This is a post I've been trying to write for a while - like, years - and I've finally gotten it down. I want to stress that I'm not a sociologist, or a historian, this is not an academic treatise or anything like that. It's just a bunch of memories and thoughts, and I don't have a complete picture of all the political and social changes of the last few decades. (Update: thank you for the lovely responses! I will reply to every one, it just might take a little while.)
A few days ago someone sent me a clip of Elon Musk talking to Joe Rogan. In a wild act of self-hatred, I decided to play the clip. Here's a transcript of what he says:
Musk: If you start thinking that humans are bad, then the natural conclusion is that humans should die out. Now, I'm heading to an international AI safety conference later tonight, leaving in about three hours, and I'm gonna meet with the British Prime Minister and a number of other people. So you have to say, like, how could AI go wrong? Well, if the AI gets programmed by the extinctionists it will... its utility function will be the extinction of humanity.
Rogan: -pause- Well yeah... clearly.
Musk: They won't even think it's bad, like that guy. It's messed up.
Rogan: There's a lot of decisions that AI would make that would be similar to eugenics.
This is a blog post about the TV show QI, how the belligerent arrogance of a few people set an example for a whole generation, and why loving science is not enough.
I did some of that as well, a decade or so back
Weasily, I told some math or programming student that she was doing real science, not me1.
She wasn't impressed with my assessment.
I still remember it from time to time.
I got better since, in part due to my hard turn to left-wing politics, but also because we all noticed that STEM doesn't make you a moral person or immune to engineer delusion or [gestures to the twitter history of Neil de Grasse Tyson]
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to be fair, the "not really doing science" fairly accurately described my approach to studies at the time.
