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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • but all of this stuff is still relatively new and I’m sure it’ll get better with time

    What is the exact point of taking this attitude? Anybody who cares to look knows exactly what’s wrong with this stuff. It’s an astonishingly, and I mean “astonishing” as in “actually beyond ordinary human comprehension” as in “literally awe-inspiring”, wasteful means (whether your energy source is fossil fuels or solar!) of doing - at the absolute outside best - extraordinarily basic shit. Every single day the window of useful applications and potential improvements narrows incredibly rapidly, and the people who are fundamentally steering the whole programme are proven liars and scam artists, and proven beyond any shadow of a doubt at that?

    Who cares if it’s relatively new, or if there’s room for mild-mannered optimism? What practical teeth does that argument have? What purpose does it actually serve beyond satisfying a basically shallow political impulse to moderate perceivedly heightened emotive responses to these incredibly stark facts?

    The only actually reasonable response to this farrago is full-throated opposition to every element of the whole show which is either a lie or covering for a lie, which is virtually every single element. If all that you’re left with is “hey, transformers are pretty cool, and I look forward to seeing how they contribute in their own partial way to our collective technical means of saving the planet, and incidentally anti-trust legislation should put people like Altman behind bars for the rest of their lives” then so be it! That’s a far more even-handed and fundamentally sensible response than blithely insisting that the occasional trinket has room for improvement - in fact if you’re liberal-minded it’s the essential output of any sensible thoughts on how to maintain a democratic society.





  • It’s really gotta be emphasised that these guys didn’t come out of internet atheism and frankly I would really like to know where that idea came from. It’s a completely different thing which, arguably, predates internet atheism (if we read “internet atheism” as beginning in the early 2000s - but we could obviously push back that date much earlier). These guys are more or less out of Silicon Valley, Emile P Torres has coined the term “TESCREALS” (modified to “TREACLES”) for - and I had to google this even though I know all the names independently - “Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism”.

    It’s a confluence of futurism cults which primarily emerged online (even on the early internet), but also in airport books by e.g. Ray Kurzweil in the 90s, and has gradually made its away into the wider culture, with EA and longtermism the now most successful outgrowths of its spores in the academy.

    Whereas internet atheism kind of bottoms out in 1990s polemics against religion - nominally Christianity, but ultimately fuelled by the end of the Cold War and the West’s hunger for a new enemy (hey look over there, it’s some brown people with a weird religion) - the TREACLES “cluster of ideologies” (I prefer “genealogy”, because this is ultimately about a political genealogy) has deep roots in the weirdest end of libertarian economics/philosophy and rabid anti-communism. And therefore the Cold War (and even pre-Cold War) need for a capitalist political religion. OK the last part is my opinion, but (a) I think it stands up, and (b) it explains the clearly deeply felt need for a techno-religion which justifies the most insane shit as long as there’s money in it.