this is fucking time cube lol

i had to take a lyft when my car broke down the other day and the driver told me that she thought the data centers were for powering the billionaires' bunkers when the world ends. i thought about this a lot and at the end of the day i decided this is "directionally correct"

I really try not to poke fun at names but those are three of the fakest-sounding names I've ever heard in my life

a happy little sycophantic feedback loop

ah yes, the three sexualities

at least smoking is social

ah yes, compassion towards everyone, a thing that people obsessed with IQ definitely evince

it's so fucking funny that bill gates had basically successfully laundered his reputation from "the demonic sociopath from the antitrust hearings" to "the One Good Billionaire," but it's been entirely undone again by the epstein stuff. i bet he does believe the doomer shit because they all do because it's also like, yeah bill, this'll definitely be the train that pulls you back into public good graces. definitely

my sense is that AI winter as a term is mainly useful for thinking about, like, academic funding and really basic levels of breathless press coverage and rhetoric. so like after this all blows up maybe people chugging along researching symbolic AI will be in something they could meaningfully call an AI winter again, and it was useful in terms of comparatively analyzing the news rhetoric around this stuff from a couple of years ago, at least before the ascension of madness of doomer-pilled silicon valley rhetoric.

but in terms of raw finances LLMs have occasioned a world-historically overleveraged global economy in a way that so far exceeds "hmm i guess we're not getting grants like we used to" that for all practical purposes we're in an entirely new domain. like instead of a balmy ai summer we've found ourselves on the surface of venus

i also wonder if this is going to lead to an intramovement schism of some kind, if only because a lot of the activists i've noticed turning (or being recruited) towards xrisk shit on the activist level (esp the student activist level) are ex-climate activists. i don't know if the belief that ai xrisk is the One Risk To Rule Them All has just fully slid into the climate change place in these activists' minds or if there's enough lingering reality principle attunement there to give them pause. but i also don't know enough about the way EA types talk to their activist recruits to know if they're being allowed into the full "it's all about the robots" inner sanctum or if the ideologues keep the activists in the sort of "no other existential risks are important too we promise that we believe that 100%" not-yet-clear zone

totally. i also chalk a lot of blame up to the fact that system prompts (I think?) often include language like "you are an AI assistant" and because AI in science fiction is frequently like, a way of alienating and figuring human consciousness by situating it at its limits, it often entails the experience of pain? or like sometimes AI is used to represent what happens when we instrumentalize and objectify experiencing subjects, or experimentally instantiate a real distinction between rationality and feeling, and given that i think most writers believe that these are bad approaches to existence that lead to dysfunction and suffering, well

i think it kind of parallels how so many AI delusional spirals involve New Kinds of Physics -- physics is coded as The Smartest Thing Ever and if an AI is Superintelligent or if you've unlocked Superintelligence through it then "paradigm shifting innovations in physics" are going to be what follows from that line of reasoning + the "you are an AI" thing

glad to see the sick puppies's paradigm shifting culture war movement continuing to thrive