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Notes -
To whence shall we roll back the clock?
We joke about the glory years, the years when Things Were Better, which just so happen to coincide with people's younger years. You get me to say what years I would like to roll back the clock to and live, I would probably say somewhere around the 90s-late 00s. I am an outlier, as far as I know. Virtually no one I know would like to roll back the clock to spitting distance from two thousand and fucking-eight.
Back when the most lefty thing on the internet was a girl telling people that she didn't appreciate being propositioned for sex on an elevator. Pre-tiktok, the era of old forums. The iphone still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. The era when Google and Microsoft weren't the undisputed emperors of your lives.
Actually, forget that. We all know there's nowhere to roll back to, we can only roll forward, embracing the aesthetics of what we imagined the past to be. I, for one, am glad that I am not eternally inundated with "WOW DAE PARENTS ARE BOOORIIINNG????" ads. You can pull my 70-lb tub of legos accumulated over more than twenty years out of my cold, dead hands, NSA. And it's probably true that in the next 30-40 years that democracy and republicanism-as-we-know it will no longer exist.
No seriously, whence come the true techno-king? Who are the contenders for the first immortal god-king of humanity. I joke in the phrasing, but it is not exactly an incorrect joke now, is it? It is very probable that we will have the first actual trillionaire human in the next thirty years. The first effectively-emperors of mankind.
The only reason companies don't do governance of humans is that they're shit at it, actually, and Democracy is surprisingly efficient over long timescales. But assume for the sake of thought experiment, that the singularity happens, and we have our first crowned god-emperor of humanity thanks to the creation of AGI. Who are our contenders?
Personally, I should expect them to:
As such, pick your top 5 most likely individuals to become humanity's first true techno-kings, and why. Do you have any you think are sleepers?
I'll hold back my top-fivers for a couple days or so.
The people who will have power in the future are largely the same kind of people who have power today. As long as the AI God runs on hardware that physically exists (which seems likely), it will be subject to the realities of the systems of governance in extant human societies, at least in the near term. Musk has no army, few loyal servants, nobody willing to die for him. Even Biden has the above, symbolically and practically.
As for Moldbug’s king, if he happens it will, inevitably, be someone mildly disappointing in terms of previous accomplishments. If it’s Kulaks, I hope he remembers us fondly.
And what happens if my (as in nobody) AI first develops autonomous self replicating killer robots? We are not that far technologically.
A: It won't happen.
B: If it does, it they get iced by dudes with rifles because AI can't violate thermodynamics and energy density is energy density.
A: It will happen. Too many regimes want to control their population fully. For them the machines to keep the people subdued would get rid of their main worry - the loyalty of their regime insiders. So there will always be money invested in this tech. Also there are few parts of the supply and military chain that really require humans (mostly science and imagination) if the ai is potent enough and self replicating industrial modules are close enough if you have the eventual ChatGPT 42 helping you.
B: If you produce autonomous weapons system faster than the other side bullets in the end you win.
As 2rafa rightfully pointed - the hard part is not the tech, but hiding it until the exponential function is unstoppable. You only have two places really - bottom of the ocean, or subterranean in the Antarctic. There is enough geothermal to go around.
Also can you elaborate on the thermodynamics thing - I can't understand what you mean.
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