>Yeah... because it's not about him.

lol, nah, that book was TOTALLY about him, or more specifically, his dumbass incel prejudices.

I'm familiar with 4chan fanfiction, and that's what the Book of Revelation comes off as. A revenge fantasy from some maladjusted manchild seething how the Romans pantsed him in front of that cute teenager.

On the contrary. Such a scenario is why I say that AI might be the only way out of our ongoing dystopia.

Warfare will be fought via cyberwarfare by way of drones. The unaugmented gamers will obliterate the cyborgs and eugenicists in a military conflict. The augmented gamers might have adaptations that allow them to exploit the AI tech slightly more conveniently than the unaugmented gamers, but the sheer crush in population will render those advantages moot.

Imagine you had a magic lamp with an all-powerful genie with three wishes in it and you were up against SkyNet. SkyNET has access to all of the resources of the planet, along with its own all-powerful genie with three wishes.

In a head-to-head conflict, I'd still give it to SkyNET. However, if there were two of me, I'd easily crush SkyNET, especially if one of our wishes was 'I wish we and any potential allies knew exactly what to use our wishes for to defeat a SkyNET also armed with a magic lamp'.

John, the bloodthirsty moron who wrote the Book of Revelation, was an sociopathic incel stoner whom even Diogeneses would think was annoying.

And yet, so many people treat that loon's Biblican horror fanfiction as some kind of revelation.

It literally will not matter what country it comes from. In fact, our disordered international politics is a big reason why I think the future of AI will be towards democratization and decentralization. China or the USA or Russia or whoever won't be able to go: 'muahaha now I have a loyal hyperintelligence to command, kneel before me' because some random salaryman in Tokyo can go 'but I have one too'.

The trend with AI has been towards increased accessibility. Unsurprising, because consumerism can't really work without accessibility and iterative release. And unfortunately for the nation-states, but fortunately for human survival, they have to democratize the tools in order to keep up in the short term.

Our society can still end, I can think of a lot of ways for things to go wrong, but the classic AI doomsmongering of a hyperintelligence being or species deciding that humanity (or a portion of it) has outlived its usefulness doesn't look likely to happen. It'll be less like an ant going up against an elephant and more like a 10-year old Chess prodigy going up against Magnus Carlsen. And both of them have access to the same Stockfish chess engine.

I can still think of a lot of ways this can go very, very poorly. For example, we hit a computational bottleneck way earlier than space colonization allows us to expand -- with all of the resource crises that enable, especially since intelligence will now be a resource.

Regardless, the dystopia won't look anything like it did in classic sci-fi movies.

Honestly? It's unclear. If you asked me five or even two years ago -- I'd vote for dystopia.

But AI is advancing extremely, extremely quickly. More quickly than I'd ever dreamed. The billionaire overlords just straight up might not have the time to deploy their infinitely loyal robot cops in a way to employ control. Because AI advanced so quickly that rank-and-file nobodies can deploy comparable resources against the overclass.

I especially claim this because I don't think the future of AI will look anything like we've seen in classical sci-fi. It'll be less like Terminator or the AI movie or even The Matrix and more like... more like a cheesy isekai anime. This is because distributed intelligence is advancing much more quickly than the unitary intelligence we have so many AI characters from.

​

So I don't know where this is all going to lead. It might lead somewhere really bad. But I can guarantee you that if humanity does meet its end (and it's not in the next decade), it won't be from traditional calamities like disease or nuclear warfare or even climate change.

When Chat-GPT4 comes out next week, I think THAT will be the turning point for other people realizing that our old politics and perspectives won't serve us.

EDIT: GPT-4. Okay, so much my timeline up by a few weeks.

Random selection from the citizenry.

Such an idea is anathema to Enlightenment liberalism. 'But what if we make a homeless bum God-king bluh bluh bluh'.

But look: if you idiots were any good at designing a society then randomly selecting some schlub and getting a philosopher king only slightly less competent than a certified genius should be peanuts. It's been several centuries of Enlightenment liberalism's hegemony and they have only gotten more smug about their lack of ability to uplift society's lowest.

>Wild ideas about services that don't actually service anyone or anything but the insiders who are designing them and imagining a need for that service from whole cloth.

[incurious, xenophobic dipshit voice] Uh, it's called innovation, sweetie. Do you hate progress or something?

>No, because democracy is dumb. Literally. Over 50% of the US read at a 6th grade level and you want them to decide how to innovate?

People say stupid shit like this and yet always whine about elites exploiting them.

As if there was some faction of Herrenvolk Loyalist Elites who, unlike every other elite that ever existed, will not ever betray their underlings to benefit their peers. Oh, if only these fictional Volkheit-promoting elites were in power, instead of the stupid masses or our corrupt leadership!

Also, the trades have a lot of grabass associated with them. After getting out, I was not pleased to learn that, for better or for worse, blue collar working culture is interchangeable with enlisted military working culture. And not the fun Stripes/Down Periscope part, I mean the G.I. Jane/Jarhead parts.

Of course, there's also the issue of finding the right trade. If you did pneumatic controls or drywall, well, sucks to be you! Should've picked lighting systems, idiot. Oh, wait, Lutron owns everything and underpays its lighting techs. Well, you should've invented a time machine, idiot.

But yeah, trades solve everything. If everyone did a trade, the wage stagnation that happened with liberal arts and STEM totally won't happen with blue collar work. You see, by picking up a wrench or a multimeter, you put up an anti-job competition field that can permanently deflect any number of hungry applicants, no matter how much you get lowballed.

>This leaves precious few new members in the trades needed to fix our cities, bridges and railroads.

I love how people talk like capitalism is just going to give them the society they want because they asked nicely and it would be mean if capitalism didn't.

Don't forget to vote. That will bring you the society you crave, lmao.

It's also the only kind of art that exists, will ever exist, or even can ever exist.

Unless you're one of those spiritualists who think artistic talent comes from ~the human spirit~ instead of something more mundane and deterministic such as 'the artist's wartime experiences as a child' or 'exposure to hundreds of other artists of that genre'.

What SandAndAlum means is that the Chinese Room Experiment shuffles the responsibility for explaining humanity's (self-oriented and essentialist) viewpoint of consciousness onto the computer. It just takes human consciousness as a given that doesn't have to justify itself, and certainly not through reductionism.

Because if our mode of consciousness did have to justify itself by the same rules of the computer in the Chinese Room Experiment, we'd fail in the same way the computer would fail.

>There is the kinda-open question of whether there are physical phenomena that cannot be modelled as an information process.

Spiritualists pretend like there is so they can have a scientific justification for crap like souls and telepathy, but from a materialist perspective: no, there isn't. If it can't be modelled as an information process, it doesn't fucking exist.

For example: randomness can be modelled as an information process. It's probably one of the easiest ones there is. It only seems complex because our brains are bad at handling iterative probability, or even non-linear change.

But that just means we're weak babies with simple minds, unable to comprehend the full consequences of our actions. It doesn't mean that it's actually a difficult thing to simulate in an information process, and it certainly doesn't mean that there exist physical phenomena that cannot be modelled as an information process. Because, again, such things don't and can't exist outside of spiritualists' imagination.

If so, what exactly does this mean in terms of causality?

>Letting them fend for themselves is not admirable, or "empowering", it's cruel. They should be involuntarily committed to mental health and addiction intervention programs. Unfortunately, we in the US dismantled our public health infrastructure back in the 1980s (which roughly coincided with the start of the homeless crisis).

The self-pitying, po-faced uselessness of Enlightenment liberalism, summarized. 'We should be doing this, but we can't, so what can we do? Definitely Reagan's fault, though.'

Electricity consumption, yes. Energy consumption?

I think people would be appalled to learn how much energy gets wasted on things like legacy HVAC and cheap housing. Let me put it this way: energy efficiently management is sort of a scam in the area I live, but the legacy HVAC is so wasteful and suboptimized that even a charlatan can bring results.

Expect commercially viable fusion at the end of this decade. Maybe not an actual plant that provides your home power (though there will definitely be viable near-term plans to do so) but unless I've been the wrongest I've been about anything in my life this decade will be the last decade of that stupid nuclear fusion joke.

>I’m wondering: What questions or approaches have you used to bring up the topic of the future in a constructive way?

You don't, unless you feel like lying. Because A) people can't even agree on what's the problem and B) the present is pretty bad and nothing about the immediate future suggests it will get better.

Because lies are corrosive and the truth hurts -- just don't bring it up unless the other person does. Ever. Not even in a constructive discussion sense, because that is impossible to make that happen on your own terms. Your attempts to have a civil discussion will only result in more stress and anxiety.

So just don't bring it up. Ever.

>It's basically this: If the scientist really enjoys doing science, regardless of what the future holds for him that makes his efforts redundant, and if the slacker likes whatever he is doing, why is one better than the other? Just because one has interests and aptitude that is looked upon more favourably by the society, even though both are just following their passions and natural inclinations?

I have done the 'follow your dreams, regardless of how much the job market likes it' dance before. It did not work out for me. I pretty much wasted years of my life on a career path I found I could just not continue; I made do and pinched pennies until household debt caught up with me and I realize I was in a cycle of having to pay part of my rent with credit -- then I bit the bullet and switched jobs back to what I should have picked.

I am still paying off debt from that adventure. Sure, I learned a bunch of things and have a career path most salesmen or engineers would never have dreamed of... but I'd have rather have the mental health of not stressing out about whether my $500 overdraft can cover rent or having to surrender years worth of possessions because I literally cannot afford to pay the cross-country moving company the final delivery fee. No matter how enjoyable I found the work, my fulfillment could not overcome the misery of being broke and becoming worse off every month.

And I got lucky. Several times over the past years I've come within a hair's breadth of breaking my leg or totaling my car or missing a rent payment.

I have a path out of this whole mess, but it's ugly. I'd have rather not have followed my heart in the first place.

...

You won't hear stories like mine, because our society prefers to downplay and even lie about the risks of valuing anything more than money.

Value the money first, chase your dreams later. You can't enjoy your life if you're constantly stressing about being one accident or pink slip away from homelessness.

Don't bother. Study something that you will be able to use in the next 5-6+ years, because if the singularity is actually a thing it'll make all of your past efforts moot -- unless you were right at the bleeding edge of the technology at the start of the singularity.

Here's my logic: 30 plus years of education and experience compared to 30 years of jacking off to cartoons means nothing if we can boost both scientist and slacker IQ to 600 with an injection of proteins and nanomachines. Then we put their brains in an aroused state and give them 12 years of additional university education in a week.

What do our super-geniuses do next? Can't say, but in such a scenario the education and experience of the scientist doesn't give them that much more of an edge after their IQ gets boosted to 600. So now there's a real question of whether the scientist was spending their time productively, given how obsolete past experiences were to future progression after the mind augmentations. The slacker can make a real argument that they wasted less of their time than the scientist (unless the scientist was working on the pill, of course), especially if both of them go on to make discoveries that eclipse anything the unaugmented scientist could or did find previously.

Of course, if a singularity isn't possible, the scientist didn't necessary waste their time. But while researching the singularity to see if it is actually possible is a worthwhile endeavor -- even if it turns out if it's not -- most people interested in the topic seem to think that it's possible, or at least desirable.

Great economic system we have here. Better than any alternatives anyone has ever come up with.

>politics has nothing to do with these decisions, its just greed

Enlightenment liberalism rots the brain. No root causes, no systemics, just vibes and presenting problems. What a childish ideology.

You don't understand it because you're either not zealous enough or not cynical enough. And let's be real here: there's a reason why the cynics think they'll get their way, no matter what Mother Nature nor the rest of human civilization thinks.