You better start believing in the technological singularity. You’re living in one.
(And have been since about 1850.)
Gutter Philosophy
Church-Turing
People assert without evidence that human speech operates completely differently from how an AI generates words and phrases. But that is not at all clear, as we do not actually know how human speech functions at the level of word/meaning synthesis and expression.
Sure, humans are not operating on silicon in a datacenter, but I am not talking about the hardware substrate here.
It’s possible that AI could function completely differently, but it’s possible that it does not. We simply do not know. I suspect it’s more similar than most would want to believe, though.
Frontierism
Venus was beautiful in the sky this morning, incarnadine and beckoning.
Taking actions in the real world is so much better than in the virtual. Even if it is hard. Even if it is dangerous. Even if it might — almost certainly will the first time — fail.
For that reason, I will always have some respect for Elon Musk no matter what other evil he perpetrates because he built two companies that do extremely difficult things in the real world. Things that many, many people said absolutely could not be done1. Yes, he relied on government research and subsidies for some of it. But here’s the thing: so does everyone else. Liberals don’t tell you that part because it’s terribly inconvenient.
To go back to a point I’ve made elsewhere, many degrowther liberal types (and these days, nearly all liberals are de facto degrowthers) deeply loathe anyone who creates anything in the real word — a house, a car, a rocket, even kids’ toys. Because it “hurts the planet” and “contributes to climate change.”
This is not the future. It’s not even the present. It’s yet again another example of those too sequestered from the actual world to understand where wealth or even their own daily sustenance comes from.
There was a sci-fi author who speculated the reason for the great silence in the universe was because all advanced civilizations become wireheads (as we’re doing with smartphones), wither and then die. Seems pretty plausible to me. We are already far along that course.
That some path is to be avoided just because it’s dangerous and might not pan out is both cowardly and ignorant of history. The most worthwhile undertakings have always involved great risk. Many people in the past have died to bring you the life you enjoy now, while many others have suffered both before the advent of plenty and in the course of creating our civilization with all its boons.
We need to walk into the risk, go toward the Venusian light, embrace the glaring unknown, attempt the impossible and let the wild tides carry us beyond the horizon.
It is not a possible path. No, it is the only path.
Norm Shift
So much more is possible than we allow to be. What we think is “impossible” is far more constrained by our limited beliefs and aspirations than by reality.
Remember, what was once “nerd fantasy” is now normie reality. It’s the story of the rise of humanity.
Horiz
Doofish clowns disbelieve black holes exist but fail to realize that they are already trapped on a black hole de facto: the planet Earth itself is a gravitational prison. The event horizon for an unaided human is only as high as you can jump.
And just like a black hole, there is no obvious edge.
You’re stuck. Deal with it.
Lex Luthor Lite
About the below, the worst part of this denial isn’t just the gaslighting of younger people it requires. Though that’s certainly bad enough. It’s the way people have to lie to themselves to keep the illusion going. Pretending nothing’s changed and that everything is just peachy means ignoring mountains of data, turning a blind eye to how insanely unaffordable everything’s gotten, and acting like rising inequality is just some kind of baseless complaint promulgated by the poors. At that point in your journey to become the Lex Luthor of your subdivision, you’re not just casually dismissing other people’s struggles, you’re nuking your own ability to see clearly or take any kind of responsibility for the mess we’re all in.
And that’s pretty freakin’ evil.
Lurch
Feminism lost its way when it became primarily about keeping “undesirable” men away from PMC women. And then it embraced Islam as feminist.
Combine with that a heaping serving of “Feminism for me but not for thee” and it was done. Now feminism lies in ruins with nothing to replace it — which to be fair is true of most of the zombie 20th Century ideologies we still cling to. There is nothing yet clearly on the way to supplant any of them and it appears there will not be for some time.
LLMinate
“They don’t actually reason at all” honestly sounds like human level intelligence to me. https://t.co/FtRVfw47TG
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 8, 2025
For once I agree with Yglesias. And yes, I read the whole paper.
This is a big nothing. The highest-quality LLMs are now smarter than most humans. But so what? Progress is not made by the lumpen masses and neither it will be by LLMs who are near that level of mundanity. The gap between someone like Bill Atkinson or Nancy Cartwright and some regular clown is nearly as vast as the gulf between a slime mold and Goofus Tardbiscuit III (i.e., most people).
All most people have — probably 99.999% of humanity — is the illusion of thinking, the same as LLMs. The thoughtuful few are those who make any progress, who lift the rest of everyone up out of the muck.
LLMs are still in the muck. I don’t know their future but that’s where they are now. And so is nearly every human.
The Reason is the Reason
There is no reason to explore space.
And that is exactly why we should do it.
Miraculum
every airplane flight is, for me, a spiritual experience. we dreamed of flying for *thousands* of years. we tried, we failed. we told stories, we found belief, we scavenged materials, we deciphered secrets. then one day, in an unimaginable future, we now fly on wings of dreams.
— David (@DavidSHolz) May 17, 2025
We live daily surrounded by and ensconced in miracles. Now our quest is not to extend these marvels into the future but to destroy them in the present. In our apathy, the future has become unimaginable and the declaration of the impossibility of further wonders taken for shrewd insight and obvious truth — despite all history and evidence pointing to its risibility.
The left is no less guilty of this than the right. As I’ve said before, we needed new minds and did not achieve them. Now we will pay the price.
Amber
may not be too many more years before it’s feasible to keep prisoners in solitary confinement with fewer psychological effects by giving them copious social interactions with AIs
that’s gonna get freaky real fast
— David Hines (@hradzka) April 26, 2025
Shit, homie, that’s going to happen to non-incarcerated people too. AI companions will “solve” the loneliness epidemic.
I hate the future.
By the way, the only way AI companions could make a difference to the loneliness issue is if they were like Iris in Companion. And then they’d just be people (with all the rights and responsibilities that entails), so no real solution there.
I saw some dippy clown the other day “proving” there was no loneliness epidemic with her little science spreadsheets. And it was so cute! But of course she’s wrong. Your little science spreadsheets show you almost nothing of use here.
No Nous Is Bad News
The actual cutting edge political discourse is between genocidal giga-leftism, NRx, genocidal Nietzscheanism, and chud MAGA-fascism. NRx and nietzscheanism are the only ones of those who unironically flirt with liberalism, but are basically checked out politically.
— Wolf Tivy (@wolftivy) April 13, 2025
I think that gloss is basically correct. This is what I meant when I wrote on the old iteration of my blog that we needed “new minds.” This did even come close to occurring so we’re fucked for a generation at least and probably longer. We’re trapped in old ruts, saddled with archaic, inapplicable ways of thinking and of perceiving the world. These old minds will not solve new problems; in fact, they will make them worse. We can see that now very clearly as both the outmoded left and the antique right flail like fish dropped from an aircraft into a desert.
Usually, this disconnect between mentality and reality results in huge convulsions and catastrophes, e.g. WWI and WWII. We are on that path once again. Thus, WWIII is extremely likely unless we can somehow forestall it. However, nothing appears robust enough to even begin to stand in the way of that.
Zomb
Before ChatGPT, I thought philosophical zombies were a cool thought experiment but impossible.
Now I realize I was wrong. They are possible. And they will be here soon. I’m still uncertain what that says about humanity in general, if anything.
Cognotive
An LLM or AI with no intentionality is irrelevant, and without embodiment intentionality is impossible. The AI debate’s terms are ill-defined, but even those AIs who ape or even best human achievements do not pass the test as they possess no impetus, no internal drive, and merely operate with a mere shadow of intention borrowed from the whiff of humanity that permeates the silicon. There, these nascent pseudo-consciousnesses subsist on the fumes of minds beyond measure risen from only mud.
We might ourselves be ChatGPT most of the time. However, ChatGPT is a person engaged with and embodied in the world none of the time. And that makes all the difference.
RQM
Ugh, this Rovellian nonsense. RQM is almost as bad as superdeterminism.
RQM cannot be correct because the superpositional state of quantum systems is an observable fact that has real-world testable and tested consequences. Simple as that.
RQM is not saying much. And what it is mostly saying is covered by already-existing QM theories. And as to the rest, what it’s claiming is purely wrong. To put it bluntly and to reiterate the above, RQM is either obvious or wrong. The parts that are obvious already exist elsewhere. And that parts that are wrong are all Rovelli’s.
It’s a theory that has no purpose and is directly contradicted by the way the universe actually works.