Accelerationism and Doomerism The coup at OpenAI basically a struggle between a nervous committee of professional worrywarts who believe the way AI is being developed will be harmful, especially to the already marginalized, versus those with utopian visions of engineered adise, the transcending of the human body, the unlimited expansion of consciousness.\
Doomers believe AIs will lead to the death of humanity. Accelerationists believe the AI enabled future will see rapid scientific advancement and will in essence save the world. \
Marc Andreessen, Techno-Optimist Manifesto: those who argues those that fear the pace of development "should be condemned for embracing \ldblquote the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death." William MacAskill imagines the countless human beings living in the future and recommends valuing them according to their number; the future is of far greater significance than the present. Significance to abortion\
LLM concerns: Mass generation of hate speech and disinformation (Meta's academic LLM could generate papers about the benefits of eating crushed glass and committing suicide or about how homosexuals are evil)\
Text-to-image concerns: Generating CSA material, reinforcing stereotypes, biases, mass disinformation\
The danger of TESCREAL ideologies is that technologies will be powerful, accessible, and weaponizable. \
TESCREAL ideologies as a vehicle for billionaire interests in the deployment of AI.
Sam Bankman-Fried's TESCREAL ideology convinced him he was morally justified in making as much money as possible in order to fund effective charities\
From the WIRED article "Research priorities follow the funding, and given the large sums of money being pushed into AI in support of an ideology with billionaire adherents, it is not surprising that the field has been moving in a direction promising an~\ldblquote unimaginably great future\rdblquote around the corner while proliferating products harming marginalized groups in the now."\
The latent dangers of TESCREAL as a second wave eugenics \
Discriminatory attitude. Racists and eugenicists within AI community. SO TESCREAL and AI are racist and ableist and they hurt marginalized communities and they hurt the environment.\ \ \ \ Postsecularity \ \ Talking about the restyling of religion\ \ That religion, such a rich repository of myth, is now a heavily saturated and incredibly dense \ \ \ \ \ --Religion, a repository of myth, has become a heavily saturated and incredibly dense solution that modern people draw on with incomplete knowledge and so fill in with their own aggregate information\ \tab -- I've been interested in the forms in which speech is evolving, e.g. using voices to enact a story rather than just tell it, to express with drama because of a lack of verbiage \ \tab -- The grand overwhelming intellectual surface of religious text, imagery, motif demands interpretation, and we fill in with:\ \tab -- Bits of ideology, fragments of cultural knowledge, pop science, phrases \ \tab\tab -- Zero sum game, exponential growth, critical mass, Occam's razor, sine wave of emotions, diminishing returns, butterfly effect, sunk cost fallacy, schrodinger's cat, feedback loop, catalyst, bell curve, quantum leap, binary, path of least resistance, inverse relationship, survival of the fittest, second order effects,\ \tab\tab -- the alpha/beta concept, the frog in boiling water, the stanford prison experiment\ \tab\tab -- karma. yin/yang, that inuit have 50 words for snow\ \tab\tab -- point being these are not connected to any body of knowledge we possess but exist as isolated phrases with tidy definitions in our vocabulary, and we bring all this to bear on religion, with the tchachkis of cultural knowledge\ \tab\ \ \ -- \ldblquote The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.\rdblquote Edward O. Wilson\ -- The need for ritual and myth is permanent, we encode everything with meaning and read code into every possible thing\ \tab -- e.g. the colour blue from the article AI Creation Meme\ \tab -- blue was prevalent in background and in the robot hands, representing intelligence, trust, communication, and efficiency. Blue is royal and is embedded in authority, businesses of safety and reliability, e.g. banks, healthcare, insurfance. It is rarely in nature but is in the sky, the ocean, thick ice, and distant objects like mountains\ -- "The modern man wo feels and claims that he is nonreligioius still retains a larege stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals" (Mircea Eliade) which validates laws, customs, institutions, and beliefs\ -- "Myths deal with the "species'' on which life depends [...] What is sacred is given mythic status. Through myth we can discover what categories are central to a world. In this way we respect accounts of how the ancestors or gods gave humans the life sustaining arts of making fire, weapons, magic, tools, canoes, and dams. Elsewhere, "essential knowledge" may be of a moral kind, with the myths focusing on the gift of religious laws. The "laws of Moses'' given on Mt. Sinai (including the Ten Commandments [...]) are such a collection." William Paden\ -- hierarchy, lineages, sources of nourishment, and essential moral and practical knowledge.\ -- The recreation of religious motif as a means of validating the pursuit of AI\ -- Creation of a god/summoning of a demon\ -- Rosko's Basilisk, the confirmed future existence of a omnipotent being that is weighing your every move from the future, creates concept of sin and damnation, a Final Judgement\ -- Future Judgement Day AI will make its decision based on its training data; if we are condemned, do we deserve it? \ -- Norman AI \ \tab -- AI trained on videos of gore, death etc. Shown abstract images, other AIs see cats, vases, etc, Norman sees people being electrocuted, shot\ \tab -- AGI trained on the entire internet might see in humanity what all the hateful, bitter, resentful, scorned, vitriolic permanent populace of the internet see in humanity, unworthiness and disgust, infinte contempt, total misanthropy\ \tab -- US court used AI for risk assessment, was biased against black prisoners, resulting from flawed information\ \tab -- Predictive policing algorithms biased, using historical crime data\ -- Singularity as a moment in which the barriers between the physical and nonphysical become blurred, when consciousness begins to rule\ -- A kingdom of heaven? Or a final battle between good and evil?\ \ \ Magic/mysticism of technology\ -- Creation of a god/devil\ -- Final Judgement\ -- Rosko's Basilisk\ -- Moral, omniscient god, concept of sin and damnation\ -- Technology as rocks engraved with runes and infused with electricity \ -- "We took rocks and made them think"\ -- Hard problem of consciousness \
QUESTIONS\
How would a future AGI determine whether or not to eliminate humanity? It seems like it would be based on its training data -- if so the future of humanity would depend on that set of data. What decision would an AI make that had the full picture? \ \ This is a sort of Final Judgement event, where all the sins of virtues of humanity are totaled up and final sentence is passed on us. \ \
LECTURE\
\ TESCREAL ideology as a vehicle for the ideologies of billionaires ... religions have most often been used as the promulgators of imperial ideology with the king or emperor or tsar as a mirror image of the king who have each created and sustain the order of the universe, and what each of them require is faith in order to fuel the order that is being created, and now likewise with science having made God improbable we are now reaching for a new supernatural justification, a new heaven that can be explicated in rational terms, and the TESCREAL bundle supplies that, but it seems they have as little to do with improving humanity's lot as Christianty did with creating a righteous society. \ \ So what is the end of it really? \
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