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 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.