Ian Coldwater 📦💥: I cannot overstate how important it is to understand that these guys are into AI because they’re in a literal eschatological cult

I cannot overstate how important it is to understand that these guys are into AI because they’re in a literal eschatological cult

AI feels like a real mania, a genuine collective break from reality among the ruling class. They might as well be pouring billions of dollars into an attempt to replace all jobs and knowledge with a large bronze idol of Dagon.

I am not being hyperbolic, but I wish I was

you're absolutely not being hyperbolic. when i first started writing my cyberpunk satire about this whole madness, some of the first dialogue i wrote was to spoof this whole vibe: “...more like a cult eager to bear witness to the birth of their own personal god.”

the weirdest part of the past 18 months has been how much of the "spoof" has rapidly actualized, before i can even get this thing finished

DESTINATION: VOID rewritten as farce

na it's definitely all set in SF + and a very 'early adopter' version of the metaverse, half a recession cycle in the future

look I just want to send techbros into space permanently okay

The original was bad enough!

Join the queue of dudes trying to make art about this stuff discontinuednotes.com/2024/01/07/t...

Techne And Telosdiscontinuednotes.com I went to see the Zach Blas show at the Arebyte Gallery. The experience was greatly enhanced by the fact that I had to travel out to the Ballardian zone of City Island, trek across barren public space...

Ian I've been trying to get people to understand this for damn near 20 years. It is… slow going, to say the least

Yeah, I've tried explaining it to people but esoteric futurism is worse than turn of the century secret society drama for making people's eyes glaze over.

Sometimes I really wonder how my kid is going to make his way through this next phase of capitalism we're moving into with his undergrad religion major. Other times I think we may all at some point be depending on him to tell us what the heck is going on.

If he’s studying theology, he may be the best prepared. The ability to think about religions as systems and to see the shape of religion systems without markings will be a critical toolset. If he’s studying for pastoral work, probably not, though.

E/acc considers themselves utopians but it's 100% a doomsday cult

Oh dear ghod you are NOT being hyperbolic. I realized how cultish this whole mess was when I started saying "no, LLMs are not AGI and will never be" using my background working with cognitive assessment results...and their arguments were incoherent and had nothing to do with understanding cognition.

Gotta be some way to get the religious right to go after them, distract them into doing something useful for a change

WBC chanting "technology is the devil" over and over, until it's ACTUALLY relevant and timely for them to do so, and then crickets

Like OpenAI staff was chanting "feel the AGI, feel the AGI" in meetings, it's almost hilarious but also deeply unnerving

Please say sike

Oof

And as with the nearly all eschatologists, bringing about their version of the rapture seems easier to them than dealing with the actual problems of the world.

Winner winner chicken dinner

Ian, I only took a religious studies class for fun. Why did it have to become relevant to how the ultra wealthy are ruining the tech industry?

youtu.be/m75SAPSrDjc?... I know there's articles on this, but for podcast listeners, there's also an episode on one about it!

Part One: Tech Bros Have Built A Cult Around AI | BEHIND THE BASTARDSyoutu.be 🛎 If You're New Subscribe ► https://bit.ly/BtBSubscribePart One: Tech Bros Have Built A Cult Around AI | BEHIND THE BASTARDSRobert sits down with Ify Nwadi...

Beat me to it... 😉 BtB did a great job on the topic, and @iwriteok.bsky.social is 100% right that there's a cult or scam that each person in the world could fall for. It's just unfortunate for all of us that this is the particular cult that our generation's wealthy and powerful fell into.

Why couldn't they have fallen for a cult built around making the lived lives of their less-well-off neighbors suck a little less, instead of accelerating their obsolescence? 😭

That's just Christianity, and almost all of Christian history is an attempt to get out from the clearly stated obligations of Christianity.

A relatively small but very real doomsday cult surrounded by a larger ring of people who can see that it's not very good yet but don't know or care to learn enough about how the underlying technology works to realize these aren't just normal v1.0 growing pains.

Having been on the outer periphery of the “rationality” branch of that cult for a couple of years many moons ago, that is so frickin true. The singularity is a when thing for them, not an if.

I'm tapping the sign (which depicts the cover of a book)

Neoreaction a Basilisk New Editionwww.eruditorumpress.com After a rather frustrating day grappling with Amazon, we are pleased to properly announce the revised edition of Neoreaction a Basilisk is now available for sale. This link will go to the current pape...

That book cover goes hard, ngl

They say tech guys are more grounded than occultists but any good chaos magician knows you don't immanetize the eschaton.

Are they though

That whole “feed the AGI!” story about OpenAI somehow came and went without a trace and it’s gonna turn me into an angry crank shouting on street corners. They’re literally cultists!

Is there more to it than "What if we finally replace all those pesky workers with machines*" or is that it? *Machines include people working the server farms in Malaysia.

That’s why the bosses like it, but the people in charge of making this technology and selling it to them are true believers in an actual millenarian cult, end of the world theology and all

Yeah - they aren't too worried about the end of the world part because as the elect they intend to be raptured^Wtransported to Mars. (Sorry, got a bit confused about which theology for a moment.)

Betcha odds are more than zero that one of them reads your bleat, asks an ai to define "eschatological", and the ai gives the wrong definition 🤣

Considering how many lawyers have been punished for relying on AI—remember, it makes up cases that don’t exist—it’s probable that most knowledge worker industries will never use AI. And it makes bad art, so, if you avoid AI vendors, by buying from real artists and authors, AI is pointless.

til "eschatological"

Millenarian, even

Don't imannetize the eschaton.

Don't let THEM immanentize the eschaton either!

Ewige Blumenkraft

very different from scatological

is this a shitpost, daniel?

i think capitalism has always been a death cult, all beneficial side-channel outputs of capitalism are merely incidental, and that "AI" in the way these people envision always was the inevitable end-goal of that capitalist death cult

While this is broadly true, it is metaphorically true rather than literally true. The AI guys are, like, literal actual cult, an offshoot of the literal actual tech-divinity "rationalist" cult of Less Wrong.

Aren't most hardcore Less Wrongers anti-AGI?

No, because they believe one is inevitable. They are anti-*bad* AGI, and their entire foundation is built around somehow making a good AGI happen first, through means which, uh hey look a goose give us money

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