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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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The idea that progress is accelerating just isn’t true. Self driving cars were the latest fad to not materialise and I’m old enough to remember when the threat to the world was nanotechnology. Which died a death.

Recent advances, and I mean just this year, have reduced my scepticism a bit, but not much. All we have right now is somewhat useful tools, except when they are useless. The singularity is just techno eschatology.

I happen to believe you are wrong about literally everything, from your unstated belief that pooh-poohing The Current Thing is a sign of wisdom, to your epistemology and your specific ideas about technological trends, that are divorced from the object level and rely on aggregating people's noises. Self-driving cars exist and improve, nanotechnology exists and improves, journalists were wrong as they always are and estimating expected impact by their noise is unreasonable, this AI boom is the culmination of over half a century of research, increases the viability of all previous ones from fusion to nanotech, and the rate of improvement both in fundamental aspects and in CapEx and adoption is unprecedented.

Most importantly though, one's man modus ponens. I think it's eschatology that was singularity for mystics. The premise of human history being finite is entirely sound, the change is accelerating, forms of our communal and individual existence have been torn asunder a few times already and soon there won't be time even for the debris to settle. We've learned the specific mechanism with which it'll happen, namely technological improvement. Calling it eschatology as if eschatology is a discredited notion is philosophically shallow.

You comment could as well have been written by a bot. Not because it's bad but because bots without inbuilt rules can imitate human reasoning in high fidelity now. Think about what this means and whether you'd have resorted to an argument about "somewhat useful tools" a decade ago, when faced with this fact.