… the whole toxic alphabet soup

We’re getting inundated these days with scare-shares about Artificial Intelligence (AI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs), etc. Reports come in two main flavors: Apocalyptic doomers who think AGI will achieve “the Singularity,” become self-aware and Terminator us all, and the other flavor — techno-utopians who think we (meaning “they,” we are disposable plebes) are going to colonize space and live forever.

Neither is true. AI has been around since at least the 1940s and is getting implemented in a piecemeal, random, inefficient manner with unintended consequences, under late-stage capitalism. It’s a huge mess, not the literal end of the world.

Pundits claim our AI overlords are going to reign over all areas of human enterprise: government, business, education, medicine, news production, the arts, psychiatry…. The military-industrial war machine is an early adopter, and teachers are complaining about AI-generated term papers. But so far, the hype-to-reality ratio is pretty high.

ROBOCOPS!

Law enforcement seems like an especially sinister application, right? What with NYC’s 400lb robot, K5, patrolling Times Square and the subways. But robo-cop experiments have had mixed results. One K5 in California went on an anti-toddler jihad and another one, in DC, was defeated by small body of water. Maybe these cyber-Mall Cops are not highly effective? Maybe, basically, they are a Roomba with a camera? And a call button? That doesn’t work? I’m just asking questions here.

BUT AI WILL TAKE ALL OUR JOBS!

Some tech-pundits think employees can be handily replaced by AI (cue salivating CEOs.) But generally speaking, humans can’t literally be replaced by tools. I mean, you can’t replace a carpenter with a hammer, because the hammer just lies there. And there’s a sense in which AI is also pretty inert in the absence of human supervision — it will just keep doing whatever it was programmed to do…

The people who actually work with AI and LLMs tend not to worship the technology, partly because getting it to do what you want is extremely laborious. Plus the industry is always chasing the latest hot development which is very tiresome for the workers. Take, for example, MassMiss’s adored only child — PhD in Physics, specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. He says recent tech “revolutions” are pretty much this…

He also says the little meme below about using ChatGPT to write computer code is painfully accurate …

The thing is, writing code with ChatGPT can be done. Sort of! But not that well! And it still needs human supervision!

Buggy code is just one of AI’s limitations. It takes a lot of computing power for AI to do things that are a piece of cake for a sentient organism — navigate in three dimensions or detect text written by another AI. If you want to imitate the proprio-perception of a mere bug, it’s actually more efficient to just microchip a real bug. And forget about being funny; that deepfake George Carlin “show” wasn’t even written by AI.

So maybe AI is not this huge threat, just another tech fad. But you know what IS terrifying? Billionaires. Specifically tech-billionaires, many of whom have fallen prey to a faux-philosophy known as TESCREALism. These people are scary because they’re billionaires, and global oligarchy and misinformation are genuine threats to everyone else on earth. Also, they’re in a cult.

THE T.E.S.C.R.E.A.L.S

TESCREALism, what is it? Think of it as QAnon for hyper-wealthy tech-bros and their fanboys. It’s like an overlapping Venn diagram of theories and beliefs, some of which are interesting, but nothing that would impress a trained philosopher. Tescrealism is very big in Silicon Valley these days — they even have their own university.

“TESCREAL,” is an acronym. It stands for…

• Transhumanism: TESCREAls think they can shed their mere humanity via technological enhancements and evolve into a new race of supermen, which turns out to be about as fashie as it sounds.
• Extropianism: a “philosophy of self-improvement,” strong in the nineties, which can seem sort of endearing (Eat your veggies! Implant this microchip!) but lacks the humility and connectedness necessary to live a decent life. Also, they are wrong a lot.
• Singularitarianism: the belief that a technological singularity, i.e., the creation of superintelligence, will happen soon and we must rush to control it. And by “we,” they mean a bunch of rich edgelords in Silicon Valley.
• Cosmism: orginating in Russia as a utopian quest for immortality and space colonization, it’s “a syncretic ideology combining technological modernity with religious conservatism.” Does this give anyone a bad feeling..?.
• Rationalism: By rationalism, TESCREALs don’t mean studying Descartes and Spinoza – it’s just a vibe. They use it as a label in celebration of their own “logic” and deductive prowess, and too bad if someone gets hurt.
• Effective Altruism: no one can object to altruism, right? Except when Sam Bankman Fried is using it to boost his crypto-scam. Basically, EA says, *I*need to be super-rich so I can save humanity. Because an exclusive club of Richie-Richies have the inside scoop on saving humanity, right? Or maybe they want to altruistically bomb abortion clinics because TESCREALs need to seed the planet with their superior genes.
• Longtermism: often a corollary of EA, longtermisim states that one should do the most good for the most people (utilitarianism) but not based on that needy person right in front of you. Rather, peer thousands/millions of years into the future and then do something for those people. Like anyone can even guess the weather for this weekend, our world is a chaotic system, come on.

So who are these guys, and yes, they’re mostly guys? Their ur-philosopher is Eliezer Yudkowsky who really, really believes the robots are coming for us and seems weirdly pleased about it…

Yudkowski is an auto-didact who did not attend high school or college and was raised as a Modern Orthodox Jew, but he has “outgrown” any such millenia-old wisdom teachings. In other words he knows nothing. However! He has a bunch of exciting speculations based on the bad sci-fi he read as a kid! Also he writes terrible Harry Potter fanfiction, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, so you just know he’s a serious thinker.

THE TECH-BILLIONAIRES

Billionaire TESCREALs walk among us, or at least their incel fanboys do — the actual tech-billionaires are likely to be off on their private, floating islands or maybe in their underground bunkers, flip through this gallery to see some of the prime movers-and-shakers…

My personal theory is that these people have tiny, shriveled souls and no fellow-feeling for other humans. Being stunted in this way, they identify closely with robots. Tech edgelords get much more gratification from interacting with machines than they do with troublesome actual people (especially women) so the idea of robots taking over is not unpleasing to them.

In sum, Artificial Intelligence is causing yet another computer-based hassle about power, control, exploitation, democracy and regulation — just like every other technology development since the railroad. Or the spear. Or a rock.

The real enemy is the political and economic system that allows billionaires to determine our future. It really makes little difference if the ideas selectively adopted by billionaires are Episcopalianism, Darwinism, Wahabism, MAGA or TESCREAL. Billionaires are going to interpret ideas in ways that valorize themselves and protect their interests

James J. Hughes

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Previous posts listed below…

• Donnie’s NFTs
• Tales from the Crypto: SBF/FTX
• Battlefield Twitter
• Whatup Mid-Terms?
• NAFO Winning Eastern Front
• EXPLODE!

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