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 before turning the

  Geoengineering a Psychic Storm Sorry to rain on your parade Joe Allen Geoengineering is real and it’s a horrible idea. Civilian and military scientists have been attempting to control the weather for many decades. Anyone who’s just now discovering that is understandably shocked and probably disoriented. Hucksters rely on this effect. A mind that’s just been opened is easily duped. “He who controls the weather,” Lyndon B. Johnson  famously proclaimed , “will control the world!” No one remembers anything these days, though. When they do, it’s usually in the form of selectively edited quotes like this—cited as “proof” the government has long been capable of godlike weather control—which will occasionally resurface to stir a memetic storm. After two decades, I’ve yet to see convincing evidence that any cabal has full control over the weather, whether it be heat waves or hurricanes. Cloud-seeding scientists  have a hard enough time  making it rain. However, there is ample evidence that sh