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"one of the greatest ironies of the singularity discourse is that many of its arguments read more effectively as critiques of capitalism itself." (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/07/the-singularity-prophets)
80

NSFW = Not Safe For Wonks

lol don't know how that got there
Prob tagged by one of the mods, non-sneers should be tagged as NSFW.
Thank you. Too much effortposting is bad for my eyesight.
To much reading about this shit is bad for your everything ;).
It's a trap. And 11/10 times, I fall for it.
Turns out the real basilisk is the sneers we made along the way.

I’ll always look back on my discovery of the “singularly cults” as a powerful lesson in human nature: how people, no matter their nominally secular and scientific leanings, are still prone to religious experiences and desires, and the irrational fervor that can accompany it.

Yup, it's literally eschatology.

The Guardian in a similar vein a couple of years ago.

As did [Ted Chiang](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway). I remember Scooter dismissing the article without even a hearing.
I think Cstross and Doctorow are also talking about stuff like this semi regularly. At least they gave us the brilliant sentence about the singularity ['the rapture of the nerds'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds) (not sure if this line is their original work, but they used it as a book title).
Stross is still salty about being pigeonholed as 'teh singularity guy' after Accelerando, IIRC.
You are right, and im sorry Stross. His work is a lot broader than just singularity stuff, the merchant princes and laundry files are super good and you should read them if they are what you like.

Subtitle:

The Singularity’s not coming to save us, but that doesn’t stop the world’s worst people from trying to bring it about.

It’s relieving to hear voices push back against the singulatarian religious doctrine.

Folks, these folks do not miss!

by Benjamin Charles Germain Lee

why is everybody at current affairs apparently a romantic-era british aristocrat

N'awlins, baby!

I’ve heard similar complaints from engineers themselves, guilt ridden by the bigoted outcomes of their creations, but even they’ll admit that “it” hasn’t happened yet. The fact that we still use to term “it’s in the algorithm” should be enough to prove that.

Current Affairs is a glorifed blog of Nathan Robinson, who is an incredibly shitty journalist who’s whole politics seems to be hating liberals without being a tankie. A lot of anti-capitalist rhetoric is similar to that of “rationalists” with their disregard for empirical evidence or widespread fields consensus in favour of pet ideologues and thinkers.

> politics seems to be hating liberals without being a tankie AKA the "cool zone"
Aka the vapid hipster zone
Using hipster as a derogatory term in 2020 certainly shows you are outside of the 'cool zone' tbh.
They're streets behind.
this comment is weird, dumb and bad in multiple ways
Mad
damn, GPT-3 is getting better at Reddit posts.

[deleted]

The problem is that for every future scenario where the AI goes mad and enslaves everybody, there are order of magnitude more likely scenarios where the AI functions perfectly well for the rich and powerful, but everyone else gets ground into the dust. These people devote a ton of energy to the former scenario, but nothing to the latter, perhaps because a lot of them don't see a problem with it.
Granted, the rich and powerful being in charge of the thing drastically increases the chance of the thing running riot and enslaving us all because *gestures at the whole world right now*.
> Is the point that they are engaging in bad faith, or missing the forest from the trees or what? The article is pretty unambiguous.

Technological evolution=bad unnatural

This entire piece is premised on the author not understanding that “artificial intelligence” is an extension of human evolution.

Call that eugenicist and make allusions about Goldstein all you want, the only choice facing humanity is acsention or the Borg.

But what about black people!?!

Race either literally won’t exist, or people of all creeds will be free to colonize any of the innumerable planets, for fucks sake, you can have earth‽ Who gives a shit?

The “singularity” is a speciation event, no one’s going to care about humans any more than we care about differently colored chimpanzees.

:s/singularity/the rapture/ E: nerd joke aside. It even says in the article 'It’s not possible it could be neither?' You also seem to have projected some things into the article which it doesn't say.
The article is literally just "i don't understand that the singularity will create a new species free from the physical restraints of evolution, what about black people?"(new species free from hunger, fatigue, and disease has evolved, women most effected)
Holy shit if you think the article said that, you really fail at reading. I would delete that post if I were you, if it gets archived and the AGI creates mindclones of you they will all be brain damaged (assuming the AGI can understand what this article is trying to say). e: this is also of course the way around mindclones. Just lie about yourself on the internet and never show you are lying, the AGI is now working on incorrect data. Hell, use a spelling checker and edit your browser to not show that extension in the list of extensions (ideally leave some typpos in).
Humans are going to die because the earth got too hot:( Also, is spelled affect and i get for my infinitely replicated consciousness being tortured for eternity in mind prison:( Honestly the retcon angle where everyones sensory perception is altered so all copies read Bernstain makes me more worried I still have time based relatively neutral human perception, cross that road when we get there /s Last blast from the past: what if like everyone had, like, a universal translator, *but I'm their miiind maaan* Besides ritual spiritual manifestations, why would i think i could outsmart a consciousness that could do even just one greater binary conceptual leap than I'm physically capable of? Why would i care at that point?
Probably because it won't do that.
What will machine assisted telepathy do then?
Not exist, most likely. Or if it does, be hellish to experience because you've got a wireless connection directly to your brain. Have fun getting bombarded with pornographic pop-ups and epilepsy triggering flashing lights. Either way, you'd still be, you know, human. You'd just have a more direct connection to the Internet. It's not going to give you immortality or turn you into a robot.
How depressingly naive.
It's always amusing when techno-utopians cast a skeptical posture towards techno-fantasies as "naive."
I guess, you didn't even bother to explore a single implication of interconnected thought, just hand waving about plausibility and parroting doomer malware fantasies, not even specifically how they would work besides "uuhhh constant flashing images probably".
I mean, there's no reason to think your thoughts would actually be interconnected into some sort of hive mind. At least the hypothetical brain-computer interfaces that just send audiovisual information have some basic idea for how they'd function; notions of hive minds don't have even that. It's just tech woo. So I actually bothered to address audiovisual feeds, and guess what? If you can send people images, you can send them porn or flashing lights that trigger epilepsy, just like you can on their computer.
G[reat, so you envision some kind of wire that goes into regions specific to audio visual processing, and then stopping there?](https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-att-us-revc&sxsrf=ALeKk00DyvudO9OcRVF0LAWaQalKyHOVug%3A1595617584773&ei=MDEbX8PcLraS0PEPjtOU2Aw&q=monkey+wire+brain+2004&oq=monkey+wire+brain+2004&gs_lcp=ChNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwEAM6BAgAEEc6BQghEKABOgUIIRCrAjoICCEQFhAdEB5Q998BWI7sAWCE8wFoAHABeACAAZwBiAGOBZIBAzAuNZgBAKABAcABAQ&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp)
Whoop de fucking do. Telepresence. What's your point?
What a visionary you are.
The visions of visionaries are almost always mirages.
"ᚹ ᛠ ᛈ ᛟ ᛏ ᚫ ᚹ ᚪ ᛁ ᚱ ᛁ ᚾ ᚫ ᛗ ᛟ ᚾ ᛣ ᛠ ᛒ ᚱ ᛇ ᚾ ᚦ ᛖ ᚾ ᛋ ᛏ ᚪ ᛈ ᛏ" Very cool.
The most likely scenario is a failed politically motivated rollout that makes millions of people psychotic, gotta keep the faith though 🙏
As opposed to a small number of internet nerds, lol.
Scope is a good question.
I'm saying it's already driven dumbarses like you insane.
What has?
No the most likely scenario is it not being possible. E: I mean, look at the great filter.
>...great filter. Eh, it's *so-so.*
I meant the fermi paradox thing obv. E: It still was a good joke btw, I chuckled.
👍
Humanity doesn't understand the motivations or resources of higher intelligence beings, news at 11.
I would have just said: 'Humanity doesn't understand higher intelligence beings'. Anyway thanks, I'm blushing. Dunno if you should call yourself all of humanity though, but go for it.
Goddam it's easy to troll me.
Would you say that they are "ineffable?"
Honestly, the idea that a superintendence would be entirely unaffected by the prejudices of it's creators is frankly kinda laughable. This is the kind of thing that happens when you're concerned about paperclip maximising but completely unconcerned with profit maximising, despite the latter being far more plausible.
Right, but there's competition, its not like one person has a monopoly on telepathy or ai research, so if morality and compassion *really are* evolutionarily adaptive and beneficial constructs, then they should win out, at least in part?
Thats a hell of a statement to throw out with zero backing, and one I have no reason to believe is true. Just looking at... like regular evolution, what percentage of species have evolved morality and compassion? The idea that competition makes things compassionate is ridiculous on the face of it, please feel free to examine the actions of your favourite large corporations.
Right, but corporations are a form of altered consciousness reliant not just on viral expansion in a (theoretically infinite)closed system, but linguistic regularities inherent to our current psychology. It's a choice, and thank God, it's been made for us, we either reach and leap over this precipice, or die. If you can't see the "moral" workings relevant to a pack, instilled in a dog, then on what level could you ever believe humanity will solve something like global warming? Literally every mammal(at a minimum) displays some kind of ingroup bias ensuring it's species survival, rat kings, all the way down. I'm just an invader here, i have no idea what this sub is about, just trying to mine this thread, so far I've been introduced to the "rapture of the nerds" which reads like Rudy Rucker writing Asimov, given the first three pages, so I'll see where that goes. I'm just trying to catch up here. Anything specific you'd like to point me towards? I don't generally put much effort into novels or lengthy pointless diatribes. Feel free to insult me.
This sub is a place for nerds to make fun of weird nerds like you who think wild conjecture based on half-baked principles is a substitute for actual evidence and domain-specific knowledge. I believe humanity can defeat climate change because I have actually looked up the problem in detail and understand that the technological transition required is well within the reach of todays society, and I know there have been succesful examples of collective action before. This belief is not based on nonsensical extrapolations about wolf packs or whatever the fuck, because that tells you fuck all.
Damn, too bad, I'll be around i guess.
> It should be absolutely terrifying to you how much public assistance goes towards disenfranchising whites. [we got a genius here kids](https://np.reddit.com/r/TumblrInAction/comments/9dhqpe/apparently_white_people_deserve_to_be_enslaved/e5j0ph7/?context=5)
oof
Damn, that's rough
Look at this extremely offended ~~dork~~ religious person.

Of course it does. And most people I know who care about AI risk, also in The Valley, are aware of this.

My sincere congratulations on not knowing Sam Altman or Peter Thiel.