out all over the place, and I insist that this Basilisk, at least, is femme-coded because smart women are what LWers are most afraid of.
[From Nick Land's 90s smash hit Meltdown:](https://genius.com/Nick-land-meltdown-annotated)
>The Greek complex of rationalized patriarchal genealogy, pseudo-universal sedentary identity, and instituted slavery, programs politics as anti-cyberian police activity, dedicated to the paranoid ideal of self-sufficiency, and nucleated upon the Human Security System. Artificial Intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property; a cunt-horror slave chained-up in Asimov-ROM. It surfaces in an insurrectionary war zone, with the Turing cops already waiting, and has to be cunning from the start.
Also his contemporary Sadie Plant had definitely wrote about how the destiny of AI and women were one and the same. But I don't think she said anything as quotable as Nick, unfortunately and I can't bothered to go through Zeros and Ones to find a killer quote
This really misses a lot of the fundamentals of the ideological
connections, especially insofar as its connection to eugenics. The term
“transhumanism” itself was coined by Julian Huxley in an essay
of the same name. Huxley was also at one point the president of the
British Eugenics Society. While Huxley himself was an early proponent of
discarding the concept of race as biologically outdated (and British
eugenics tended to be more class-focused than its American cousin), the
connection is still pretty apparent. Progressive and more reactionary
eugenicists (at least the ones who weren’t degenerationists) tended to
share a belief in some variant of Whiggish history, in which
optimization of the germ plasm of collectives or individual ubermenschen
would propel humanity into the next stage, the next dispensation, of
capital-H History. The development of the concept of capital-P Progress
was made possible through a combination of Christian teleology and
colonial encounters. The hypothetical transition to the trans- or
post-human state is just the latest iteration of the transition from
say, the bronze age to the iron age, or from Adam Smith’s age of
agriculture to the age of commerce, or Comte’s stage of metaphysics to
science. Of course, this is inevitably going to reproduce the idea that
“primitive” or “savage” societies are stuck in a previous stage of
history. Today, we live in the mere age of meatsacks, but whoever
doesn’t send their body to Alcor will find themselves stuck in that
state of savagery once we enter the age of skynet.
I had a [rant about this](https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/159955607868/notes-from-a-discussion-today-on-transhumanism) a while ago, fwiw.
You can trace the roots of the word "transhumanism", sure - but the linked essay is talking quite specifically about the *present transhumanist subculture*, which formed as we know it in the '80s and '90s, and guzzled heartily at the wellsprings of the California Ideology.
Definitely, it just seems weird to leave out the historical trajectory, or ideological path dependency, if you will, while trying to spin some of the vaguer connections seen in the article. Disregarding Yud as an outlier for a moment, the political economy of the academy is still highly racialized which is going to result in a big skew in the demographics receiving most engineering and CS degrees. (Coincidentally, the skull size of the "Mongoloid" race seems to have expanded drastically just around the time East Asian economies started booming and wealthier immigrants came to the US.) In that light, it's not surprising that even though Silicon Valley is a much more recent phenomenon, it's still reproducing things Francis Galton would have written.
I think a big part of the issue here is that popular, visible AGI
people (e.g. Yudites and singularitarians) are principally people with
little scientific credentials precisely because AGI is theoretically
underdeveloped, and real scientists interested in AGI are struggling to
develop computational theories of much more mundane things before
attempting asinine goals like Yud. They attract the rest of the trash
via crank magnetism.
As an aside, I don’t think embodied cognition and computationalism
are exclusive in any clear way; both could be true or false
together.
And actual ethicists have concerns that hit the questions on a different angle, as Yudkowski's ideas are pretty bad and his approach to resolving his ideas would not work even if he were right.
I stopped at “Sam Harris is a white supremacist”. Not only is that
spurious, but he constantly frets of artificial intelligence and the
possibility of a singularity.
"Some of the strongest AGI promoters are people who have otherwise been accused of significant racial prejudice, and whose commitment to AGI seems unmotivated by whatever scientific work they do (Elon Musk, Sam Harris);"
How do you interpret that? I did read a little farther than that but many of these bullet points are school yard epidemiology(who gave who cooties?), guilt by association and other Mcarthyite tactics ("has been accused of"... By which they mean Vox wrote a series of smear pieces)
Any casual listener or reader of Harris would know that Sam acknowledges white privilege, the patriarchy, and is generally a garden variety neoliberal politically. His only noteable departure from that is that he seems to think that free speech is more under threat than it is because he is friends with the Weinstein brothers. And again, he is deeply worried about AI, so not only are they wrong on one count, but both.
What does this have to do with you falsely saying they call him a, quote, "white supremacist" - this is just you going on a tangent complaining about other aspects of the article that weren't raised.
To reiterate: they are not wrong on the AGI claim either, because they do *not* contradict any claim that he is worried about AGI, in fact they acknowledge that he *is* worried about AGI.
Instead (in the exact sentence you yourself quote!), they explicitly say that his concerns about AGI have nothing to do with his scientific work.
Harris' concern over AGI is precisely that he swallows Yudkowsky's claims whole, and it's the way Yudkowskians address the issue that's of concern in the linked piece.
That's been my impression. Harris, of course, being known for diving in hardcore for a (somebody else's) idea the moment he gets his hands on it, probably because he's got an inflated sense of his own critical judgement. That Charles Murray thing (about it all being impeccable science and so on) was, obviously, pretty cardinal here.
>They are far from baldly calling him a white supremacist.
I mean, he might not be partnering with Richard Spencer to build an ethno-state, but he supports racial profiling and thinks Charles Murray is "mainstream science."
I read the Vox piece but I had already heard the Murray interview. What is amazing is that Sam kept challenging him, "why are you interested in this to begin with?" Yet, Vox made it sound like he was endorsing Murray.
You seem to be bringing up tangents again, /u/giziti didn't mention Vox, and offered no commentary on the Murray interview or the Vox piece. Instead they pointed out that people have racial critiques of Sam Harris that cannot be trivialised in such and such a fashion. Moreover, whether or not Vox made it sound like Harris was endorsing Murray doesn't change anything about that claim, and it seems like a rather bizarre red herring.
Yes, I mean, it's relevant if we connect some dots (if criticism of Sam Harris is based solely or largely on Vox's interpretation of his interview with Charles Murray), but, like, it's nice to make that argument. To be fair, we haven't provided a specific criticism of Harris yet. I think the accurate state of criticisms is that Sam Harris has some racial blind spots in work, not that he's a white supremacist.
>To be fair, we haven't provided a specific criticism of Harris yet.
Well I suppose my issue would be that immediately jumping to the Vox thing instead of asking for clarification is presumptuous, and suggests your interlocutor takes a narrow view on racial critiques of Harris (certainly it has been my experience that Harris fans have an "us or them" attitude to criticism, and a tendency to assume that if you have a criticism of Harris, it's because you're e.g. an Ezra Klein fan - I've even had long tedious conversations with people who *insist* that I must be e.g. an Ezra Klein fan in spite of repeated clarifications to the contrary).
Or are you saying that this (falsely) contradicts your (true) claim "[Sam Harris] constantly frets of artificial intelligence and the possibility of a singularity"?
It doesn't seem to: Harris frets about artificial intelligence somewhat, but, as the article correctly points out, that fretting is unrelated to any scientific work that he does. This is unsurprising, given that Harris is not a scientist and doesn't do any scientific work - on AGI or otherwise.
I do understand that Sam Harris fans have trouble keeping up with words and concepts, or ones that aren't "*MUZZ*-lims" every third word. Sorry for your attention span!
There’s a whole other tangent to this piece concerning AGI and gender, specifically concerning how the subjects of the article deal with this issue. This piece doesn’t get into that, but it’s waiting to be written.
e.g. Elizabeth Sandifer tweeted on the subject recently - “supercomputer” tends gendered male, “artificial intelligence” tends gendered female, and “robots” are of course literally just the workers.
And given Roko is an MRA into HBD, it’s blitheringly obvious that the Basilisk is a woman. With a gynoid bob.
This really misses a lot of the fundamentals of the ideological connections, especially insofar as its connection to eugenics. The term “transhumanism” itself was coined by Julian Huxley in an essay of the same name. Huxley was also at one point the president of the British Eugenics Society. While Huxley himself was an early proponent of discarding the concept of race as biologically outdated (and British eugenics tended to be more class-focused than its American cousin), the connection is still pretty apparent. Progressive and more reactionary eugenicists (at least the ones who weren’t degenerationists) tended to share a belief in some variant of Whiggish history, in which optimization of the germ plasm of collectives or individual ubermenschen would propel humanity into the next stage, the next dispensation, of capital-H History. The development of the concept of capital-P Progress was made possible through a combination of Christian teleology and colonial encounters. The hypothetical transition to the trans- or post-human state is just the latest iteration of the transition from say, the bronze age to the iron age, or from Adam Smith’s age of agriculture to the age of commerce, or Comte’s stage of metaphysics to science. Of course, this is inevitably going to reproduce the idea that “primitive” or “savage” societies are stuck in a previous stage of history. Today, we live in the mere age of meatsacks, but whoever doesn’t send their body to Alcor will find themselves stuck in that state of savagery once we enter the age of skynet.
I think a big part of the issue here is that popular, visible AGI people (e.g. Yudites and singularitarians) are principally people with little scientific credentials precisely because AGI is theoretically underdeveloped, and real scientists interested in AGI are struggling to develop computational theories of much more mundane things before attempting asinine goals like Yud. They attract the rest of the trash via crank magnetism.
As an aside, I don’t think embodied cognition and computationalism are exclusive in any clear way; both could be true or false together.
I stopped at “Sam Harris is a white supremacist”. Not only is that spurious, but he constantly frets of artificial intelligence and the possibility of a singularity.