Longer read than I had realized but worth every word. Very well done.

In other words, we may eventually reach a sort of wealth singularity, a point when the wealth of a few grows so exponentially that it basically reaches the point of infinity.

I actually question whether or not this has already happened. The wealthy already have access to enough money that they don’t actually need to sell assets - to give anything up - in order to get credit. Just taking away Elon’s money doesn’t make him stop being Elon. It doesn’t take away his connections, his charisma, his loyal follower base, etc. Even if he did get taken down in court any financial consequence wouldn’t actually hurt his power base nearly as much as the reputational shift (see also Orange Man). Their net worth may not be literally infinite, but I can’t think of any additional power or prestige they could command if it was.

Nope. That would be more immediately concerning but less dumb than the reality.

Alright OpenAI, listen up. I’ve got a whole 250GB hard drive from 2007 full of the Star Wars/Transformers crossover stories I wrote at the time. I promise you it’s AI-free and won’t be available to train competing models. Bidding starts at seven billion dollars. I’ll wait while you call the VCs.

I don’t know, I think by their stated goals they did alright. They took investor money, yes, but they used it to move very quickly and break a lot of things. Now, we should probably have seen ahead of time that this was actually a bad thing and that breaking things is a bad goal, but it was the 2000s and we all thought touchscreen digital watches were pretty neat.

Easy Money Author (and former TV Star) Ben Mckenzie’s new cryptoskeptic documentary is struggling to find a distributor. Admittedly, the linked article is more a review of the film than a look at the distributor angle. Still, it looks like it’s telling the true story in a way that will hopefully connect with people, and it would be a real shame if it didn’t find an audience.

Given the relative caliber of those two I think this may be considered an attempted inducement to suicide by better writer. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.

I do think Ed is overly critical of the impact that AI hype has had on the job market, not because the tools are actually good enough to replace people but because the business idiots who impact hiring believe they are. I think Brian Merchant had a piece not long ago talking about how mass layoffs may not be happening but there’s a definite slowdown in hiring, particularly for the kind of junior roles that we would expect to see impacted. I think this actually strengthens his overall argument, though, because the business idiots making those decisions are responding to the thoughtless coverage that so many journalists have given to the hype cycle just as so many of the people who lost it all on FTX believed their credulous coverage of crypto. If we’re going to have a dedicated professional/managerial class separate from the people who actually do things then the work of journalists like this becomes one of their only connectors to the real world just as its the only connection that people with real jobs have to the arcane details of finance or the deep magic that makes the tech we all rely on function. By abdicating their responsibility to actually inform people in favor of uncritically repeating the claims of people trying to sell them something they’re actively contributing to all of it and the harms are even farther-reaching than Ed writes here.

Right? I guess maybe the incel-adjacent want to go back to the standards of medieval kings needing to have the whole court in their bedchambers on the wedding night just to make absolutely certain that the royals fucked at least once.

It’s also kind of weird to see Atlas Shrugged on the list. Not because it’s not dystopian because the only thing it’s missing from its libertarian hellscape is realistic consequences in the form of bear attacks. But unlike the others the society isn’t expressly said to be awful by the narrative. Or, for Scholtzenizen, by reality.

Your bonus points link is even dumber than you’re suggesting. The first half of the tweet:

I don’t want to live in the world of “Camp Of The Saints”.

I don’t want to live in the world of “Atlas Shrugged”.

I don’t want to live in the world of “The GULag Archipelago”.

I don’t want to live in the world of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”.

I don’t want to live in the “Brave New World”.

I want to live in the world of Hyperion, Ringworld, Foundation, and Dune

I don’t want bad things! I want good-ish things!

Also I’ve never read Ringworld or Hyperion but the other two stories span literal millennia and show wildly different societies over that period. Hell, showcasing that development is the entire first set of Foundation stories. Just… You can absolutely tell this sonofabitch doesn’t actually read.

I mean you could make an actual evo psych argument about the importance of being able to model the behavior of other people in order to function in a social world. But I think part of the problem is also in the language at this point. Like, anthropomorphizing computers has always been part of how we interact with them. Churning through an algorithm means it’s “thinking”, an unexpected shutdown means it “died”, when it sends signals through a network interface it’s “talking” and so on. But these GenAI chatbots (chatbots in general, really, but it’s gotten worse as their ability to imitate conversation has improved) are too easy to assign actual agency and personhood to, and it would be really useful to have a similarly convenient way of talking about what they do and how they do it without that baggage.

I’m pretty sure there are some other factors he’s gonna need to sort out before having kids is even an actual question. For example, finding a woman who wants to have his kids and let him fuck with their infant brains.

Also given how we see the brain develop in cases of traumatic injury I would expect to see that neuroplasticity route around any kind of implant under most circumstances. Nerves aren’t wires and you can’t just plug 'em in and wait for a software patch.

I assume that the corpos are taking my data, but I also trust that their primary interest is commercial. Or rather, commercials. I.e. selling shit or otherwise profiting. But I’ve seen the kind of asshole who ends up in the general public and some of those fuckers are actively evil. I don’t expect Meta to target my family for our politics or go after anyone’s gender identity unless some outside circumstance makes it profitable for them.

You know, I really shouldn’t be surprised that the prominent photo of a sexy woman is the post that brings out the creeps and gets more “comment removed by mods” than any other thread I’ve seen. But somehow I was.

I’ve been trying for far longer than reasonable to come up with a parody of this kind of toxic misogyny and technofetishism in the form of a “but ChatGPT is better than girlfriend” joke and I can’t do it. The combination of pettiness and vitriol is beyond my ability to exaggerate.

Seeing shit like this alongside the discussions of the use of image recognition and automatic targeting in the recent Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian bombers is not great.

Also something something sanitized violence something something. These people love to fantasize about the thrill of defending themselves and their ideology with physical force but even in their propaganda are (rightly) disgusted and terrified by the consequences that such violence has on actual people.9

I mean I think the whole AI consciousness emerged from science fiction writers who wanted to interrogate the economic and social consequences of totally dehumanizing labor, similar to R.U.R. and Metropolis. The concept had sufficient legs that it got used to explore things like “what does it mean to be human?” in a whole bunch of stories. Some were pretty good (Bicentennial Man, Aasimov 1976) and others much less so (Bicentennial Man, Columbus 1999). I think the TESCREAL crowd had a lot of overlap with the kind of people who created, expanded, and utilized the narrative device and experimented with related technologies in computer science and robotics, but saying they originated it gives them far too much credit.

All I know is that I didn’t do anything to make those mushrooms grow in a circle like that and the sweetbread I left there in the morning was completely gone by lunchtime and that evening all my family’s shoes got fixed up.

At the same time, we have a Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know etc in the article itself:

What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation?” Mr. Yudkowsky asked in an interview. “It looks like an additional monthly user.”

I recommend it because we know some of these LLM-based services still rely on the efforts of A Guy Instead to make up for the nonexistence and incoherence of AGI. If you’re an asshole to the frontend there’s a nonzero chance that a human person is still going to have to deal with it.

Also I have learned an appropriate level of respect and fear for the part of my brain that, half-asleep, answers the phone with “hello this is YourNet with $CompanyName Support.” I’m not taking chances around unthinkingly answering an email with “alright you shitty robot. Don’t lie to me or I’ll barbecue this old commodore 64 that was probably your great uncle or whatever”