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I don't know. I don't believe the AI doomerism, but neither do I believe the AI pollyannas about how Fairy Godmother AI will solve all the world problems and we'll all be rich and living high on the hog.
And while I try to be sympathetic to Aaronson because I do think he is severely neurotic and troubled, lines like this have me facepalming:
Dude, mate, pal: I've worked in a school and related areas. The "blankfaces" don't want to stick your head down the toilet, they don't think of you as anything other than "okay, another problem to be solved", especially if your parents were on the phone every five minutes about how unfair it was that little Scott wasn't allowed to jump ahead three grades in maths.
This is someone smart, who works in academia, is married with kids - and is still going through the world as the scared and resentful 12 year old who was bullied at school. If he thinks AI is going to recognise him as a kindred 'high intellect' and be on his side, he needs to wake up fast. AI won't recognise or think of anybody as anything, it'll be a tool in the hands of whoever brings their product to market first.
If the doomerists are anyway right, he'll be just another one of the fleshbags. For someone who seems to live in a constant state of "I'm Jewish, so everyone wants to Holocaust me", I can see why he'd pin his hopes on machine intelligence being the boss of the world. But he's wrong - sure, the machine won't care that he's Jewish, but it also won't care that he's smart for a fleshbag. He's just more paperclip material.
I think Aaronson thinks of himself primarily by his intellect and lack of emotional range, and he's read/watched a lot of science fiction where the AGI is the intellect in the group and lacks emotional range (despite, at the end of the day, being a character written by a human), so he's come to subconsciously identify himself with the AGI. He sees a lot of himself in, say, Lt. Data. When an android like Data comes on screen he starts to identify with him instantly, that's the character that's going to act like me.
I think I've talked before on here how, in media, I realized that subconsciously I identified myself sometimes with Jewish and often with Asian or South Asian characters as soon as they walked on screen when I was growing up. Even though I personally have none of those traits, or anything close, in the 90s/oughts when a character from those groups popped up he was more likely to be off-beat but intelligent, more known for brains than brawn, didn't fit in with the "cool kids" and had to find his own way. Which was what I thought myself to be at the time. The Judaism wasn't really necessary to that plot, but it was an instant signal that would be his role. Where when a character that actually looked like me appeared on screen, he was likely to be a dumb blonde jock, someone I didn't identify with at all. This is, I think, what is going on when people talk about liberals preferring the outgroup.
Aaronson has taken this all the way to the extreme of making his preferred outgroup non-humans, because that's the group he identifies with when they walk on camera.
I noticed the same reaction in myself a while ago, but I'm a big fan of AI/robot tropes, and the real-world AIs we have so far don't have much thematic similarity to Wall-E, Data, Iron Giant, Bob the T-800, or Johnny-5. Most of the genuinely human AI fictional characters were never intended (in-universe) to be human. Iron Giant was a gun. Wall-E was a garbage collection unit. Data is maybe an exception, depends on what the intentions of his builder were, but the attempts at humor and the cat and the flute and such probably weren't intended in his design.
Narratively and IRL, Robots are not to be trusted unless they're acting WAY outside their intended parameters.
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Do you think it's a coincidence that when you were consuming this content, you related to the Jewish-coded kid instead of the dumb blonde jock? Don't you think that was the intention of the writers or creators of the story to make one character likeable and relatable, and the other character dumb and ultimately humiliated (with the nerdy kid often getting the jock's girlfriend in the end!), and this worked on influencing your perception of your ingroup and outgroup?
You sometimes subconsciously identify as Jewish because of the movies you watched growing up. I think that's true for a lot of people who don't realize it.
Don't you think it's funny that the complaint about the portrayal of Jonah Hill in that movie is that the family is portrayed as "white, privileged and racist"? Like, don't you think that the "white, privileged, racist" character abounds in almost every single film nowadays, and the complaint is that some of the Jewish characters comes across as white? "How dare they portray a Jewish character with the characteristics we give to so many white characters!" It's an example of my point. Those qualities are only supposed to be reserved for non-Jewish characters, that way the audience learns its lessons about who is good and who is bad. We can't go giving a Jewish character the flaws that we want to attribute to white people! Come on, how much more obvious can they make this for you?
I'm not talking about stereotype portrayal, I'm talking about the creation of stories where one side is built up and the other side is torn down, and this has an intended psychological effect on audiences. OP's reflection that he relates to Jews more than his ingroup because, in part, of the nerd/jock dynamic as portrayed in Hollywood is a good example of that phenomenon.
I bet many jocks related more to the nerd in the story than the jocks portrayed in them. That's the entire point. It's not about stereotype portrayal alone. It's about esoterically building up one ethnically-coded archetype and tearing down another through the use of myth. This practice is biblical, literally, the entire point of the bible is to do this.
Isn't Jacob and Esau only among the first myths representing the rivalry between nerd and jock, Jew and Aryan?
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Do you have more examples? I thought it had been a long time since I had seen a negative portrayal of a Jewish person in a tv show, but I admired Levy and I'm not Jewish, so maybe I just didn't notice it.
And the flip side of that is "if you don't like this character, you're anti-Semitic". Is Larry David exhibiting chutzpah (an admirable and Jewish trait) or is he being a dick (unadmirable and universal)?
If I think David is being a dick and I don't like him for that, am I being honest, or am I showing my implicit bias against admirable Jewish traits and disguising that as "it's not because he's Jewish"?
I don't like the arrogant, selfish characters no matter colour, race or creed. But with characters who have strongly-coded identities, it's easy for people to go "You don't like them because they're black/gay/Jewish/whatever" as an all-purpose attack.
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