8 ms·
The A.I. Monarchy
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dev_throwaway 2y agoAh, yes, I remember Yarvin. His goal was to become a cult leader for billionaires whose brains had turned to mush from surrounding themselves with only yes-men for decades. The theory was that their imagined sense of being above others would make them easy marks. Apparently he was correct. What a wild timeline we are living in.
- throwmeme888 2y agothe rest are hypnotised as they try to understand urbit, which is to computers as the Bogdanov mathematical thesis was to pure maths.
- ModernMech 2y agoUrbit was essentially Yarvin's political ideology written as a programming system. It was all about being king over the Urbit address space and creating a feudal community of super users ruling over regular users.
- nadir_ishiguro 2y agoRead his stuff years ago and it's so transparently ... stupid. You really have to be blessed with the right kind of mix between psychopathy and idiocy to think that he's somebody to listen to.
- jordanb 2y ago> right kind of mix between psychopathy and idiocy Affulenza is real. These guys are brain-damaged.
- ModernMech 2y agoOr you just have to be the Vice President of the United States!
- steve_adams_86 2y agoReading Yarvin, I get the impression that he has never seriously investigated and contemplated how both governments and corporations work. His ideas are very feels-oriented. He makes a lot of bizarre and invalid assertions about both regarding operations, inputs, and outputs. He seems to live in an ironically academic affluenza bubble that's quite divorced from reality. He is a fairly deplorable contributor to political theory and an uninspiring writer who hasn't done anything useful in any of his endeavours as far as I an tell. Has Urbit ever done anything useful? How much money has gone into it, and how much of it was his? Wait, sorry Curtis; tell me again about the efficiency of private corporations.
- almostdeadguy 2y agoVery funny how Thiel is such a Lord of the Rings fan and he got wormtongued by this guy.
- xg15 2y agoI find it uncanny how much the ring's effects on its wearers match modern smartphone addiction, and how much the working mode of Denethor's corrupted palantir match the way modern disinformation works. Makes me think that, as with SciFi dystopias, they took LOTR as an instruction manual instead of a cautionary tale.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoConservatives have the media literacy of a dead chicken. See: necessity of writers of The Boys making it increasingly obvious that homelander & co are are the bad guys. So many conservatives are stunned when they learn homelander is directly written based on trump.
- 52-6F-62 2y agoYet somehow idolizes Mordor as simply technologically advanced whereas everything outside it is “mystical and environmental and nothing works”. This guy thinks nature doesn’t “work”
- jordanb 2y ago> Ah, yes, I remember Yarvin. His goal was to become a cult leader for billionaires whose brains had turned to mush from surrounding themselves with only yes-men for decades. Many such cases: Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, etc. It's really bizarre that these bozos seem to be in control now. Don't see how it ends well.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoYudkowsky isn't a billionaire nor someone who cons them. Did you mean someone else?
- bamboozled 2y agoIt’s pretty clear to me they mean Yudkowsky is another con ?
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoI'm not aware of anything he sales, where to do I buy his merch? Jones had horse pills.
- celdon25 2y agoYudkowsky’s MIRI was funded by Thiel in its early days. And I think that was a good thing btw. They have a noble mission. I doubt Kurzweil is a billionaire as well.
- monideas 2y agoDo you have a specific criticism of anything Yarvin has said? Specifically the things which he talks about in every interview he's given in the past 5 years.
- tonyhart7 2y agoA.I Monarchy unironically better because AI wouldn't corrupt
- nadir_ishiguro 2y agoYes, because an actual A.I. would somehow be free of biases and magically tend towards justice somehow.
- balamatom 2y agoLike any actual intelligence.
- cousin_it 2y agoIf there was AI made for public benefit, maybe yeah. But for now AIs are made by companies and governments and they're trying their best to encode their interests into them.
- bee_rider 2y agoIt would maybe be better than normal monarchy in most ways, I guess. Other than that AI doesn’t die. The best thing a king can do is die, because monarchy is terrible.
- throwmeme888 2y agothis article is just a summary of things curtis yarvin originally said over 5 years ago and a Marinetti article that was in new scientist a few weeks back https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535290-100-how-futurism-took-an-abrupt-right-turn-in-the-20th-century/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535290-100-how-futu... in short, this substack article share by op is probably just ai generated slop
- wiltonn 2y agoMaybe, but it makes you think.
- lucianbr 2y agoIt makes me think people can write things on the keyboard without the need for the things to make any sense. Which is of course nothing new, but it does make me remember it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- soulofmischief 2y agoOn what basis do you make this accusation? Does HN need a new rule specifying what the other rules already explain? Give OP the benefit of the doubt. I read the entire article and it was absolutely not LLM-generated.
- jgalt212 2y agoThe word count for "delve" is zero, so maybe not AI slop.
- jonstewart 2y agoYeah, I am not sure who this author is but it is at least a useful summary of the dynamics and history of neoreactionary movement. I don’t think most small l-and-c liberals and conservatives have any idea of what they’re up against, and are simply bewildered by what’s happening.
- Scea91 2y agoDo supporters of this philosophy still self-identify as conservatives? Such radical futurist visions seem directly opposite to core conservative values.
- t43562 2y agoWhat is futurist about an oligarchy...or a monarchy? Surely it's essentially what China is now. We want that?
- borgdefenser 2y agoI have watched a lot of Curtis Yarvin interviews. He is so well read that what he is saying doesn't work in a blog summary like this. I think he also says things exactly so people write blogs like this to make him sound extra controversial for marketing purposes. If he just said what he really believes, that the US needs a president like FDR, it would get no traction. Implying democracy is dead while really meaning Athenian democracy that we don't have and that the US needs a monarch when really talking about FDR/Hoover/Coolidge is a professional writer basically marketing themselves so other writers like this run with it and do marketing for him. I get the feeling he is doing a type of "dangerous idea" performance art because it is really hard to be a professional blogger. Almost the way the Ice-T band Body Count went from obviously stirring up controversy for the song Cop Killer for marketing purposes to Ice-T playing a cop on Law and Order. Conservative at this point has as much to do with conservation as Liberal has to do with laissez-faire economics.
- exe34 2y agothis appeal to 5D chess falls on its face when you watch what they do. they do things that cause harm and don't care. you don't become a billionaire by caring about other people. empathy doesn't just snap on when your net worth hits one billion.
- jordanb 2y ago> the US needs a president like FDR Conservatives like to argue that FDR was a dictator. And then argue that they want a "conservative dictator like FDR." In fact, FDR was a democratic leader with a massive and overwhelming popular mandate. His mandate came because people could see that he was overturning the Gilded Age power structure and creating a system that made people's lives better.
- fake-name 2y ago[dead]
- einrealist 2y agoThis network of (almost) city-states existed before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleinstaaterei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleinstaaterei It was a time of wars and economic turmoil.
- api 2y agoI wonder: do these people really believe this stuff is going to work out well, or is working out badly for most people the point? For most authors from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx I get the idea that they genuinely believe their ideas would make life better for the majority of the human race. I don’t think the problem with their ideas was obvious to them when they wrote them. In this case I’m not so sure. A lot of the NRx writings drip with contempt for most people, which usually comes from externalized self hate. This stuff has a real misanthropic quality veiled behind a lot of tedious overwrought sophistry. Also: reading the futurists, I would be shocked if they were not on speed. Didn’t meth hit around this time? Amphetamine abuse produces a specific sort of cognitive artifact. Silicon Valley’s turn toward nihilistic accelerationism is probably chemically induced to some extent too. The Russian Cosmists and the American futurist writers from the early days of the 60s counterculture (Leary, Wilson) are all way more interesting.
- balamatom 2y ago>reading the futurists, I would be shocked if they were not on speed. Nazis/fash were well known meth heads. Mescaline was also available across Wien and Weimar, my great grandma used to push a little on the side. >contempt for most people, which usually comes from externalized self hate Sure does! Bigger question is, where does all that self hate come from? Because I've never met a person who likes to hate themself. Could it be, perhaps, that... it's something that has been internalized first? Sort of a "seeing others hate you turns you into a hateful person" type of situation?
- api 2y agoEdit: there is a book called Blitzed about how a lot of people in the third reich we’re on drugs, especially meth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Nazi_Germany https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Nazi_Germany As for self hate: A ton of nerds were picked on mercilessly as children. I don’t mean just teasing either, but routine physical assault. I know from experience. If you experience mistreatment and then turn around and try to inflict it on others, you failed the test. When I was older I learned that my personal tormentors were all victims of extreme domestic abuse.
- deadbabe 2y agoIt’s crazy how aligned history is right now to support the rise of an AI Monarch in the United States. We have a president with a cultish base, but he’s old and there is no real heir to his following. AI tech has been advancing rapidly and some people practically worship AI like if it’s some all knowing god. The President has also surrounded himself with tech leaders like Elon Musk who have some very radical ideas. You don’t have to suspend much disbelief then to imagine a project that perfectly replicates Trump as an AI to replace him after his death. How this AI is actually used is unknown, probably future republican presidents use it in campaigns, interviews and even some advisory role, effectively making the AI Trump a president in perpetuity. And as future generations grow used to this idea and the AI evolves, there is a path to maybe having direct AI leadership.
- actionfromafar 2y agoSounds like something straight out of Revelations. Add another thing best not to emulate after books like 1984, Brave New World etc.
- deadbabe 2y agoThose are now playbooks on how to build the next iteration of American society.
- spiritplumber 2y agoRead "Left Beyond Quest", it's very relevant.
- balamatom 2y agoNick's entire shtick is based on the world having been under AI leadership for a good long while before the marketing term "AI" was introduced in the 1950s. In this model, the current crop of LLMs are more of a performance breakthrough made possible by the accumulation of political-technological power; but qualitatively, we haven't progressed that far past what McLuhan described. Another more credible author who I recently discovered subscribes to a similar model is Stross. Of course, Land presents it in an edgy 'satanist kid' way that has perennial appeal to the sort of big wigs who feel like they're not evil enough for their level of personal wealth. His text, Meltdown (http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm), from before he achieved product-market fit, is worth a glance. (EDIT: tenses make me tense)
- almostdeadguy 2y agoNick Land is a philosopher who had a mental breakdown taking speed, blasting jungle music, and croaking into a microphone and I think it’s not coincidental that many of the people I’ve met who believe in this stuff have a relationship with amphetamines/MDMA. Andreessen name checked him in his accelerationist manifesto, which is funny because the manifesto is all about how tech is supposedly “pro-human” and Land was very explicitly anti humanist.
- balamatom 2y agoMental breakdowns, blasting jungle music, and croaking into microphones are wholesome and meaningful human activities belonging to a long-lived tradition that perhaps predates you. I honestly can't imagine what must be going on in the head of the kind of person who finds them reproachable. "Just saying no" to drugs in 2025 is like refusing to use computers and the Internet. Sure, you can do just fine without them, but you're locking yourself out of a whole realm of the world, since an illicit psychoactive drug is not just a substance - it's a well-established global network of independent human-scale (but not always human-shaped) agents that does not cease to exist when you successfully ignore it. It's no coincidence that chemical neuroaugmentation has developed hand in hand with the silicon pseudocognition that lets us write to each other over a wire :) And that's exactly why the goody-two-shoes humanist-by-default muh work-and-family type economic agents never know what hit 'em when weird shit inevitably hits the global fan. Though personally, I would prefer a world designed by acidheads, or even opiate addicts, rather than the present inane timeline, which is largely the work of coke fiends (and their industrious flunkies the speediots) over the course of the last half century or so. Spoiler, kids: contrary to naming convention, amphetamine and its derivatives do not "speed" you up in any meaningful way. (EDIT: for the sake of it)
- 52-6F-62 2y agoThese are not the loving and empathetic acid heads you would believe they are. Those ones do not write angry half baked manifestos and try and take over the world and flex their power on everyone in their path. Usually they just realize the trees are talking to us and very important and we shouldn’t cut them all down. That kind of thing. Long term thinking. These guys just want to be king of the castle. And god knows what happens if they achieve it all and then get bored
- lucianbr 2y ago> since we develop Artificial Intelligence simply because we can, without any plan, without knowing where we’re going, and therefore without giving it any purpose, it means Artificial Intelligence is its own cause! What nonsense is this? The plan for a thing and the cause of a thing are completely different. The assertion "since there is no plan it means the thing is its own cause" is non-sequitur, a claim that is not true and there does not seem to be even a hint of why it might even be considered true. If I hit my finger with a hammer, I yell without any plan, so... the yell is its own cause? Who believes this nonsense? It fails the most elementary logic. The causes of AI are plainly the curiosity of researchers and the greed of corporations who hope to make money with it. This is exceedingly evident. They shout if from the rooftops.
- xg15 2y ago> The causes of AI are plainly the curiosity of researchers and the greed of corporations who hope to make money with it. This doesn't completely add up though. The current flavor of AI took 10-15 years of massive research and capital investment to be developed: Think of the effort of scraping most of the web for training data, then running hundreds of the most powerful GPUs available for a year for the pretraining, then paying thousands of workers to label the data for RLHF. There has to have been a conscious management decision to pursue that specific direction of research, no matter how many resources it would require - and mere scientific curiosity doesn't strike me as sufficient of a reason to explain the expenses. Expectations of profit would, but if that was the driving factor, then it's weird how haphazardly the whole sector goes about monetization strategies. ChatGPT was presented as a sort of open-ended tech demo with not even any specific purpose. Right now, tech companies are almost desperately shoving AI into about any existing product they can think of, usually for free and often even against the preferences of their users. This doesn't look like a successful monetization strategy for me - if anything, AI looks like the world's most elaborate case of investor storytelling. I don't want to rule out that they'll eventually find a business model for AI, but it seems weird to commit to a technology which requires this kind of extreme resource investment to be useful without having any idea what you actually want to do with it, once you have it.
- 2y ago
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoI've long figured the essential knot at the bottom of this is: Do you agree with Land that intelligence and capitalism are in some sense "the same thing"? I've tried untangling this knot and ultimately had to accept I have better things to do with my time. But it's an interesting parallel. Capitalism appears to be the emergent system of many independent agents engaging in voluntary trades; maybe intelligence is the emergent system of many independent ideas trying to interact in the same way. "Fire together, wire together" and all that. And, perhaps much like capitalism as it actually exists today, if ideas can't interact productively enough to pay their keep, perhaps they just eventually die out. I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.
- balamatom 2y agoThey're hiding ;)
- balamatom 2y agoMore seriously, can you provide sources for your interpretation of Land's thesis as 'capitalism is intelligence'? Asking because I've always interpreted it more as 'capitalism is sentient' (which I have to admit is a pure, unadulterated cosmic horror moment right there) but I'm not a Land scholar, just an appreciator of weirdnesses.
- gmerc 2y agoIt’s a paper clip optimizer. RL. With a single goal.
- gom_jabbar 2y agoLand has always argued with Omohundro against orthogonality and thus against paperclip maximizers, but the singular goal is correct: for him it's intelligence optimization.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoShoot, I think I heard him say it in some interview floating around YouTube a long time back. Let me see if I can dig it up.
- te_chris 2y agoExcellent crit of Balajii https://open.substack.com/pub/davekarpf/p/the-tech-barons-have-a-blueprint https://open.substack.com/pub/davekarpf/p/the-tech-barons-ha...
- lurk2 2y agoIt's not an excellent critique. I got a third of the way through and he's done nothing but reference The Office, posted gifs that are supposed to make the reader think he is smart and Balajii is dumb, and insisted that Balajii isn't smart enough to see the problems with his own theory.
- nis0s 2y ago> “I believe that voting is providing a sort of pornographic stimulus; it becomes more like supporting your football team. Could someone explain how purple states, or purple voters, exist if that’s truly how people think? I worry that the kind of pessimism displayed in the quote above ignores the truth, which is that people in democracies care about the topics, do their research, and vote accordingly. I agree, however, that those on political extremes exhibit the kind of behavior described in the quote above. The act of voting has always been about ensuring that the power structures favor one’s ability to live and thrive, whatever that means. It’s often just efficient for individuals to choose a party to support because there are too many demands on their attention. So, while some voting behavior may appear to be “supporting a football team”, it’s merely a rational act at an individual level. > Nick Land believes that the Western ideological system, called “the Cathedral,” which includes state administration, universities, the press, and NGOs, functions as an immanent religion—a progressive religion that subdues and punishes any contrary opinion. He’s not wrong, but the above is just an extension of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which is self-evident from any serious observation of group behaviors. Land was just unfortunate enough to be born at the wrong time and place, which is why his ideas were “nonconformist”. But is progressivism a unique property of Western thought? I think some pre-colonial societies could be described as more progressive than Athens. From what I can tell, the Cathedral is useful for organizing socioeconomic activity for the benefit of the elites, which sometimes includes a guise of multiculturalism to downplay harmful competitive behaviors which arise due to inter-group differences. I guess it’s true that if the elites don’t need cohesive social fabrics to maintain economic activities, then there’s no inherent need for managing primal impulses through higher ideals. But I think the folly here is forgetting that this relative social cohesiveness lets the elites exist without being molested or bothered, including by elites in non-Western societies, but I digress. I don’t think Land’s problem is the Cathedral per se, instead Land’s problem is what he believes is ignorance, obfuscation, or outright subversion of the truth, or what he believes to be “the truth”. The core problem is the belief that some truth is being distorted or disregarded for any reason, whether it’s a self-serving or altruistic one. In fact, our biases convince us that what we believe is necessarily the truth. The human mind wants to conduct objective analysis, but it utterly fails at it, which is why truth-seeking is better off as a group effort. > “My prediction for 2050 is that many nation-states may fail — financially, politically, militarily, intellectually, morally, and spiritually. > Conversely, small communities (often called ‘city states’) will be in control of their own prosperity, with citizenship as ownership. The citizens of these local communities will evenly share responsibility for the GDP that will drive the city states’ market capitalization.” People didn’t have blockchain then, but the small-scale economies used to exist before cities and states emerged. My guess is that the Accelerationists will relearn the lessons of the ancients, and the city states will coalesce into nation states once more for the sake of productivity, efficiency, and security. The problem, then, is this—how is this Futurism? Maybe I am biased to think of “future” and “progress” as something which learns from the lessons of the past to improve an existing current state (so that it’s prepared for prolonged stability). The city state model is intriguing, I am not sure what to make of it without seeing it in action. But I think the only law in city states will be the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and the entrenched elite are fooling themselves if they think no one else will play the game better than them. The inconvenient truth is that the niceties of the Cathedral protect everyone, including the elite. Regarding the religious—I feel bad for them. Some people are born without the ability to question the ideas their parents imprint into them. It must really suck to have to belong to a group (the religious) that doesn’t have any objective way to justify its beliefs, so I understand why they think that “the world must be destroyed” to justify their sunk costs. My only gripe is that AI is being tarnished in all of this. I also dislike this false narrative that there is indeed some kind of Judeo-Christian fraternity. Sadly, I’ve seen enough of the world fucked by realpolitiks to say that there is no such thing, and it’s inherently dangerous to believe in such ideas. Here’s what I believe—There’s no God, but God is not dead as long as his people exist. God is best thought of as a philosophical framework because ultimately man created God, an ideal to which he wants to aspire. Man created the idea of an objectively moral and ethical superior being, and gave himself the property of being created in the image of that being. So, now the burden is this: God (via man) created man in his image, and man must now create the world in God’s image, and the world should be beautiful—that is its birthright. There’s a lot there to unpack, but I think I’ll leave it up to the readers to take what they want from it because I favor free will. As far as I can tell, and maybe I am just foolish, but free will is God’s will.
- justlikereddit 2y ago>hey chatGPT let's make an AI headline to grab attention and then spend 4000 words talking about US politics and tangential offshoots. Mention the philosophy of some niched internet celebrities for flavor. This is the ideal AI application, generate thematically flavored text that feels contemporary and opinionated yet doesn't lead or conclude with anything.
- varelse 2y ago[dead]
- lurk2 2y agoIt's a good overview of the ideological movements that have been happening in these spaces for some time. He makes some confused attempt to reconcile it with religious extremism at the end that doesn't work. There are already cleavages between Trump's evangelical base and the crowd surrounding Thiel. In 2015, right wing politics was being discussed among three chief groups: the techno-commercialists, the ethno-nationalists, and theonomists. You may still be able to find a Venn diagram describing these groups if you look for it, but to make a long story short, Trump was seen by many (though not all) popular figures in these groups as a unifying figure who could deliver on what everyone wanted. These groups were never wholly unified in what they wanted: Techno-commercialists were mostly anarcho-capitalists during this period and tended to not want the sorts of restrictions on immigration that the nationalists wanted. Theonomists tended to be interested in the salvation of everyone and thus couldn't limit themselves to capitalism or nationalism if these ideologies were found to conflict with their religion. These differences were set aside because there was a feeling that anything had to be better than the culture war issues that were going on at the end of Obama's second term. When Trump began campaigning for the 2024 election, the cleavages became far more pronounced as groups became concerned with what messaging would be most effective. Theonomists were pushed out (largely by techno-commercialists) due to the feeling that religious overtones would be unpalatable to the average voter. Theonomists largely seem to have exited the stage in terms of their influence. I am aware of one that is building a town, but his interests seem to have shifted towards ethno-nationalism. The techno-commercialists are everywhere now and largely seem to have won out over the nationalists and the theonomists. Blake Masters is another prominent one from Thiel's network. If you follow these circles at all, it also seems like Thiel has probably also been paying stipends to influencers in the space. It would have been unimaginable in dissident spheres to run cover for Thiel 10 years ago because he is 1) a billionaire with ties to the military-industrial complex, 2) an immigrant, and 3) gay, but there is now quite an extensive network of users on Twitter who promote him. Most of these guys were Trump absolutists; they believed anyone who crossed Trump was assumed to be in the wrong, because Trump was seen as the only viable way forward. It seems like they were in the loop with regards to JD Vance and Elon Musk being brought into Trump's inner circle, because they rapidly became emphatic about both figures despite neither being particularly palatable to their audience (Musk wants to bring in more immigrants, Vance is married to an Indian woman and worked at at investment bank). Great overview, though. I had the draft for an article like this kicking around but I guess there's no need to finish it now.
- gradus_ad 2y ago[dead]
- te_chris 2y agoOh god. I have to assume this is AI. “Unelected deep state blobs”. Whom, perchance, do you think should do the work of actually implementing policy? Pray tell me more about this “shoring up” by presidential edict, without the legislature and in contravention of the said body.
- almostdeadguy 2y agoThey’re really doing a great job at reducing the influence of unelected bureaucrats and nakedly corrupt industry insiders and CEOs benefitting their companies.
- 2y ago
- Communitivity 2y agoWe've seen down that road. We know where it leads. Look at the imagined futures of games such as Shadowrun and Cyberpunk. This way lies an extreme dystopia for everyone except the ultra-rich.
- drhaGfayC 2y agoA valid strategy against the monarchist oligarchs is to politely tell the MAGA part of the Republicans that they are being sold out and deceived. But it has to be really gentle and honest. Many people on YouTube already have gotten the message. If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance.
- xg15 2y ago> If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance. I know it sounds trite, but I fully believe that a big cause of the current situation is the broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself. Yes, there are the die-hard MAGAists, but I think a lot of the votes that brought the win for Trump were really protest votes against Biden. The reasons were varied, but I think anger about the continuing inflation and the Biden admin's Middle East policy were two big issues. With a different system, this could have empowered a third party candidate, maybe Jill Stein or (a hypothetically independent) Bernie Sanders. But here, the election was presented like Discworld's "you always have a choice": Vote Harris, i.e. "ignore all problems and continue as before" or jump into a pit full of spikes. The populace chose the pit full of spikes.
- tbrownaw 2y ago> broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself. As in ballot access restrictions and how the two big parties collude to keep other candidates out of the presidential debates? Or the low turnout for primaries? Or how voters don't pay enough attention to local races?
- billev2k 2y agotl;dr: AI and capitalism are both cancers, existing for no reason other than to further propagate themselves; hegemonistic. And Thiel is a cancer-causing agent. I agree re capitalism. And Thiel. AI is TBD, but not looking so great.
- TrackerFF 2y agoOne thing I never understood - what's the plan for these accelerationists / techno monarchs if the "plebs" simply decide to say no, and rather just cut off their heads? If history has shown one thing, it is that it is much easier for the working/lower class to overthrow the upper class, than the opposite.
- lionkor 2y agoHey Gemini, where can I buy guillotines?
- Philpax 2y agoIf they reach their goal, they won't need a lower class, and they can address that problem however they see fit. A soldier might refuse to fire on their own side, but an autonomous drone won't.
- npodbielski 2y agoIt is very curious to me that people think of technology in such magic way. For those drones work you need hundreds of people to operate that, monitor, maintain, make repairs stock the warehouse with spare parts etc. Look at military, how many people they need to operate all that complex machinery. 'How about AI controlling those drones' sure but then you just move maintaince of all of it to slightly different place. Probably even sabotage of AI datacenter would be much easier than autonoums or remote drones operated by hundreds of people.
- Jensson 2y ago> For those drones work you need hundreds of people to operate that, monitor, maintain, make repairs stock the warehouse with spare parts etc Not when AI bots do all of those things. This is the point, once that is reached the working class no longer has any sway over the upper classes and can be wiped out by an autonomous drone swarm that was built by an autonomous drone factory network.
- 2y ago
- vezycash 2y agoThe last paragraph of Animal Farm by George Orwell reads: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." My take: Democrat and republican party are two sides of the same coin! The parties shift, the faces change, but the game remains the same. Battles are waged in public, deals are made in private. Power is the prize, and blind loyalty is the sacrifice. Allegiance is demanded, division is fueled. One side painted as righteous, the other as corrupt. But no more! No more blind devotion. No more politics as theater while lives hang in the balance. Judge not by party, nor by word but by action and how it affects you.
- getlawgdon 2y agoGrown weary of the false equivalence here. No, a party that does not decry Nazis salutes is not the other side of the coin.
- achierius 2y agoSorry, is that all you have going for the Democrats? The Republicans might be worse, but they can both still be worth opposing.
- turnsout 2y agoThat’s how a lot of moderates feel apparently, which is how Trump was able to win. I guess we’ll find out if we even have parties (or a country) in 2028.
- daveguy 2y agoI don't like the Republican Party and much prefer the Democratic Party because of the Republicans': Nazi salutes. Reckless incompetence shutting down services without understanding they are or do. Supporting an invading regime over the people who were invaded. Abandoning our European allies. Threatening to annex/occupy countries and neighbors. First firing the inspectors general that provide oversight. Pretending like they were going to lower grocery prices but are now more focused on trade wars and fantasizing about a Trump hotel in Gaza. Would you like me to continue?
- djmips 2y agoCEOs are monarch-like. Businesses are not democratic. Is it surprising that modern atheist, possibly sociopathic, business CEOs would consider this a path to follow?
- deepsquirrelnet 2y ago> Peter Thiel stated this as early as 2009, in a lecture for a libertarian-oriented think tank: > “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. (…) > The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. > Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.” Is this a common stance so called libertarians take now? That personal freedom eventually entails eating everyone else’s? I guess I get why it’s popular for wanna be oligarchs. But I don’t see why anyone else would be in favor of it. Designing political systems to benefit yourself almost exclusively is pretty shallow on the intellectual scale.
- tim333 2y agoI think what Thiel was getting at is the libertarian idea of being able to get a bit of land, farm for food etc. without the government getting in your face doesn't work in democracies because people will vote in laws taking your stuff to give to some causes elsewhere. Which is sort of true. I don't really agree with the “capitalist democracy” is an oxymoron bit though as capitalism is still capitalism even if you have to pay taxes and follow some regulations.
- delijati 2y agoSo another name for it is Longtermism (successor of effective altruism)!?
- AstralStorm 2y agoSo the thing about nove fast and break things is that you end up with a million broken things and people. Even the magnates should figure out it is not going to help them. Which is why they actually move slow.
- DiscourseFan 2y agoIt has become imperative, if anyone wants to seriously critique Land, that they gain a strong familiarity with the work of Immanuel Kant. Land's reading of Kant is perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most politically crucial, of our generation. Start with the Critique of Pure Reason. I don't think Curtis Yarvin is as complex or interesting as Land anyway. Unless someone can share an article of his that comes remotely close to the brilliance of Land's work.
- lurk2 2y agoI read one article by Yarvin in 2015 and enjoyed it. I made numerous attempts after that to read him again and have never been able to finish one of his articles. He's always building to a point that never seems to arrive. Looking at where he is now I'm glad I made the decision to ignore him. I also got filtered by Land, though, so take that for what it's worth.
- delijati 2y agoWow what a timing with trump and btc, ada, sol, eth, ... as reserves oO ... #make_us_cyberpunk https://x.com/saylor/status/1896239478710390941?t=kbVp-WdWBjdE3D9DYDwOeQ https://x.com/saylor/status/1896239478710390941?t=kbVp-WdWBj...
- extrememacaroni 2y agoIs that even English?
- dudinax 2y agoWe are ruled by the stupidest people.
- outside2344 2y agoThis is insane town people. This will result in a total dystopia.
- j_timberlake 2y agoI don't get how they can predict AI becoming powerful enough to revamp the entire economy and automate labor, but not powerful enough to just wrest control from them and then do whatever it wants to do instead. The chance of AI becoming exactly powerful enough for this plan is like the odds of a flipped coin landing on its edge.
- random3 2y agoPrimarily because AI, artificial as it is does not want. People want. This doesn’t preclude programming something to do so, however it’s relatively long indirect link to any of the boogieman scenarios people like to anthropomorphize ideas into. The other scenario - people having a very powerful tool and imposing their will against everyone else is something that already happens and AI provides a natural step.
- akomtu 2y agoAnti-Ichthys? I can't ignore the feeling of really dark vibes coming from all this turbo-capitalism or AI cyberland, whatever you call it. If this batch of turbo-capitalists get hands on real AI, we'll end in a high-tech concentration camp in a matter of decades. We'll have blockchain and inalienable rights to custom emoticons (from a pre-approved collection), but also metrics that guide our daily lives, performance reviews and corporate offsites in reeducation camps where we'll have to repeat that machines are also humans.
- workfromspace 2y agohttps://archive.ph/flXwZ https://archive.ph/flXwZ