Iconochasm
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2hr ago
I just encountered a business whose product is "AI renter harassment". Imagine a chatbot that pretends to be a person, and annoys your renters with frequent reminders that the rent is due, and then keeps hassling them for up to three months after move out!
Can't wait for the counter-offer, "AI creditor deflection".
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7hr ago
My actual plan (modulo not dying, and having resources at my disposal) is closer to continuously upgrading my physical and cognitive capabilities so I can be independent. I don't want to have to rely on AGI to make my decisions or rely on charity/UBI.
I think this is the part that upsets me about the situation. I used to hope for this too, but that pretty heavily relies on a slow take-off. What happens when the friendly AI is simply better able to make your decisions for you? To manipulate you effortlessly? Or when you can't understand the upgrades in the first place, and have to trust the shuggoth that they work as claimed? You might not want to wirehead, but why do you think what you want will continue to matter? What happens when you can get one-shot by super-effective stimulus, like a chicken being hypnotized? Any takeoff faster than Accelerando probably renders us well obsolete long before we could adjust to the first generation of upgrades.
And that ties back to the "meaningful work" stuff. We're not just souls stuck in a limited body, and it would be neat if the souls could be transplanted to awesome robot bodies. The meat is what we are. The substrate is the substance. Your cognition 1.0 is dependent on the hormones and molecules and chemicals that exist in your brain. We are specific types of creatures designed to function in specific environments, and to seek specific goals. How much "upgrade" before we turn into those animals that can't breed in captivity because something about the unnatural environment has their instincts screaming? Again, it's one thing if we're slowly going through Accelerando, taking years to acclimate to each expansion and upgrade.
But fast takeoff, AGI 2027? That seems a lot more like "write your name on the Teslabot and then kill yourself" - as the good outcome. Maybe we can just VR ourselves back to a good place, live in permanent 1999, but why on earth would an AI overlord want to waste the resources? Your brain in a jar, at the mercy of a shuggoth that is infinitely smarter and more powerful than you, is the most total form of slavery that has ever been posited - and we would all of us be economically non-viable slaves.
You talk about writing a character only as smart as yourself, but that's keying into the thing that terrifies me and missing the point. What happens when "smarter than you" is table stakes? Imagine life from the perspective of a pet gerbil - perhaps vaguely aware that things are going on with the owners, but just fundamentally incapable of comprehending any of it, and certainly not of having any role or impact. Even Accelerando walked back from the precipice of the full, existential horror of it all. You don't want to write a story about human obsolescence? Bro, you're living in one.
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15hr ago
I was thinking about making a post on those ads. That's the only thing I'm seeing Sherril hit him on, that quote about raising taxes and energy prices, and that just seems as bizarre to me as the Fetterman-Oz Mirrorverse campaign. Especially when he has the much juicier quote from her about how your energy prices are going to go way up, but if you're a good person you'll pay it.
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16hr ago
That is an engineering problem. That is an artifact of current baseline human cognition and psychology. What sacrifices do you actually have the right to demand people to make, when there is no actual need for such sacrifices?
MBIC, in your own story you had to posit SAMSARA resulting in successful total legal abolition of too-advanced AI, aliens waging an extra-dimensional Butlerian Jihad, and widespread, spontaneous superpowers, including non-causal precognition just to carve a place for a human protagonist to matter in a setting where AI was a fully valid tech tree.
Do you really not see the concern? Do you want to be a permanent heroin wirehead?
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16hr ago
nd it wasn't unions demanding vast floods of foreign labour and immigrants
Actual question, I genuinely have no idea: how much of the demand for foreign labor in Europe is driven by how hard it is to hire/fire natives, and how many benefits they get?
If I have the choice between a French guy who expects 6 weeks of vacation, 30 hour weeks plus lunch, brunch and coffee breaks, and who is basically impossible to fire if he's a problem on the one hand, or a Syrian indentured serf on the other...
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16hr ago
Don't have a strong opinion on the Greer worry, but PT seems like it would have direct downstream consequences as a reminder of the primacy of physical reality. There's no way to tailor a slide deck to make running while fat suck less. Forcing all of the brass to touch grass is more than just superficial hazing - even without scaring off all the DEI hires.
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1d ago
The day before I went to move out to an apartment for the first time, my credit union creatively applied charges and deposits to drop me into the negatives, then charged me $35 per transaction. They functionally stole $1500 from me, and then raided my mother's and sister's accounts when mine ran out. Then stonewalled, insisting that there was just nothing they could do about it before I had to leave to be two hours away at college, now broke.
When I set up my daughter with her first account, I went on a very nasty rant about overdraft protection, right in front of the banker lady, until we clarified 10 different times that there was absolutely no overdraft "protections" set for her account.
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1d ago
It makes me think a lot about how the bar has risen to meet some minimum standard to meaningfully navigate society.
Future shock is already here. The number of people who freak out at being asked to send an email is disturbingly high.
I have never read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but my closest friend once described it as being at least partially about the transition from pre-Modern society, where everything a man might encounter was basically comprehensible, to Modern society, where a stroll down the road would reveal behemoths of concrete and steel and chained lightning that the average man could not hope to understand well enough to effect repairs on.
This is incredibly stark with cell phones. How many of us here have ever repaired a cell phone? Have you ever tried to coax, say, an elderly Chinese man though a non-standard use of their phone, with all the text in Mandarin? It is sufficiently advanced technology, and it is indistinguishable from magic.
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1d ago
Unless you exaggerate greatly, Hassan sounds like he has quite a low IQ on top of his "schizophrenia". Mentally, he's close to an 8-10 year old White or Asian kid.
No, that's a fair and accurate recollection of his speech patterns. It's a bit odd to characterize him, unlike other mentally dysfunctional people I've met who did seem to be mentally aged 4 or 7. In mannerism, nothing about him codes as "childish", and that stream of free association comes quickly enough that it doesn't automatically flag him as stupid. But his thoughts seem constrained to a very narrow range that seems far more limited than even an 8 year old, like he's partially making up for an even more extreme limitation by sheer brute force of computational cycles, spending hours talking to himself about activities that most people here would cover in a few seconds.
And I've met plenty of other people like that (yes, disproportionately black), and they tend to be even more disordered than Hassan. People who will take ten pages of paperwork and spend 30 minutes going over it, sorting it, then confusing themselves, starting over, and repeating the cycle multiple times. Hassan at least usually has a clear sense of what he is doing and why, even if he's burning outrageous brain time on minor errands.
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2d ago
Untreated schizophrenia tends to worsen. He's quite young, we don't know how bad it'll eventually get.
He's in his late 30's, if that changes things. The "young Denzel" line might have given a different impression, but there's a high degree of "black don't crack" going on. He has excellent skin condition.
If only there was a way to bring him in for a few weeks to an impatient clinic and starting him on some antipsychotics.
I don't have any clues from things he's told me, but as we've covered his is pretty functional. Is it possible he's already on medication? I don't have a good sense of what modern anti-psychotics do. Would you expect a notable improvement on the delusions?
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2d ago
So where do you work where you can get away with talking to Hassan for 45 minutes?
Really not trying to be that specific on my spicy political opinions pseudonym. Let's just say that workloads are spikey, and I have never figured out a graceful way to disengage from conversation with Hassan. He will just natter away at me without pause until I am working with someone else, and even then it takes a minute or so for him to realize I am otherwise occupied and make his farewells. 45 minutes is a length I know from experience he is capable of, when he catches me during a slump, but the average is more like 10.
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2d ago
Where do you work that employs someone like Hassan?
I guess I was being a little vague, but Hassan is a regular customer, not an employee.
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2d ago
I recently had an experience with a regular at work that left me in a bit of a dilemma. It has some worthy CW meat to chew on, particularly in regard to some recent events, so I thought I'd share it here.
Let me tell you about Hassan.
Hassan is not his real name, though his real name is similarly classic Arabic. Hassan is an American black guy. Nothing he has said in the years I have known him implies Islamic faith, but the name suggests maybe his parents had interests in that direction. Hassan is tall, in quite good shape, and fairly handsome - a bit like a Temu Young Denzel. As I mentioned, he is a regular, and he seems to like me in particular, so I usually end up chatting with him for a while whenever he comes in. The last time I encountered Hassan he mentioned his desire to leave Jersey for the south (possibly the Carolinas), something he's mentioned on numerous prior occasions. He has issues with New Jersey that we'll get into later, and thinks the south would be a more welcoming environment. But this last time he added that if he were in the south, he could get a gun (he pantomimed a holstered pistol on his hip as he said this), so that he could "be a man" and "take care of business".
And the reason I found this concerning is that Hassan is a textbook paranoid schizophrenic.
The very first time I met Hassan he spent 15 minutes telling me that the government snuck into his apartment while he was out and planted listening devices in the walls. He frequently expresses concern that "they" are out to get him, a nebulous shadowy they who mess with his Social Security Disability payments, try to steal his money, try to lure him into doing bad things, sabotage his employment efforts, and try to take advantage of him sexually.
More on that last bit in a moment.
Talking to Hassan, all of this comes out in a non-stop stream of consciousness type exposition that has never even caught sight of a filter or a reality check. It's as though every thought that occurs to him is taken as literal Truth, and never subjected to any kind of, er, sanity checking.
That said, Hassan is actually quite functional. He lives by himself, handles his own bills and money, cooks for himself. These are accomplishments he is very proud of, that frequently come up during his expositions. He will start by telling me how the people at the Social Security office are stealing from him (AFAICT, that was either taxes or a garnishment of some sort), then veer into reciting all the vegetables he eats because he knows how to eat healthy, he cooks for himself, but these people they not eatin' right and it causes problems, mental problems in they head they be havin' mental problems because they don't eat right, not like him because he eats his green beans, real food that he cooks for himself because he knows how to eat right, act right because he learned it in school, third grade, food pyramid, he learned that here in Jersey in school, third grade, and these other people should have learned it but they not acting right, that’s just Jersey, lotta bad people in Jersey, obsessed with money, takin’ from you, takin’ your money.
Just imagine that sort of run-on sentence going on for 45 minutes.
"Acting rightly" is a very serious concern for Hassan. He is deeply worried about people plying him with drugs, or otherwise enticing him into criminal behavior. He recently managed to get a job at a bakery, but he noticed his boss was sniffling and rubbing at his nose, so Hassan flatly told the man to please not offer or force Hassan to do any coke.
He was fired shortly after for some reason. "They" struck again. Jersey, ammirite?
So, we have a man with an internal filter that is severely misfiring at best, with consistent delusions of enemies out to get him, telling me he wants to get a gun to "be a man" and "take care of business".
I consider myself to be a strong proponent of the Second Amendment, but that conversation made me consider the merits of having a chat with my local police department.
Awkwarrrrrrd.
As that thought occurred to me, it wasn't conceived as a hostile action. Five seconds before that moment I would have happily told you that Hassan was the very model of "Oh, yeah, he's crazy but he's harmless." As my brain first traced that hypothetical report, it was largely directed by concern for Hassan himself. He travels on foot throughout the county, often in bad neighborhoods, but that's always been the case. Has something changed? Is he being threatened? If I were to take that info to the police, it would be in the hopes that they would be forewarned, and able to help him.
And, contrary to popular belief, I honestly believe they'd try, because I've seen it before. Someone called the cops for a wellness check on Hassan, and they caught up to him when I was there. Three of them showed up, because this is a small, safe town with little for them to do, and they earnestly tried to just check and see if the man was alright.
Hassan responds poorly to wellness checks. On another occasion, Hassan was trekking around on a hot summer day, on foot and hauling his old lady luggage cart. A much more successful black man (judging by the car) paused to ask Hassan if he needed some water. Hassan yanked out his gallon jug of water from the luggage cart thing and shook it at the interloper, yelling "You need water?! You need water?! You need water?!" I had a young second-generation Hatian kid working for me at the time, and he thought it was the funniest fucking thing he'd ever seen. He was wandering around the place for weeks afterward, randomly muttering "You need water!" to himself and cracking up.
It was worse with the three cops. Hassan was yelling and agitated and scaring other customers, and I ended up sort of forcing myself into the situation and just aggressively treating him like a normal customer to keep him calm until the cops left (Hassan responds very well to being treated with normal, respectful courtesy. Imagine that.)
You might think it was so bad because of the obvious racial element of three white cops stopping an erratic black man and trying to grill him with questions, but it's actually because one of Hassan's persistent delusions is that The Police want to enter a homosexual relationship with him and he has no interest in doing so. It's not even like specific officers. Just "The Police" in general. All of them, I guess. Hell of a polycule. And it sounds funny, but it's probably actually very sad. Hassan has told me that his deceased father was a police officer, and the interest in a relationship from the cops came from when he was a young man. I suspect that the start of this was his dad's old buddies trying to watch out for the son, but their interest and attention being filtered through Hassan’s delusional paranoia.
Or maybe someone tried to molest him. I don't know, and I can't exactly take his interpretation at face value.
So the optimistic thought of the cops trying to help Hassan while being mindful that he may be armed lasted until the instant it occurred to me that they might try to frisk him, because that could well end in Gay Panic Tragedy.
But really, what right do I have to red flag the man? He has never done anything wrong that I've ever seen. Hassan would walk ten miles out of his way to avoid the appearance of having accidentally stolen a quarter. He might honestly be the most scrupulous person I've ever met - and if part of that is fueled by paranoid delusions, then his paranoia is remarkably pro-social and it might be that this world could do with more of it. By what right should a man that is pathologically righteous be stripped of the right to self-defense?
Well, because his IFF functionality is broken. Because his current modes of behavior may be "pro-social" because his only move when he encounters anything that strikes him as sketchy is to leave. But it's not like the man is powerless now. He's above average in height, and fit enough that I assume he's still doing Presidential Physical Fitness Testing daily, just like he was taught in third grade. If he was inclined to strike at perceived enemies, he could certainly do so by hand. A gun expands effectiveness, it won't add intent where none existed before.
Unless it puts the idea in his head. He's been paranoid and talking about moving to the south for years. Why the gun, why now? Was it a random conversation? Was it the violence on the news, in the air? Hassan strikes me as too focused on daily life for that. It takes nearly 100% of his mental bandwidth to get through his day to day. But I only see slices of his life. If a 3rd grade teacher told him that good citizens watch the news, how susceptible to social contagion would he be?
The final thing that dissuades me from taking a stroll to the station is the fact that we live in New Jersey. Hassan is never going to buy an illegal gun - in the tiny chance that some ne'er-do-well offers him a sale, he would assume he was being set up, freak out, and flee. And if the state that requires fingerprinting and a background check and two character references and a psych history and a sign-off by the local PD and assorted other rules so strict they won't let TheNybber buy a gun... well, if they give Hassan a Firearms Purchaser Card to buy a gun with his Permanent Disability For Psychological Issues money then we have much more general problems. And it's not like a warning like that would carry across state lines, even if the Free Carolinas would take a warning from the People's Republic of Jersey in the first place.
So I'm 99% sure it's a totally moot point. But it raises interesting questions. At what level of non-functionality should people lose rights? Should they, if they've never done anything wrong, in spite of the non-functionality? When I look at things like mass shooters, I will decry playing the partisan blame game when I think the person's thought process is sufficiently disordered - roughly at the level of "GPT2 playing madlibs". Is that a level that justifies preemptive action? If no, does such a level exist at all? If yes, where is the line?
The recent boat guy with the bullet in his brain who thought the "LGBTQ white supremacist pedophiles" were trying to kill him for narrowly avoiding their previous assassination attempts? That dude seems like he might just be broken hardware in a way where blaming any kind of software is just irrelevant. But before the attack he was just filing unhinged lawsuits and expressing wild conspiracy theories (unless there is an LGBTQ white supremacist pedophile cabal, in which case we again have much bigger problems). Is that something a man should have his rights stripped for? If so, is that meaningfully different from believing that, say, the police kill 10,000 unarmed black men per year? Or that Obama is a gay Kenyan married to Big Mike? Even broaching the topic feels wildly ripe for abuse.
Is this whole topic a can of worms best left unopened?
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2d ago
It's not even that he's an atheist. I doubt he stakes such a claim, even in his heart. Rather, he's irreligious in an old school way that still has quite a bit of generic respect for religion and Christianity in particular. Like someone said earlier about the early season Simpsons going to church out of sheer inertia, Trump comes from a cultural environment where "The Good News/Book" still carries weight, even if you don't take it too seriously in your personal life.
tl;dr: Trump isn't Hitchens, he's Sky Masterson.
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2d ago
My issue with Trace is that he wants to be simultaneously a Serious Investigative Writer Thinker Guy and also a Sassy Bitch Merry Prankster. And that's fine, really, but he also refuses to offer that kind of consideration to others, and also freaks out whenever anyone doesn't offer friction-free clown-nose code switching to him.
Take away any one of those clauses and he's fine. But when you add them all together... bro, what are you even doing?
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6d ago
Has anyone figured out how much acetaminophen I should be adding to my supplement stack for autismmaxxing? Ideally, I wouldn't want to go full "memorize every detail about trains", but I'm on a Civ 4 kick and I would appreciate a bit more attention to detail during the late game slog.
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6d ago
When the fuck did Oreo packages get so small?
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6d ago
Happy birthday!
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6d ago
That guy sounds like a jerk
I can't believe that my post was misconstrued to be protrayed as some sort of definitive statement or personal attack. This is so unfair to me, personally, and no one else.
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6d ago
Well, The Motte has hit a new low with aquota desperately trying to pretend that the violence, hypocrisy and patheticness problems belong to anyone other than himself.
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6d ago
British police are trained how to do it,
Are they? Every video I've seen of British police makes me understand a little better those guys who think a cop is a fight they can win and then walk away from. What are the Brits going to do, send more frail, unarmed women to engage in some mawkishly scolding?
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7d ago
The left, as far as the democratic establishment goes, has a good record on condemning violence.
Less believably than when Republicans condemn racism, and I've never seen the other side offer an ounce of grace on that score. Have any prominent Democrats acknowledged that Robinson looks a lot like a radicalized leftist?
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7d ago
Even dog-walker Doreen thought she was going to be a philosophy professor.
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7d ago
Life in prison? Just spend the time productively getting a Doctorate in Education, then wait for the next Dem admin (or maybe the one after) to pardon you so you can enjoy your sinecure as a professor at an Ivy league university.
I don't see any reason for optimism here. Digital intelligence built as such from the ground up will have an insurmountable advantage over scanned biological intelligence. It's like trying to build a horse-piloted mecha that can keep up with a car. If you actually want to optimize results, step 1 is ditching the horse.
In which case, yes. I'd rather Butlerian Jihad.
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