The Post-Partisan Emporium

 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 befor...

  Crony Capitalism: Everything Has a Price Supplemental industries for sale Donald Jeffries When I was a boy, an obese boy when obesity wasn’t cool, I never dreamed that one day we would all know the glory of paying for water. I would bring a thermos with ice water to baseball games. For basketball games, I drank out of the gym’s water fountain. I had no idea what was in that non-purified water. Fluoride was first added to our water supply in 1945. But that was only in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One of the initial proponents of putting this known poison into our drinking water was Harold Hodge, who was part of the human radiation experiments taking place around the same time. You know, where they injected vulnerable “test subjects” with plutonium and uranium. I guess they anticipated something wonderful happening as a result. The “science” behind putting a deadly toxin in our water was provided by some of the largest corporations in the country; Alcoa, the American Petroleum Institute...