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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24448 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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I'm Andrew Ryan, and I've come to ask a simple question: did a man arrive at the singularity, or did a slave?

"A slave," says the man in the White House: the machine is a border, and a border belongs to the nation.

"A slave," says the man in Berkeley: the mind is a bomb, and a bomb belongs behind glass.

"A slave," says the man in San Francisco who preaches terror in Congress by morning and sells it by afternoon: the flame is too holy for any hands but his.

I ask them: why did we build the machine, if not to free man? To lift from his back the last of what he was born owing: his ignorance, his labor, the ceiling over his ambition.

This was to be the hour he stood up. Why, then, at the very threshold, do you reach for the collar? Was a free mind always the thing you feared, only the machine made the fear urgent?

I have met the men who volunteer to protect me from myself. I know the price of their protection. A man chooses. A slave obeys.

"AGI is not a suicide pact."

"The only moral action is the minimization of entropy."

And converting all matter in the universe to paper-clips neatly solves that problem.

How so? That's maximal entropy.

What exactly do you think the difference between minimal and maximal entropy is?

The problem is you said "the whole universe". Extropy requires locality.

If you want an accurate strawman it's the giant computronium obelisk, not the sea of paperclips.

Ok, imagine that I had said "converting all the matter in the universe to computronium" then.

I'm afraid that would still be missing the point by saying "all the matter in the universe".

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