The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Face To Fasces Evil-doers do evil Radio Far Side "Destiny’s powerful hand has made the bed of my future, and it’s up to me to lie in it. I am destined to be a superhero, to right wrongs, and pound two-fisted justice into the hearts of evil-doers everywhere. You don’t fight destiny. No sir! And you don’t eat crackers in the bed of your future, or you get all… scratchy. Hey, I’m narrating here!" —  The Tick , 1994 As a freelance writer and editor, I work on a lot of high-level international documents. Though they are freely available on the interwebs, very few of us actual humans ever read them, and with good reason. If I didn’t get paid to do it, I would rather pull my own teeth with tweezers. These reports, roadmaps, frameworks, and studies clearly lay out the machinery of global governance. They go into excruciating detail on the legal and regulatory foundations for how governments blend with NGOs, blend with financial institutions, blend with “stakeholders” (how I detest

 Thanks to Saint Jimmy (Russian American) for recommending this article. The Road to AI Utopia, Paved with (Empty) Splendors Simplicius Last month Sam Altman wrote a fanciful blog post which has stirred discussion within the tech industry. He titled it  The Intelligence Age . The chief thesis which the narcotically optimistic post espouses is the following: In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents. It’s almost all you need to know to understand the gist behind much of Altman and his cohort’s foundational beliefs, or even  ethos , driving their near-pathologically obsessive accelerationism toward AI singularity—or what they conceive as such. It has all the hallmarks of blind Utopianism. The examples of coming achievements he gives seem myopically ratcheted to first order effects, never considering second or third order consequences as should responsibly be the case. Let’s go through some of them before turning the