I would love it if people would forget these silly “material conditions” sometimes.
I think exploring your own vision of a better world is really healthy and hearing and discussing others’ ideals is educational.
Yes, the world is ass and our pathways to FALGSC are basically nonexistent. I’m not saying people should be living in LaLa Land, but even with the way things are I just think it would be nice to hear people’s aspirations!
So what’s your unrealistic, niche, but admirable ideal?
I’ve been watching some of the AI Bazingas because I hate myself and all happiness, and one thing is just how fucking openly Fascist they’ve become. Most of it is white Fascism but some is a weird Hindutva strain that is even more virulently anti-China.
Sometimes they have interviews with merely deeply problematic old transhumanists like Ben Goertzel and they’re taken aback with the level of fash spilling out.
Now obviously this is all a grift, but Some Highlights.
“America must remain culturally dominant and dictate the terms of technology to other countries, including allies.”
“We must use international orgs like the UN to make sure only the USA has military with AI”
“New reproductive and in person education should be limited to the rich.”
“People should be scanned for “Cultural compatibility” before being allowed longevity treatments (this is definitely not a social credit system our thing is different”
“I’m really concerned about meaning under AI, because struggle is the reason for existence and I, the Ubermensch, have determined that that struggle be in such a way to maintain the supremacy of CIs whites like myself” “I think most people derive meaning from the pleasure of creation and social interaction with those they love” “No! only the Triumph of the individual will can give life purpose, that’s why I have no friends!”
I want them all gulaged but realistically half of them will be in jail for fraud in 5 years so…
I’ve seen that myself, in its early days, both around bazingas chatting it up at my old local bookstore back in CA and in ChatGPT-related communities.
The rapid vulgar reductionism against “meat puppets/meat computers” was there all along, as was the desire to have a more perfect slave (let’s face it, the desire for a theoretical “friendly” artificial person that is sapient but also unconditionally loving and obedient is high-tech slavery). Hating living beings and wishing them to be “obsolete” (especially in a “those feeemales will be sorry when this chatbot replaces them!” way) apparently made them believe that their treat printers were that much closer to ascension, and they saw the increasing precarity and consequent suffering of people hurt by the technology as deserving it as part of a nerd revenge fantasy of some sort.
Basically, this.
Or more recently… this.
Then you have “wants to warn about the poison cake but also eat it too” quacks like Big Yud and his forum buddy “Roko” that lament that they could have saved the world from “unfriendly” treat printers (they bought into the hype labeling of LLMs as “AI” and just ran with it) but there just aren’t enough geniuses like themselves to do so.
What really annoys me is that none of these things really print all that many treats. To the extent they work they threaten to take away the parts of work you like while also making the product worse.
I remember when the big promise was that machines would do the repetitive grueling manual labor and people would be more free to make art and express themselves.
AND LOOK WHAT’S HAPPENING INSTEAD.