Charlie StrossMay 13, 2023

@mpesce I prefer to think in terms of corporations as being very slow AIs, executing procedures to copy themselves into the future by any available means. "Capitalism" in that context is simply the vector sum of their interacting goal-seeking behaviours. No mind, just blind iteration as it expands to absorb all available resources.

And "human attention" is a very low-level but useful resource.

Show threadHenry FarrellMay 13, 2023
@cstross @[email protected] @delong Cosma's classic - http://bactra.org/weblog/699.html - "vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, ... An implacable drive ... to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere ... words like "agenda" or "purpose" are too anthropomorphic, and fail to acknowledge the radical novelty and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating."
The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone

Show threadCharlie StrossMay 13, 2023
@henryfarrell @mpesce @delong The *precise* mid-point of "Accelerando" is a barroom debate over when the Singularity happened (options range between "development of language" to "hasn't happened yet"). They reach no satisfying conclusion. The punchline is, the debaters are all uploaded minds running inside a coke-can sized starship en route to visit an alien megastructure.
Show threadHenry Farrell
@cstross @[email protected] @delong I've returned pretty often to the Economics 2.0 idea in the intervening years - one of the really interesting questions is what happens as markets move from flash crash type trading bots to LLM-fueled systems that use non-price based representations of complex underlying economic relationships? The space of solutions to the Hayek-Polanyi tacit knowledge problem is going to be a very, very weird one. Accelerando-meets-Blindsight is a somewhat disturbing sounding future.
May 13, 2023 at 7:11pmWeb
Show threadKarl Heinz HäsliprinzMay 13, 2023
@henryfarrell @cstross @mpesce @delong The market is just another video game nowadays. Only cops make it real.
Show threadBill TozierMay 13, 2023
@henryfarrell @cstross @mpesce @delong with a dash of "indistinguishable from nature" thrown in....
Show threadHenry FarrellMay 13, 2023
@Vaguery @cstross @[email protected] @delong Once out of nature, I shall never take/my bodily form from any natural thing/but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make/of hammered gold and gold enamelling. More practically relevant - what happens when the Idols of the Marketplace start getting chatty? https://www.dropbox.com/s/26q90q6vjkp0d39/Spufford%20-%20Idols%20of%20the%20Marketplace.PDF?dl=0
Spufford - Idols of the Marketplace.PDF

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Show threadLoungeiguanaMay 14, 2023
@henryfarrell @Vaguery @cstross @mpesce @delong I love Spufford, and this essay is great. Thank you.
Show threadLuis VillaMay 15, 2023
@henryfarrell Thanks for sharing this.