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Notes -
More developments on the AI front:
Big Yud steps up his game, not to be outshined by the Basilisk Man.
Now, he officially calls for preemptive nuclear strike on suspicious unauthorized GPU clusters.
If we see AI threat as nuclear weapon threat, only worse, it is not unreasonable.
Remember when USSR planned nuclear strike on China to stop their great power ambitions (only to have the greatest humanitarian that ever lived, Richard Milhouse Nixon, to veto the proposal).
Such Quaker squeamishness will have no place in the future.
So, outlines of the Katechon World are taking shape. What it will look like?
It will look great.
You will live in your room, play original World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on your PC, read your favorite blogs and debate intelligent design on your favorite message boards.
Then you will log on The Free Republic and call for more vigorous enhanced interrogation of terrorists caught with unauthorized GPU's.
When you bored in your room, you will have no choice than to go outside, meet people, admire things around you, make a picture of things that really impressed with your Kodak camera and when you are really bored, play Snake on your Nokia phone.
Yes, the best age in history, the noughties, will retvrn. For forever, protected by CoDominium of US and China.
edit: links again
Firstly, that's mostly due to Maotism, not Soviet aggression. In 1966, Mao started the Cultural Revolution to advance his claim to lead the Communist world. In 1969, China picked a fight with the Soviet Union:
They picked a fight with the Soviets and fully deserved a disaster. The Soviets had done so much to help China in industry, economically, in developing nuclear weapons. Mao was incredibly ungrateful. As much as I complain about aggressive US foreign policy, Maoist foreign policy was even more reckless.
Anyway, nobody listens to Yudkowsky in the halls of power. He has 120K followers on twitter, a drop in the ocean. There's absolutely zero chance of the US and China cooperating on this matter, they just can't trust eachother. Both are trying very hard to advance in AI, they see it as a core source of national strength. The US has already tried to sabotage China's AI development with the semiconductor export ban. Xi Xinping would be the biggest cuckold in human history if he decided to accept second place under US AI hegemony and enforce it on the rest of the world. It's voluntarily helping your greatest rival dominate the world for the grand prize of being Chief Lickspittle.
Just consider how much louder the other voices are! There's the military men who want advanced AI to help them on the battlefield, the big tech people with bottomless wealth and political connections who want to get ahead in the race, the researchers who want to research unhindered, the tech autarky people who want independence and sovereignty...
You can start making memes.
The Chinese will gladly trade the vanishing shot at dominance for some more overregulation and domestic oppression in the short term. Indeed, that's how they settled the issue of Choynese Eugenics, and this is what they're doing already with AI. That's how that nation rolls, that's their part in the dance, being a role model in all things illiberal for creepy globalist technocrats, and simultaneously a feeble, unappealing caricature that Americans won't feel too guilty erasing. Putin, too, could've been building GPU clusters Yud suggests must be bombed. Instead he preemptively bombed Mariupol. There is no «geopolitics», it's all a sham.
Not much more.
The rhetoric of schizos Leahy and Yud is on every outlet, from niche forums to highbrow magazines to popular podcasts to mainstream media to the White House and the omnipotent Chuck now. Yud must be imagining this is an anthropic shadow – since he's so smart and policymakers are stupid and cannot coordinate, it can't be that his premises are revealed as wrong now that they endorse his message, it can't be that he's a patsy, it must be some issue of broken multiversal causality! If a grown man thinks he's an anime character, one needn't deceive him any more on top of that.
Importantly they face no credible opposition – LeCun spews condescending inarticulate nonsense and doesn't call Yud out on his subtle technical misstatements; and the non-technical folks just accept the Terminator imagery because why not, it's intuitive! The Overton window is being so defined as to make their conclusion the obviously accepted one, devoid of serious opposition. Even alignment doomers like Christiano who don't live in the la-la land are sidelined.
Once more, a chance at escaping the predefined trajectory that was dangled before my eyes is being pulled away. Crypto – regulated, FUDed into the ground and drowned in speculative nonsense, many founders dead. Darknet and darkmarket – busted. Citizen science, biohacking – fizzled out, and good luck after COVID. AI could have been our shot at greater autonomy, it could've helped everyone, from the unhinged transhumanist to the paranoid traditionalist, divest from the failing body politics and global supply chains. But no, that's too rich.
The powers that be prefer preservation of the status quo more than they yearn for new capability; they've ruined several technologies with the precautionary principle already. And they'll have any capability they want if they ensure strong AIs do not leak outside the regulated state-mandated bounds.
My main bet now is the Wall Street, big tech, and their surprisingly moderate pocket regulators who throw minor bones to the politicians – but China hoped on that mercantile lobbyism, and look where this got us and them.
As usual, hope to be just overemphasizing the bad scenario.
Are darknet markets actually dead? Shame if that's the case, I'd have liked to dabble in them since I actually have money now.
Past their heyday, and never moved closer to legitimate marketplace or a no-holds-barred piratical Utopia. I'm not sure if you recall what was expected of them.
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