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Notes -
Neuralink has caused a bit of a storm on X, taking off after claiming that three humans have what they call "Telepathy":
Assuming this is all true and the kinks will be worked out relatively soon, this is... big news. Almost terrifyingly big news.
AI tends to suck in most of the oxygen around tech discourse, but I'd say, especially if LLMs continue to plateau, Neuralink could be as big or even bigger. Many AI maximalists argue, after all, that the only way humanity will be able to compete and keep up in a post-AGI world will be to join with machines and basically become cyborgs through technology like Neuralink.
Now I have to say, from a personal aesthetic and moral standpoint, I am close to revolted by this device. It's interesting and seems quite useful for paraplegics and the like, but the idea of a normal person "upgrading" their brain via this technology disturbs me greatly.
There are a number of major concerns I have, to summarize:
Does this ring alarm bells for anyone else? I'd imagine @self_made_human and others on here are rubbing their hands together with glee, and I have to say I'd be similar a few years back. But at the moment I am, shall we say... concerned with these developments.
I believe that the only way to survive the technological advancements for me, even if only for a vanishingly small part of me, is by being subsumed into a giant blob consisting of the humanity melted whole, so I welcome this development.
If anyone here is still perplexed as to why Marxism has historically been such a popular ideology, and remains such a popular ideology: this is why. This same fundamental desire will always continue to reemerge in various forms, as a natural biological response to suffering: the yearning to be freed of the burden of differentiated subjectivity, the transcendence of the individual/collective distinction, a suicide without death. The only difference between singulatarianism and Marxism is that today's transhumanists think the Soviets were too early; they jumped the gun, the necessary scientific advancements hadn't materialized yet. But the underlying impulse is the same.
Marxism originated because brutal working conditions of the proletariat in Western Europe during the Industrial Revolution combined with dense cities and mass media that enabled easy organizing of labor movements. It had little or nothing to do with "the burden of differentiated subjectivity, the transcendence of the individual/collective distinction, a suicide without death". Labor movements did attempt to abolish the individual/collective distinction but this was a tactic, it was not the emotional motivation of the movements. There are of course communists whose motivations are mainly psychological, and there always have been, but they are more common now than they used to be, for the simple reason that working conditions have improved to the point, and states' surveillance capacities have increased to the point, that workers are both much less motivated to revolt than before, and have less chance of success. One should not believe that Marxism as a historical phenomenon has been mainly motivated by some sort of singularitarian-esque drive. Certainly Marxists have always had their own utopian eschatology, but it has never been the core emotional driving force of the movement. If it was, then improved working conditions would not have taken the wind out of labor's sails nearly as much as they did. The core driving force behind Marxism, whenever and whereever it is a vital force and not just an intellectual plaything for bright outcasts, is material poverty.
The appeal to the plebs is really irrelevant. You can convince the urban proletariat of anything. The draw to the disaffected bourgeois and occasionally even upper classes is more interesting.
The appeal to the plebs is the decisive factor, since without massive emotional momentum for economic change among the plebs, the intellectuals would have just sat around cafes arguing like they do now, instead of leading actually vital, powerful leftist movements.
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