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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14338 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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I don't actually think 1-5 are all obvious, but my point is that you responded to my criticism of my Scott with points that are in the 1-5 area.

Do I think that people are actually going to stop making LLMs? No, I don't. If I had to bet, I'm in the camp that sees LLMs as a 'normal technology'. I think they will exist, more use will be made of them, and that the uses found will be moderate and not that interesting. I think both the doomers and the singularitans will be disappointed.

The point that I made that you took issue with was that it is ludicrous to say that if we don't make LLM-based 'AI', we're '[consigned] to a permanent civilisational childhood or an early grave'. That is absurd. If we don't pursue that technology, we're not even locking ourselves out of artificial intelligence, much less locking ourselves out of civilisational maturity.

The Babel example was meant to be evocative, not an argument as such. You're an atheist, fine, whatever. Scott made a comparison from Judaism so I felt it was within-bounds to reply with another comparison from Judaism.

With 7 you're bringing in 'short term'. Scott is specifically saying 'not right now' and neither am I. Scott wrote about Plan A where he explicitly asks for 15 or so years to make sure it's done right, not racing ahead.

Fifteen years is short term.

This is one of the weird things about the debate to me - the absurdly short timelines everybody seems to be approaching it with. From my perspective, Scott and the 'AI pause' people are basically one subgroup of accelerationist AI-enthusiast arguing with another subgroup of accelerationists. Five, ten, fifteen years, that's all still the short term. That is the immediate future. Medium-term for me means 'within the next hundred years or so', i.e. within the lifetimes of people alive today, and long-term means after that.

Well, you may not care for technical capacity. In some abstract sense, the Zulu empire and the British empire were equal peers. But in all real and significant senses, obviously the British were better and greater and the Maxim Gun settled the question.

I think there is a very good argument to the effect that 'civilisational maturity', if it is a meaningful measure, refers to more than sheer destructive power.

I think there is a very good argument to the effect that 'civilisational maturity', if it is a meaningful measure, refers to more than sheer destructive power.

Can you give some examples where the "more" would diverge meaningfully from the "sheer destructive power"? What's an example of a "mature civilization" with minimal destructive potential? The Amish?

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