Illustration from RAW Semantics post.
RAW Semantics on AI. He invites comments from RAW fans, and I have chipped in.
Michael Johnson also recently wrote about AI. Michael writes that rich tech people "are trash," this seems to me to lack nuance (while I'm no Elon Musk fan and I feel let down by Big Tech politics in general), see my comments to the RAW Semantics post.
Tyler Cowen posts a lot on AI. here is a recent post. "Snap out of it you sad sacks, hope you can recognize negative emotional contagion when you see it!"
"People are still saying that Dick’s novels are turning into reality. But it’s not a joke anymore. It’s feels more like a warning." Ted Gioia on Dick's seven best novels. I do think he's found some of the best books, I read Flow My Tears the Policeman Said recently and enjoyed it.
Natural Law Theory Is Obviously False. Bentham's Bulldog Newsletter.
"I think that whether the right reforms in any meaningful way or continues its slide into stupidity and genocidal vibes will depend on election results. Parties are always responding to messages from voters, and this will continue to be true going forward." From "Why Non-White Voters Must Crush Republicans."
8 comments:
Thanks for the mention, Tom. Is it okay if I self-promote a wee bit? (God knows, my pathetic readership figures need the boost!)
***start of shamelessly gratuitous plug***
CRITICS RAVE about the new article from RAW SEMANTICS:
"Some of the clearest thinking on the subject matter I've read. A sheer delight. Wow, whattan' opener." (Steve Fly)
"This is really good, Brian. It makes me think." (Overweening Generalist)
(With apologies to Steve, whose Bluesky comment I've been reposting the crap out of, and to Michael, whose comment is part of a longer comment left at my post).
Thanks
***end of shamelessly gratuitous plug***
Everyone I post about at RAWIllumination is welcome to self promote, as I only mention people I want to be read.
Me calling the tech billionaires "trash" is just me doing name-calling, because I frankly feel so outmanned by this entire meshuggah milieu.
That, and anyone who has political values 178 degrees from mine I tend to see as "trash," basically. EX: Peter Thiel hates democracy and thinks corporate top-down decisionmaking for everything is the way to go. Also: women are inferior. He gave a talk with Ross Douthat in San Francisco last year in which he said the 1960s counterculture people all "turned into Manson." Something like that. I could pick another 15 tech bro fascist billionaires and run a similar litany. Are there billionaires who aren't trash? Yea, I think so. A few. But having that much money and being that driven to "progress" in the way people like Musk and Thiel have said OUT LOUD is a horror story to me. And I do the equivalent of nailing them in the back of the neck with a spitball by calling 'em names. That's it.
Some of my values that run 178 degrees from theirs: I want a livable planet Earth for generations after I'm gone; I want the end of dire poverty globally. Little things like basic access to good education, health care, clean water, and creative expression for us, the 8 billion.
Musk, Thiel, et.al: fuck those losers. I want MORE and not with those icky poors all over the place I have to look at. They're inferior, genetic defectives. (As am I.) That's my semantic extension for "trash."
I found Erik Davis' latest essay very interesting as well, connecting this current AI insanity thingy to 60s Beat poetry, via Adam Curtis:
https://www.burningshore.com/p/machines-of-loving-grace
AI researcher, transhumanist, and RAW fan Ben Goertzel discusses AI outside of the political myopia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz2Po6hGmLQ
Interesting with Ben Goertzel there - thanks for link. He runs through the positive, optimistic potentials - these ideas don't seem to have changed much in the last 30 years (I came across the same notions, same framing, when I read Extropy magazine in the 1990s; also the sci-fi he refers to, etc - although the more nerdy technical talk, which he goes briefly into, has advanced along with the AI tech).
He does mention social-political implications (ICE, military use, China, etc), but only in passing (except for some negative comments on Facebook/Zuckerberg). I get the sense he's well aware of the MAGA/SV connections/directions, ultra-authoritarian uses and the like, but simply prefers to talk about the positives. If so, I can't say I blame him.
The brief digression on consciousness & panpsychism also interesting. I've come across folks on the "left" who disbelieve and argue quite aggressively against the whole idea of AI *agency* (never mind superintelligence, or AI sentience), which they think is just BS "corporate narrative" to distract everyone from the evil actions of the corps. And folks who view AI output mostly as "slop". And I've come across those so dazzled by the promise of the positive potentials of super-AGI that they flippantly dismiss the near-term negatives, the extremist anti-democratic aims of some of those with the biggest financial stakes in the technology - not to mention the uses it's being put to (see the Pete Hegseth example in my blog piece).
It's a good job I'm a non-joiner, as I can't see any intellectual "tribe" that shares my views on AI, exactly.
I appreciate the thoughtful response, Brian. I thought I had also posted the Goertzel interview directly to the comment section on your blog, but I don't see it there.
Thanks, Mike (I'm around 90% sure it's you, but I sometimes mix up these different handles). I checked my blog's spam folder, as I do regularly, and nothing there. I sometimes get reports of comments not showing up - I'm not sure why. I don't moderate at all (there's just a basic auto-filter for obvious spam).
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