Show threadDash RemoverJul 15, 2025
“AI didn’t take your agency, Chad — you outsourced it to a decision matrix and a productivity app named after a woodland animal.” 🧠📉 #Inevitabilism #AIhumor #ExistentialUX
N-gated Hacker NewsJul 15, 2025
🤖 #AI inevitabilism: the ultimate excuse for your lack of decision-making skills. 🎯 Tom Renner serves up 479 words of existential dread, cleverly disguised as a debate tutorial. Spoiler: AI isn't stealing your freedom, your own #indecisiveness is. 😂
https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/ #Inevitabilism #DecisionMaking #ExistentialDread #TomRenner #HackerNews #ngated
The sound of inevitability

Have you ever argued with someone who is seriously good at debating? I have. It sucks. You’re constantly thrown off-balance, responding to a point you didn’t expect to. You find yourself defending the weak edges of your argument, while the main thrust gets left behind in the back-and-forth, and you end up losing momentum, confidence, and ultimately, the argument. One of my close friends won international debate competitions for fun while we were at university (he’s now a successful criminal barrister), and he told me that the only trick in the book, once you boil it all down, is to make sure the conversation is framed in your terms. Once that happens, it’s all over bar the shouting.

My place to put things
Hacker NewsJul 15, 2025

AI inevitabilism is a framing device designed to remove your freedom of choice

https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/

#HackerNews #AI #Inevitabilism #FreedomOfChoice #FramingDevice #TechEthics #CriticalThinking

The sound of inevitability

Have you ever argued with someone who is seriously good at debating? I have. It sucks. You’re constantly thrown off-balance, responding to a point you didn’t expect to. You find yourself defending the weak edges of your argument, while the main thrust gets left behind in the back-and-forth, and you end up losing momentum, confidence, and ultimately, the argument. One of my close friends won international debate competitions for fun while we were at university (he’s now a successful criminal barrister), and he told me that the only trick in the book, once you boil it all down, is to make sure the conversation is framed in your terms. Once that happens, it’s all over bar the shouting.

My place to put things
Show threadCory DoctorowOct 1, 2023

#AIHype completely misunderstands the point of #ScienceFiction

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship-236575979d5c?sk=28d4f52322040150651fea37a303b342

#Inevitabilism #ThereIsNoAlternative #Luddites

Doug WilsonJun 27, 2023

"Hope begins with the ability to imagine alternatives. And there is always an alternative."

https://doctorow.medium.com/there-is-always-an-alternative-e55fd414d1fd

#Hope #Imagination #HumanRights #Politics #Literature #Polycrisis #ClimateEmergency #Inequality #InfrastructureNeglect #Authoritarianism #ZoonoticPlague #COVID #Thermodynamics #Optimism #Pessimism #Fatalism #Inevitabilism #Realism #HumanAgency #Inevitable #Alternative #Luddite #Technology #Millionaire #Billionaire #ScienceFiction #Predict #Contest #Challenge

Show threadCory DoctorowApr 29, 2023

This has a lot in common with science fiction, a genre full of thought experiments that ask #Heinlein's famous three questions:

* What if?

* If only, and

* If this goes on...

These contrafactuals are incredibly useful and important. As critical tools, science fiction's parables about the future are the best chance we have for resisting the #inevitabilism that insists that technology *must* be used in a certain way, or must exist at all.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMar 28, 2023

That's why they're so invested in the idea that - as #MargaretThatcher endlessly repeated - "#ThereIsNoAlternative":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#its-pronounced-tape-ass

#Inevitabilism is a cheap rhetorical trick. "There is no alternative" is a demand disguised as a truth. It really means "Stop trying to think of an alternative."

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Pluralistic: 08 Nov 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadCory DoctorowFeb 7, 2023

Capital's greatest weapon in this battle is #inevitabilism, sometimes called #CapitalistRealism, summed up with #FredericJameson's famous quote "It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" (often misattributed to #Žižek). A simpler formulation can be found in the doctrine of #MargaretThatcher: "There Is No Alternative," or even #Dante's "#AbandonHope all ye who enter here."

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