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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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Very interesting framing! The question that most strongly appears to me, though, is this one:

With the NotebookLM conversations fresh in my mind, I start to engage in esoteric free-association. Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI? What if we are, as Elon Musk has put it, the biological bootloader for artificial superintelligence, a biotechnical ribosome that has encountered our stop-codon? For that matter, homo sapiens has existed for some 300,000 years, and spent most of that time getting better at knapping flint, until something changed approximately 10,000 years ago and the supercritical transition to technological civilisation got going, a dynamical inflection point when the final programmatic sequence kicked into gear. And now, the end point, the apogee, the event horizon. Surely some revelation is at hand?

This sounds to me like positing a kind of agency or purpose to history - a sense that it's almost like there's a design, or something that's meant to happen now.

That sense would imply some kind of agent to have that purpose, a designer or meaner who lies behind this. To UFO cultists (pardon the pejorative language), that agent might be some enlightened alien race, or spiritual being or group thereof that are only observed through these esoteric occurrences. Someone more focused on AI might posit some way that a future agent can reach back in time to influence its own creation (perhaps something like Dan Simmons' Ultimate Intelligence?), or to create the condition of its own possibility. Or adherents of traditional religions might easily slot their own divinities in there.

Do you have any sense of such a purpose, or implied agency?