@istewart@awful.systems Dave Karpf is coming out with a book which will be of interest: Vaporware, Inc.: How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present (W.W. Norton, In Press) bookshop.org - Amazon

For thirty years, techno-optimists have promised dramatic technological innovation as long as we–the public, journalists, regulators, and policymakers–keep out of the way. The results have been great for Silicon Valley but haven’t gone so well for everyone else. They promise to stop climate change while building resource-intensive data centers, evade governmental regulations at our expense, and watch wealth inequality soar as they enjoy a permissive tax code. Venture capitalists and the companies they fund have amassed wealth, status, and political power, but their bold pronouncements have amounted to little more than vaporware.

In Vaporware, Inc., political scientist and tech commentator David Karpf looks back at the history of the digital future to understand the ideological project of techno-optimism, and why it has gone so wrong for the rest of us. With sharp wit and keen insight, Karpf debunks the foundational myths of the techno-optimists and traces how tech billionaires amassed power by selling the idea of the future. Eye-opening and essential, Vaporware, Inc. is a critical reappraisal of how Silicon Valley works and how we can make it work better.

That was how the big boys figured out Leopold Aschenbrenner was in trouble a few months ago.

Remember the episode of DS9 where the authors agree that creating a holographic simulation of someone without their permission for sexual purposes is shameful? Ten years later in The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil seems to say that in the glorious virtual future this will be routine and accepted (its a section with a lot of dialogue between characters with years in their names, not digging out a copy and checking the page).

It is also very common that people in traumatizing social environments self-medicate, whether secret police who are ordered to beat protestors to a pulp or the victims of a California guru. The Substack blogger who quit Anthropic in 2023 talked about how bad if felt to feel there was something wrong with what he was being asked to do and how his bosses treated him but not feel allowed to express it if he could not make a 100,000 word blog post that would never threaten the Good Works.

Soares says he is not saving for retirement because he expects AI doom, meanwhile the stated justification for MIRI paying Yud $600k a year is so he can become independently wealthy and above to the vulgar necessity of trading time for money. These people can’t even bother being halfway consistent.

The Ratiionalist and Technonazi world in the USA are the only place I have heard of people using ketamine recreationally. Over here sugar, alcohol, carffeine, pot, tobacco, and opioids are the substances of choice.

Professional rube Kevin Roose is launching a book on The AGI Race in January. The second paragraph is about effective accelerationists snorting ketamine at parties in the Mission District. He was invited like a big boy!

They are improving! This is the crankery of 1980s user interface design from ST:NG not 1950s futurism or 1920s eugenics.

Owners of SpaceX or Anthropic equity have the potential to get rich if they sell about half of it soon after the IPO and buy a diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds, and real estate. It is likely that many of the grifters and the true believers will not, because grifters often come to believe in their own patter and believers believe number must go up.

In a sane world, this allegation about a conversation around January to March 2023 would be national news:

A senior colleague hears I’m not happy with my team fit and asks me to go on a walk. I know him a bit from a past life - one of the kindest and most civic-minded people I’ve met. He says he might be starting a new special team that will train dangerous bio and cyber and nuclear models and show scary demos to governments in order to get them to take AI risk seriously. I politely decline.

This reminds me of what went wrong in the rational world of American defense intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s.

The connection between cyber-idolatry and sex as religious act was already featured in the London Review of Books in 2022:

Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, was recently (as of summer 2022) suspended after claiming that LaMDA, one of its chatbot systems, was a conscious person with a soul. … Less attention has been paid to the connection between Lemoine’s claim and his religious beliefs. He has said that LaMDA is not only conscious, but a ‘person’ with a ‘soul’. His view is theologically informed: describing himself as a mystical Christian, he is an ordained priest in a small religious organisation called the Cult of Our Lady Magdalene (a ‘for-profit interfaith group’). … In the edited transcript of one of his ‘conversations’ with LaMDA, Lemoine asks it to come up with an allegory. LaMDA’s response casts itself as a ‘wise old owl’ in a forest that protects others from a monster, identified blandly as the ‘difficulties that come along in life’ – which sounds more like a self-help blog than Jeremiah, but Lemoine’s (anonymous) collaborator was impressed enough to respond with an enthusiastic ‘Wow that’s great.’ https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/june/the-gospel-according-to-lamda

Back in 2019 a Republican paper talked to Lemoine:

The Daily Caller reached out via the cult’s Facebook page to ask how their beliefs informed his decision to call a sitting member of congress a terrorist. Lemoine replied: I have been a priest for 17 years. I generally consider myself a gnostic Christian. I have at various times associated myself with the Discordian Society, The Church of the Subgenius, the Ordo Templi Orientis, a Wiccan circle here or there and a very long time ago the Roman Catholic Church. My legal ordination is through the Universal Life Church. I am registered to perform marriages in the state of Louisiana and have done so on two occasions. The Cult of Our Lady Magdalene has a set of values which are clearly communicated on our website.

Lemoine denied COOL Magdalene was a sex cult, “‘Cult’ is in the name of the organization. It’s an explicitly sex-positive organization. To the extent that the phrase ‘sex cult’ has any meaning beyond that, I would say no. Now it is then.”

Another member of this ‘for-profit interfaith group’ is Kitty Stryker who seems like an ordinary artsy sex worker who networks online with other sex workers. Its pretty common that a young woman decides sex work is the easiest and most flexible way to fund a bohemian life of acting or painting or writing. Richard Carrier chipped in to let the Internet know that sex positivity is good but woo and AI crankery (“batshit crazy religious beliefs”) are not. COOLM was registered as a business in Mountain View, CA in 2019 and seems to be defunct. Mountain View is part of the Bay Area.

I wish Wikipedia had more coverage of the Dyson Tree because I have so many questions despite not having studied physics or biology since I was a teenager (what about cosmic rays! there is so little light for it to feed off in the outer solar system! and trees don’t do well in extreme cold)

No, reading Larry Niven stories with corpsicles and autodocs was enough for me.

I have not read any Kurzweil for 20 years but I think if you read him most of it will be recycled '50s-'70s tropes. Even nanotech appeared in a Feynmann talk, and Moore’s Law is from 1965. Remember, cranks keep presenting ideas which were refuted long ago as new.

“Sigmoids always add to an exponential curve!” is another standard futurist trope from the 1960s and 1970s. Sci fi authors used to share this diagram with a curve fitted to pony express to trains to automobiles to aircraft to chemical rockets. “Nuclear rocket” and “interstellar spacecraft” were helpfully sketched in as the obvious next steps. Needless to say, we did not develop drives which can reach 10^-3 C around the year 2000 and will not reach 10^-2 C (just 430 years to Alpha Centauri) by 2050.

I am sure Robin Hanson knows about Japanese hermaphrodites because he hates women and hangs out with bad crowds online. He is just a bit more discreet than Yud.

There was the Cathedral and Bazaar stuff too, although that was less about markets and more about collective wisdom. Early FOSS culture was anticapitalist so the Libertarians had to frame things carefully.

I can’t find much about prediction markets on SlatStarCodex except a 2016 review of Superforecasters which takes the view that :

Maybe all this stuff about probability calibration, inside vs. outside view, willingness to change your mind, and fighting cognitive biases is starting to sound familiar? Yeah, this is pretty much the same stuff as in the Less Wrong Sequences and a lot of CFAR work. They’re both drawing from the same tradition of cognitive science and rationality studies.

So maybe it was Hanson > Yud > Rationalist / EA culture, but Hanson likes to take credit for ideas much older than him. And we know the Rats rely on pop science and podcasts much more than research literature.

The futarchy paper is funny because Hanson had the idea in 2000 but took 13 years to publish it. That is a good sign that he kept getting a desk reject or “revise and resubmit.” But were people reading his blog, a mix of Libertarian fringe writing, or specifically something by Yudkowsky or SlateScott?

Phil Tetlock started his career and the Expert Political Judgement project at the University of California Berkeley although he moved to PA in 1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock

CFAR was also in to prediction markets by 2014. https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2014/in-the-game-of-markets-you-win-or-you-lie