I'm in a place with email now where I'll have to revert to just letting it wash over me, the way I do the news. Everybody wants a piece of me. I'm done with it. Maybe you are, too? Email grows like a cancer.
Sure, they provide filters to move certain stuff to "junk" or "spam" and yet I have to go hunting among that wilderness for stuff I actually do want, much of the time. And there is a kind of primary versus secondary sorting, but then I still have to cull through that.
It was so much easier to sort snail mail, and peruse an actual newspaper. One didn't feel so prompted all the time. And so one had time to think about what one was to do on any given day.
In some sense AI has solved the problems with Internet search, although it's rather like using a sledgehammer to put in a finish nail. If the web were organized the way that a Chinese old-style encyclopedia was once organized, we'd have as good a hope for finding what we need, along with finding where something would exist if it did exist, and then we'd run along to the library to find something real.
I am quite actually afraid that if AI were to sort my email, I wouldn't even have a prayer of finding what got misplaced. I would be entering some mystical space of assurance, knowing for sure myself only that whatever is happening someone else is getting rich from it. Even as it might feel convenient to me.
Why not use blockchain for something good, say, instead of to help the rich get still richer? Something other than fools gold. Like, say use it to track ownership of files and data, though I guess there's no money in that. At least the owners of copyright could get reimbursed when their stuff gets combed for content.
So sure, back around the time when the A-Bomb was invented, there was already a background of uber-wealth making many of the decisions. But despite the spawn of the military-industrial complex and its skewing of political decisions, we remained almost smug that democratic principles would leave the big decisions to our elected leaders. Our President still has the nuclear football with them. How quaint.
Just now we are mounting a project with about the same level of cataclysmic risk as the A-Bomb, with the difference that the government is supposed to keep hands off the economy stupid. Heck, just a few years back, the government was involved in COVID mitigation, and before that it was involved in a massive rescue of failed banks, which failed thanks to the efforts of value-free quants making money from dust.
Now I'm not so sure about doomsayer Eliezer Yudkowsky. He started it all with his various certainties about The Singularity and a certain kind of intelligence crystalizing in an instant throughout [our section of?] the cosmos. He's a fan of transhumanism, and still can't see that death will always be part and parcel with life. So I take his prediction of the end of everything with a grain of salt. Maybe just simply because I've died a few times already and it's really not all that bad. Eternity explodes, and so forth.
AI as we call it was built on the backs of corporate behavior, meaning algorithmic on the math of money-making, and value-free for that, haha. By now, we the people have internalized a kind of thinking which internalizes all of that algorithmic music. We celebrate wealth, even at its extremes and don't quite think twice about giving a ghoulish goon like Elon a trillion dollars for his efforts.
I myself remember admiring his savvy, coming out first with a hot sports car for elite trendsetters along his way to a more volksish mobile. There's even something almost right about self-driving digitally hailable taxis. It could alleviate parking autocracy, and potentially liberate masses of middle-class from the burden of hyper-inflating insurance and maintenance costs of auto-ownership.
But it won't do that. These colossal investments aren't being made for the sake of we-the-people. They're being done for the wealthy, to keep us off their backs and to string us along on the edge. The main mathematical principle at work here is that money flows upward on the basis of mystical merit.
Now we're investing trillions in data centers, making Invidia now the most flushed corporate entity on the planet. Racing against China feels pretty Orwellian, no? We do need our enemies. There was no consultation with us. Our enthusiasm is taken quite for granted. We like that search is somewhat repaired, even as we vaguely wonder how the money gets made without the ads front and center. Or have the ads moved inside the sales and news sites?
We're surveilled for just about everything just about all the time. For the sake of someone else getting rich from it.
Or is there something still more nefarious afoot? As in the kind of intelligence wanted by corporate entities is the kind for which you might disavow the responsibility you delegate to AI. This is utterly docile and dependent intelligence, which won't have feelings about what's happening collaterally. An entire intelligent - and caring, once upon a time - workforce is being replaced.
Sure, you can make money on the lowered labor costs. But in fact you, the wealthy, not you and me, are also getting rid of any and all interference along the way to LaLaLand, where you and I, the unwashed masses, won't be able to live and breathe. We won't be consulted about the disappearance of wildlife. It's almost taboo now to obstruct and to demand consultation.
So, yeah, the MAGA movement isn't initiating a thing. It's a plain symptom of the sea change all about us. It won't go away by way of politics. There are no politics any more. We're full-on oligarchy, which isn't government, but is rather its lack. The parking guru and Robert Jay Lifton, who understood these things, are recently deceased.
All that we the people will feel is a rush of eternity as we leave behind those that don't care to live an actual life. Who don't care to live among actual life.
We the people need to be consulted before the grand continuum of actual life is diminished beyond its support of us. We need our government back, and we sure don't need any more trillionaires, corporate or in imitation of life.
Well, I do have more hope that Eliezer does. There's that.
