BlueMonday1984Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st March 2026
e8d79I’ve started to feel like Ed Zitron is actively hurting people I care about…
Have you been abused by Ed Zitron being mean to your favourite AI? You might be entitled to compensation!
The parent thread is also worth a read. “What if pee pee was poo poo” - brilliant opener
It’s a pretty wild read. This isn’t a rational doomer screed about the annihilation of life on earth, though it similarly bounces radically between being overly vague and overly specific to create the appearance of analyjsis and consideration and confuse when it’s claiming a fact with when it’s extrapolating a trend (hint: it’s almost always the latter). Instead it’s written firmly for the McKinsey set to convince them their bets on the AI future weren’t dumb and actually it’s the naysayers who will lose their jobs and homes. Also David might need to update his site because there’s an offhanded reverse-pivot back into crypto.
I regret reading that in full. Really, read the opener summary, stop at “What if pee pee was poo poo” and you will be wiser and happier.
Insane that people got paid large sums to write this.
Commented [97]: if we simply imagine something that didn’t happen,
“Intelligence Displacement” indeed.
Yeah, I probably should have included a warning about incoming psychic damage on that link. Sorry.
Although highlighting the phrase “intelligence displacement” construct dies illuminate that the whole case they make is built on the same foundations as that other Rat fixation: eugenics and race science! Like, I’m not saying the author is definitely a eugenicist breaking out the skull calipers, but their argument is based on the same idea of what “intelligence” is in the first place. It’s a distinct commodity that is produced or contained in certain minds and is the ultimate source of the value that they create. If you’re a “knowledge worker” you don’t provide a specific perspective, experience, expertise, or even knowledge, you just plug your intelligence into the organization like connecting a new processor bank to a server farm. Because it’s disconnected from a person’s individuality and subjectivity we can model it effectively as a commodity and look to optimize its production, either by automating away the squishy human element with ai or by increasing the productivity of current methods by optimizing for the white “right” kind of person.