lyrabold

lyra

@lyrabold

yipping in your area

  • she/it

also called BP-04 sometimes. kobolds! kobold enthusiasm! oh yeah woo yeah yip yeah

log in
lyrabold
@lyrabold
atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs
vogon
@vogon

the more news that comes out of silicon valley lately, the more I marvel at the fact that the secular tech right wing seems to be reinventing every awful aspect of evangelical christianity, with the sole exception that technically they don't think god exists

they've reinvented pascal's wager, the homeschooling movement, prosperity gospel, quiverfull...

don't worry, though, they're "liberals" -- just, the kind of liberals that want to be able to stop funding public schools and give all of their disposable income to think tanks that exist solely to write papers about how getting rich and giving all of your disposable income to think tanks is the best thing people can do for society

garak
@garak

And the AI Singularity is just the Rapture with a fake mustache and fedora.

I've also noticed religious overtones to the (strong version of the) Efficient Market Hypothesis. It basically says: The Market has the three "infinite" qualities traditionally ascribed to God, which are Omnisciences, Omnipotence, and Infinite Benevolence. The Will of the Market becomes their guiding diety.

For millenia, Christian philosophy has wrangled with the thought that these three qualities are a contradiction, called The Problem of Evil. How can evil exist in the world, of God is aware of it (Omniscience), can fix it (Omnipotences), and is infinitely kind?

Modern finance has a depressingly banal solution: The Will of the Market is definitionally good, and therefore evil does not exist. Any time you see evil in the works of The Market, it's because you're stupid. The natural corollary is that market adherents can just do whatever the fuck they want to, and if the market permits them, then it's just and moral.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @vogon's post:

SiteRelEnby
@SiteRelEnby

I always took it as a semi-parody - I agree with its overall message but the way it goes about it is obviously stupid in stretching people's denial to absurd lengths, but then again, Pascal's Wager is one of the stupidest ideas in all philosophy (to quote Homer Simpson, "What happens if we picked the wrong god? Every time we go to to church we just make them madder and madder" for just one easy takedown of many of it).

(Although, it looks less stupid with all the COVID denialists everywhere - when the pandemic started, I was immediately expecting MAGA types to take the side of the virus, but not 90-95% of the general population to be completely unable to give a shit about anyone else until it's them and their family ending up disabled...)

login to reply
gureito
@gureito

i don't think god had never had anything to do with it. even for evangelical christianity, these moves have always been about strengthening their power structure and dressing it up in way that the ones under the structure accepted it. the tech right wing is just playing the exact same moves. i don't think they are reinventing anything. what they are doing is that they learned what worked for religion --there's a lot of old money in there, and money and church have been hand in hand for as long as they existed-- and adapted their discourse to distance themselves from them, to make it acceptable independent of denomination. i think it's a conscious and deliberate move, not something they are stumbling on their own as they get used to newfound power... don't make it any less sad though 😔

login to reply
zaratustra
@zaratustra

if every billionaire had 100 children, it would be less kids than the population of Corpus Christi, Texas

If all of those had 100 children, it would still be less than the population of Mozambique

login to reply

in reply to @garak's post:

SiteRelEnby
@SiteRelEnby

Agreed except for the singularity part, I've always hated that analogy - the idea of a singularity is just a point where technological progress goes exponential - you could argue that when the first humans discovered a process that resembled the scientific method, that was a singularity too (or the spread of agriculture as a concept, or the industrial revolution, or the computer age), as it's been exponential from there - next one will just be a similar ramp up again. Of course, most people just believe it's some magical "everyone disappears" moment, perhaps not helped by older or low-quality scifi. In terms of wishing for a magical saviour, sure, it's stupid, but that's the kind of belief that Musk et al hold and not so much the people who are actually building the future.

That said, the idea of a singularity brought on solely by AI is stupid, human enhancement and life extension will certainly necessarily be parts, as would brain-computer interfacing.

login to reply
garak
@garak

The belief in the AI Singularity isn't just a specific technological singularity. As I understand it, the idea of the "AI Singularity" is that when we cross the threshold where AI can improve itself better than humans can improve it, then its self-improvement very quickly accelerates faster than humans can keep up. The first part, acceleration, you are correct to point out is not novel and that's just part of a regular technological singularity.

It's the second part that is often spoken of with quasi-religious awe. That the new artificial intelligence will be unfathomable to mortal minds, that it's exponential self-improvement will make it exceed humans and render our own intelligence obsolete. It's not just that technological progress would create a new society that would be hard to understand for people living today (that happens), it's that it would create a society that would be hard to understand for the people living in it due to the existence of this higher category of being.

That's the part that sounds to me a lot like "people, some of whom are alive today, will be taken away from the earthly plane and live in the company of angels."

Of course, this is all kinda watery thinking for a variety of reasons, foremost among them being how one defines "better." It also relies on the seldom-examined belief that consciousness is simply a level of intelligence, and so a sufficiently-intelligent system will be self-aware and then a more intelligent system will exceed that in some fashion. But unpacking that is a whole separate discussion.

login to reply
otteralice
@otteralice

yeah i've always rolled my eyes at the talk of "the singularity". like, for one we're so far away from creating a sentient ai and it takes such a fuckton of assumptions that have no basis in reality to say "the ai will take over" and that it would learn and grow so rapidly that we couldn't contain it.

give me a break. for one, it's subject to the same reality we are, and an axe to the power source would contain it quite well.

login to reply
otteralice
@otteralice

it really is all a new religion based on numbers, logic, tech, and their biases. all geared to funnel power and money to the new priest class who Are The Only Ones Who Can Fix Things.

what's worse about this new religious thinking is that it's much more isolating and more blatantly focused on greed and power consolidation than other religions because there's no facade of helping others (except maybe in the longtermism ideology of "we need to save the humans that aren't born a million years from now)

login to reply