@Sempf @cR0w @Gabrielle

(Cutting out some folks that I think aren't as interested in this branch of this discussion)

The TL;DR - Yarvin is a software developer and pseudo-philosopher out of Stanford that wrote a pretty awful manifesto back around the same time Peter Thiel was in his manifesto-writing era.

They reached, more or less, the same conclusions. Their view is, roughly, that democracy is ultimately self-defeating and is not up to challenges facing 21st century political systems. They explicitly discuss the need to dismantle the democratic state and set up a neo-feudal, pseudo-corporate state with a CEO-president at its head. Sound familiar?

For being half-assed philosopher, Yarvin *really* hit the big time. His writing is deeply influential among a number of groups.

@codinghorror @Sempf @nopatience @cR0w @cloudskater

So, TESCREAL is an acronym for "Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalists, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism."

It basically describes the set of philosophical views that many of the biggest figures in the AI industry adhere to. When one digs in a little bit, there's a literal cult at the center of this with all of the usual cult views and behaviors. A few include eugenics, structured attempts to isolate adherents from broader society, leaders that view it as a moral imperative that they reproduce as much as possible, apocalyptic prophecies, and more. It's the whole shebang, really.|

Edit: Fixed a typo (adherence -> adherents)

@Sempf @codinghorror @nopatience @cR0w @cloudskater

This is pretty well written. I'm assuming the author is a younger relative. Any background in philosophy and/or contemporary political theory?

To get a better handle of just how on the nose this piece is, it may be worth looking at the (absolutely morally reprehensible) philosophical views of Curtis Yarvin and the "Dark Enlightenment" crowd. They explicitly discuss a lot of the awful things this post speculates about.

@codinghorror @nopatience @cR0w @cloudskater

I meant "obvious motivation" in more of the grand sense. The reason that megacorps and banks are driving dumpsters worth of money into the AI fire pit is that they hope it will eventually be able to cut all of us from their budgets.

As an educator, though, this position concerns me a little bit. There is educational value in having the human visit and synthesize the information from those sources. There's a growing body of literature showing that AI usage - likely because of this sort of cognitive offloading - causes folks to deskill.

@nopatience @cR0w @cloudskater

I'm increasingly thinking that AI is a symptom and not the root problem. Leaving aside that the obvious motivation for it is the destruction of the modern peasantry, I would cautiously suggest that most of the problems with it are really caused by indifference to sustainable systems.

Everything is so optimized around short-term market gains that literally everything else is getting tossed by the wayside.