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The problem of AI is still very indistinct to me. Throughout the readings people have been twiddling their fingers and biting their fingernails worrying about the mass reproduction of biases into the architecture of society (as I understand it) but I'm hardly even aware of what that means, and it's to the detriment of their cause. The other camp, the accelerationists, sitting across from the doomers (a more apt name might be the reservationists), are not necessarily better communicators but they have the enormous advantage of having compelling subject matter. I am bored to death reading about vague and unarticulated threats to the equality of all people in society without ever being told what they might look like, and I am captivated entirely by the TESCREAL ideologies and thoughts of what life in the universe might plausibly look like. These nouveau intellectuals in Silicon Valley might not be the most intellectually reserved of their ilk but they have got to be one of the most vital, most imaginative, and most zealous of all intellectual movements still breathing on the planet right now. When they start dreaming of what could be done into the future they have this incredible audacity that's willing to fly up into the face of God and spite him, and what's thrilling about this moment in technological history is that this time Babel might not fall. We've killed God already, so who is there to smite our monuments any more?

Sept 30 - The Map is not the Territory