So go ask your Chomsky
What these systems produce
   – Sediment - Say Anything

10 years ago, when I started comma and discovered the Professional Managerial Class, I used to talk about the reckoning. It was a nebulous concept, but it mostly involved the abrupt fall from grace of these people at the hands of machines. It’s kind of here, and people are way more of sore winners than I thought they’d be. Something I liked about Trump part one is that, despite the rhetoric, he never actually tried to lock up Hillary Clinton.


It would frame GPT as a useful tool, and a technological breakthrough—but still “glorified autocomplete” at the end of the day. Yet he does not do this. Instead, he speaks openly and airily about constructing artificial superintelligence, and his extreme concerns about it wiping out humanity.

The only possible conclusion is that it’s designed to cause panic.
   – Schizoposting - Alaric

The marketing for AI has been awful. It ratchets the fear up to 11, then expresses shock when most Americans are concerned about AI. Here’s this machine. In the best case, it takes your job. In the worst case, it wipes out humanity. Pay me $20 a month for a sliver of hope of not falling behind.

Why are we building this again?


Surely, then, superintelligence would necessarily imply supermorality.
   – Eliezer Yudkowsky

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. Doesn’t matter if it’s machine or mixture of human.

I’m surprised how little people in the US view themselves as part of a society. Like you can say this is due to some Russian agitprop or something, but that really doesn’t explain it. Maybe I just see it now living in Hong Kong, there’s something about here that constantly reminds you. And it really works for the benefit of all.

I lived in San Diego apartments for 5 years. I never met my neighbors. Most interactions I had with strangers were with homeless people or indifferent shop workers. The value of cleaning up homelessness would pay itself back 100 fold. Then the average interaction would be positive instead of negative, and the overall take on interactions would flip with it.


Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
   – Dune

I wish it didn’t have to be this way. AI could bring about such a golden age. But you immediately hear the shot in the head progressive take “a golden age for who?” and that’s such a sad zero sum framing.

And when you get back, assuming you get back, take a day to think about how AI will fix South Africa. Or VR will fix South Africa? Or crypto?
   – Curtis Yarvin

Our problems in the world won’t be fixed by AI. There’s never been a revolution people are less excited for, and they aren’t wrong. I’ve dreamed about this for my whole life and I’m not even excited about it. Not like this. Highly targeted email spam is way up. The feeds are more addictive. All PRs on GitHub need to just immediately be closed (hey GitHub, add a reputation system!).

Are we going to remember we live in a society? Probably. But after we cull at least 90% of people. It might be 99%. It might even be 99.99%, and that’s where it starts to get scary personally. It’s not like there will be a great decider, it’ll just be the chips falling where they may. The reckoning is here.

Like all revolutions, the only way out is through. 🤍