Plainly their utilitarian approach to #rationality informs how they view #intelligence and their fixation on "generative AI" as the summa qua non of computing technology: it would be irrational by their lights to reject the use of a computing device that's:

(a) such a conceptually simple and brute-force method for approximating human behavior and creativity, requiring very little from the #tech entrepreneurs besides extravagant hoarding of computer hardware and #data

(b) so readily tailored to produce output within a desired specification, merely by tuning the training data fed into the #LLM or other "generative AI" thingummy

(c) so easily slotted into #business models precisely because the chief virtues of #LLMs and similar devices is their predictability of output and their brute-force ability to generate massive quantities of output.

To them it's a ridiculously obvious proposition: rent a building, pack it with GPUs, steal a mass of training data from somewhere and hey presto it's like printing #money. Who would be stupid and "dumb" enough NOT to do these things?!

I can think of these people as "irrational" myself, motivated clearly by emotional and fallacious notions about #science, but here's the paradox about #rationality: one's reason must always be based, ultimately, on a set of premises which one is forced to take more or less on faith, as the starting-point to one's thinking. Consider the simple example of Euclid's parallel postulate, for example: one cannot prove the parallel postulate in terms of the previous axioms in Euclid's Elements, so one is actually free to replace the postulate with another and thus obtain a consistent but "non-Euclidean" system of geometry.

I have my own set of essentially unprovable notions about how the Cosmos works and how people ought to behave ethically, and the techbros are free to reject ALL those premises. I can regard them as "irrational" but that's according to my premises, not theirs. Conversely they're free to look at my own presumptions as ridiculous ones, and prioritize their own.

This speaks to the general techbro attitude towards #rationality as meaning something very different from what I think of as being rational. To me, one is rational if one thinks and speaks in a reasoned way and is able to defend one's statements and actions rationally without resorting to fallacies or contradictions.

But to the #technology elite crowd, to be "rational" is mostly about maximizing one's rewards. It would be "irrational" not to take advantage of some obvious and facile means of cheating large numbers of people out of money, for example, because it's "rational" to maximize one's personal hoard of money and conversely it would be disadvantageous and "irrational" not to grab such an opportunity, and thus be the loser of the game of life—the loser of #evolution itself, according to the particular way in which techbros view evolution.