Here’s my first shot at it:
“Imagine if the stereotypical high-school nerd became a supervillain.”
>proceed to punt this goal decades or centuries by helping to justify a tech bubble which consumes tons of R&D resources for no apparent benefit and will bind further resources in the future to adapt to an aggravated climate crisis, and also inspiring a slew of technofascists too dumb to tell the difference between tech that benefits mankind and tech that exploits and oppresses
Not to mention, the aforementioned bubble’s given us shit like some jackasses’ ghoulish (and failed) attempt to “revive” George Carlin, attempts to automate end-of-life care, “AI seances” designed to scam the grieving, and God-knows-what-else.
So, the very concept of “defeating death with technology” has probably been thoroughly discredited as impossible, inherently ghoulish, or a combo of the two.
It is technically correct to call Yud a “renowned AI researcher”, but saying someone’s renowned in a pseudoscience such as AI is hardly singing their praises.
I tagged it NSFW because the previous thread was tagged NSFW.
I didn’t mean to link something else, I just mangled my description. Thanks for catching it.
A piece like this would dovetail nicely with Baldur’s deep-dive into AI’s link to esoteric fascism. Hope to see it get finished.
I was tempted to write this up for Pivot but fuck giving that blog any sort of publicity.
On the one hand, I can see you not wanting to give the fucker attention, on the other hand, AI’s indelible link to fascism is something which needs to be hammered home and shit like this gives you a golden opportunity to do it.
To paraphrase one of South Park’s more infamous jokes (because I’m not giving this shit any dignity):
Looks like we’re getting a lotta sneer material here! The topic is “People Who Annoy Scoot”.
Personally, my money’s on them being thoroughly lost in the AI safety sauce - the idea of AI going rogue has been a staple in pop culture for quite a long time (TV Tropes lists a lot of examples), and the relentless anthropomorphisation of LLMs makes it pretty easy to frame whatever fuck-ups they make as a sentient AI pulling malicious shit.
And given man’s long and storied history of manipulating and misleading their fellow man, I can see plenty of opportunity for fuck-ups baked directly into your average LLM’s training data.
🎶Say, Yud, I hear you like em’ young
🎶You better not ever go to Cell Block One
- following on from 1, it’s kind of funny that the EAs, who you could pattern match to a “high school nerd” stereotype, are intellectually beaten out by an analog of the “jock” stereotype of sports fans: fantasy league participants who understand the concept of “intangibles” that EAs apparently cannot grasp.
On a wider note, it feels the “geek/nerd” moniker’s lost a whole lot of cultural cachet since its peak in the mid-'10s. It is a topic Sarah Z has touched on, but I could probably make a full goodpost about it.
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(your shocked Pikachu was borked, I ended up fixing it out of frustration. Took me a couple attempts - standard formatting fucks it up no matter what, but code’s kinder to it)
This hits a lot worse after JD Vance became Vice-Pres Elect
Happy cake day, Charlie!
And less time than her partner-in-crime, who went out of his way to show a complete lack of remorse and a strong willingness to reoffend, all whilst lying out his ass to basically everyone.
Honestly, SBF’s antics probably helped make Ellison look like her role in this was much smaller than it actually was
oh yeah she got two years’ jail for her part in stealing eleven fucking billion with a B dollars
A slap on the wrist compared to Sam Bankman-Fried’s twenty-five years. Turns out working with the feds, admitting your guilt and knowing when to fold 'em are pretty important when karma finally catches up with you.
I’m gonna risk coming off too harsh and say this gaggle of meth microdosing ratfucks don’t deserve rehab, they deserve to rot in jail. Fuck them.
You could also ask ChatGPT to make it for you. The idea’s complete garbage unworthy of an actual writer’s time, so I’d let it slide in this case
Ran across a BlueSky thread that fits this perfectly - its a social sciences and humanities reading list on AI in education.