Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸
So, if you trace the AI freakout back, it comes down to one guy’s longtime misunderstanding of how computers work. Eliezer Yudkowsky believes in the equivalent of perpetual motion, cold fusion, or zero-point energy—and he has transmitted this virus through broligarch funded propaganda. The basic problem is not that he never had a formal education; it’s that he came into his career of being Chicken Little for AI with a preconceived set of wrong assumptions he got from science fiction he read as a teenager—and never gave them up. People like Peter Thiel, looking for apocalyptic technologies which could break the back of liberal democracies, promoted him despite the fact that he had no idea what he was talking about. Yudkowsky’s chief line of paranoia goes by the shorthand FOOM—which means that AI will start improving itself (RSI) so much faster than humans can understand what’s going on that if it’s “misaligned” it will just go ahead and kill us all. The entire backstory of AI as we currently know it involves Yudkowsky and Peter Thiel meeting at a Foresight Institute event in 2005. Foresight was founded by two people who claimed to be worried about nanotechnology taking over the world in the late 1980s (this hypothesis came to be known as “gray goo”) and switched its grift in the 2000s to AI when its first disaster fantasy didn’t work out. Yudkowsky raised money from Peter Thiel for his Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), and started “LessWrong” a “Rationalist” community/cult that he systematically steered in the direction of proving his paranoid, incorrect theories were true. The founders and the entire lexicon of the current AI industry comes from LessWrong—AGI, ASI, RSI, alignment, etc. That’s why the current freakout about AI is about all the stuff Yudkowsky has been promoting for 25 years. The paranoia of an AI apocalypse is BAKED IN to the fabric of the industry. Trillions of dollars are being burned in a furnace because this one guy managed to convince people that a pile of numbers and linear algebra was actually a malevolent alien brain. When you throw an enormous amount of compute at a problem and it does something it’s not supposed to, that’s called a bug, it is not evidence that a chatbot wants to kill us. Please stop falling for this stuff. It’s always the same damn story.
Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸
You may be shocked to learn that the latest apocalyptic psyop is also brought to you by a Peter Thiel funded cult leader.
