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To whence shall we roll back the clock?
We joke about the glory years, the years when Things Were Better, which just so happen to coincide with people's younger years. You get me to say what years I would like to roll back the clock to and live, I would probably say somewhere around the 90s-late 00s. I am an outlier, as far as I know. Virtually no one I know would like to roll back the clock to spitting distance from two thousand and fucking-eight.
Back when the most lefty thing on the internet was a girl telling people that she didn't appreciate being propositioned for sex on an elevator. Pre-tiktok, the era of old forums. The iphone still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. The era when Google and Microsoft weren't the undisputed emperors of your lives.
Actually, forget that. We all know there's nowhere to roll back to, we can only roll forward, embracing the aesthetics of what we imagined the past to be. I, for one, am glad that I am not eternally inundated with "WOW DAE PARENTS ARE BOOORIIINNG????" ads. You can pull my 70-lb tub of legos accumulated over more than twenty years out of my cold, dead hands, NSA. And it's probably true that in the next 30-40 years that democracy and republicanism-as-we-know it will no longer exist.
No seriously, whence come the true techno-king? Who are the contenders for the first immortal god-king of humanity. I joke in the phrasing, but it is not exactly an incorrect joke now, is it? It is very probable that we will have the first actual trillionaire human in the next thirty years. The first effectively-emperors of mankind.
The only reason companies don't do governance of humans is that they're shit at it, actually, and Democracy is surprisingly efficient over long timescales. But assume for the sake of thought experiment, that the singularity happens, and we have our first crowned god-emperor of humanity thanks to the creation of AGI. Who are our contenders?
Personally, I should expect them to:
As such, pick your top 5 most likely individuals to become humanity's first true techno-kings, and why. Do you have any you think are sleepers?
I'll hold back my top-fivers for a couple days or so.
My top 5 candidates to be techno-king in 20-30 years:
Unless Sam exits ai development, he is the most likely candidate for the future techno-king in the US.
Xi is obvious- all corps in china are extensions of the state, so whatever ai is built will be built with oversight from The Party officials, and whatever Xi wants.
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As a social conservative, I don't want to turn back the clock, at least not to any point in my memory. There's been some meaningful backwards steps (gay marriage, the rising popularity of transgenderism, etc), but there's also been some positive developments that have gotten less attention.
Pornography is widely accessible on the internet yes, but a side effect of this is that there's much less economic incentive to pollute popular media with T&A. So it is a lot easier to actually raise kids without being bombarded by sexual imagery. These days the fact that Oppenheimer included a sex scene is notable, a couple of decades back that sort of thing was de rigueur.
Relatedly, teenage sex is declining. Partly this is because of competition from porn and porn is also bad, sure. But there's network effects. Horny teenage boys directing their sexual appetites towards real life girls creates social pressure and expectation for those otherwise wouldn't want to partake in such a sexualised culture. And of course, whatever the flaws of porn, at least it causes a lot less pregnancy out of wedlock than teenage sex does.
I think that AI porn will soon outcompete real pornstars for the most part. Again, that's a mixed blessing, but it has the benefit that girls will be less drawn financially to a lifestyle that is very damaging to them. The damage to the women involved is hardly the only problem with pornography, but it's a significant one and mitigation in that area is good.
Paedophilia is far less accepted and far more rigorously guarded against these days. It wasn't so long ago that a Michel Foucault could openly advocate for lowering the age of consent to 13 and stay in good standing (unsurprisingly he turned out to have been abusing boys much younger than that). It seems likely to me that whatever issues todays kids are growing up with, many fewer of them are having to deal with the particular trauma of sex abuse.
"Me Too" may have had its overreaches, but it's bad when women are sexually coerced in the workplace. It's bad when false accusations destroy an innocent man's life, but it's also bad when a woman is genuinely taken advantage of. The balance of type 1 errors to type 2 errors has shifted - and while I'm not sure it's worse to be a female victim than a falsely accused man, I would expect that the deterred male misconduct is much greater in frequency than the corresponding rise in female misconduct. Similarly, many jurisdictions have consciously made it easier to convict men for rape - and again, while this is a double edged sword, the fact that more bad guys are getting punished and others are being deterred from doing bad things is good. Additionally, the type of conduct that is not rape but may result in an increased likelihood of being accused of rape is conduct that I think is bad - so even if it sometimes gets punished unfairly harshly, I don't mind men being disincentivized from e.g. getting women drunk to make them more pliable.
Abortion continues to be prevalent and bad, but the overturning of Roe v Wade in America is a significant step in turning back the tide, and it has the potential to help create a new cultural reality. I firmly feel that there is a feedback effect where people who have abortions (or are involved with the decision to have one) end up more invested in ideologically supporting it. They subconsciously resist the idea that abortion is bad because they do not want to feel like they are bad people. And even though the left is eager to campaign on abortion rights and see it as a good issue for them, it's clearly not such a good issue that it will prevent the right from continuing to win elections. So I expect that strict abortion restrictions will be durable in large red states like Florida and Texas, and this will help create a polity of people who have grown up without the expectation of abortion always being an option, who have the personal experience of a pro-life regime to compare to rhetorical claims, and who are not invested in justifying the practice because of their own actions. Meanwhile the US will continue to get richer and richer and the economic difficulty of raising an unexpected child will become more and more manageable as a result, medical technology will get better and better, and careless sex will continue to become less common - all reducing the practical reasons for abortion supporters to prioritize the issue. There's a long, long way to go, but America is a country of great cultural influence and if the pro-life cause can ultimately win there, that belief in the protection of early life can spread across the world.
Not my impression? Unless you never let them use the internet. And you should, a rapidly increasing fraction of all of life is taking place on it, denying a smart child access to wikipedia is almost a crime imo, and of course wikipedia alone has plenty of sexual images that a motivated teen will absolutely find if they have nothing else. Even if you just let them use google, plenty of women in rather little clothing are available via google images.
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I think there's been a lot of pro-social behavior that's been thrown out with the bathwater, though. The proportion of people meeting their partners at work has dived off a cliff, and like that's generally good sort of assortative mating that produces solid outcomes for everybody. I don't think you can just purely say it's 'falsely accused men versus molested women' when there's a ton of social behavior that has been modified.
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Indeed; it's now been replaced with tokenism for race and sexuality as a cover for incompetent writing.
If the perpetrators are straight white men, sure. Women have far larger latitude to perpetrate abuse of children- for a gender that's stereotypically supposed to be free from the temptations of sexual abuse they do seem to be weirdly invested in things like making sure kindergartners are masturbating frequently enough to know if they're trans in time for puberty blockers (which, naturally, children must be allowed to unilaterally consent to far south of 13), making sure gay porn is available for them, and being just as secretive about those things as someone who was actually fucking kids.
(The in-group preference in the overwhelmingly-female-staffed education system for one gender over the other, and the refusal to prosecute rapists based on race, are no different than other forms of systemic sexual abuse in the same way and for the same reasons progressives consider certain institutional behavior in relation to their favored groups.)
Sure- what's a little co-ordinated criminal conspiracy to get in the way of a just cause?
Cases of sexual assault fell off a cliff in the '90s like every other kind of crime to the point that I'm not convinced this is true. Of course, we only have a benchmark for one of those things since progressives and traditionalists share the belief that female misconduct doesn't exist and thus refuse to even try to meaningfully address it (the perjury in the above case never actually led to criminal charges for the women who perpetrated it).
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I'm sorry, what?!
Because modern movies suck so much, I'm actually steadily going through older ones, and the thing that stands out is how absent or toned down sex is.
I'll take shotgun weddings over kids becoming so neurotic and drained of vitality they don't even want to have sex.
The reason he remained in good standing wasn't because pedophilia was more accepted among average people, it was because it was more accepted among the elites, and quite frankly I see little evidence this has changed much. Saying that we're guarding against it more, therefore it is less likely too happen, is like saying "can you imagine how many burglaries there must have been in the past? people didn't even lock their doors back then!".
I disagree. Every once in a while someone shares a social media post with some woman complaining that while everyone is treating kindly and professionally, it never goes beyond that because no one wants to be seen as a "creep". I'd argue that friendship and camaraderie at workplaces is more common than sexual impropriety, so your chances of deterring good behavior are higher than deterring bad behavior. While I have a lot of sympathy for women having to fend off unwanted sexual advances, superiors trying to take advantage of them, etc., #MeToo and related memes had the effect of abolishing public spaces where you'll allowed to make a pass at someone. Unless you're Mormon and attend one of these weekly dance get-togethers, you either have to blatantly break the rules, and hope nobody minds, or use dating apps, which is it's own can of worms.
I can understand a true believer progressive that wants to drag me, kicking and screaming, into their glorious brave new world, but there's something especially insulting about being told to clap for progress tearing our communities down, by someone calling himself a social conservative.
How old? Certainly if you go back to classic movies from the 60s things are much tamer, and I'm hardly going to argue there's no further room for improvement. But I grew up in the 90s and I remember movies back then being pretty darn horny. Not to mention of course there were porn films on the top shelf at the video rental place, porn magazines on the rack at the service station, etc. It certainly feels to me that you're much less likely to encounter sexualized content without going looking for it.
And you accuse me of not being a real social conservative XD.
From my experience, kids these days don't seem "neurotic and drained of vitality". Maybe that's selection effects and the teenagers I see and interact with in meatspace are different from the average. Or maybe there's an observer effect and they act differently around the adults. But as far as I can tell the new generation seems full of life and vitality, and I feel like TikTok might be warping the world's perceptions of the teens as much or more than its warping the teens' perceptions of the world.
Do you think an equivalent person today could get away with arguing for lowering the age of consent to 13?
Unfortunately my reason for thinking that child sex abuse was more prevalent in the past is not based on the fact that people worried about it less. It's anecdotal, based on older peoples recollections and experiences. But since you contested the point, I went looking for actual data, and the best I was able to find paints a mixed picture.. We see an elevated rate from 1950-1980, a sharp reduction that bottoms out around 2000, and thereafter a worrying increase undoing about half of the previous reduction.
I have no idea if this is reflected in other western countries (the study is based on British data), how reliable the data is, or if the increasing trend continues past 2016 (the last year this paper has data for). But at the least it gives reason to be less rosy-eyed about the past, if also to be less optimistic about the future.
I really can't comment on the difficulties of dating, either past or present. I've only ever asked a woman out once and I now have three children with her.
I fancy there's a good chance I'm significantly more socially conservative than you - I'm just also more optimistic.
Anything up until the late 60's is the Hays Code era, so there was a hard limit on what they could show, but no I'm talking also talking about the 70's, 80's, and yes, even the 90's. That's not to say there was not a single movie that showed the act of sex in those eras, but there was a lot fewer of them to begin with, and even when they went there, they showed a lot less.
Yeah, me too. I invite you to rewatch some of them, and have another look at what passed for "pretty darn horny". The 90's is when they started pushing the boundaries, but it was still pretty damn tame by modern standards, even the ones explicitly marketed as "you get to see a titty in this one!".
That doesn't say much, when “sexualized content” you'd bump into those days was a sideboob or gyrating ass, “going looking for it” involved staying up late, and somehow turning on the TV without waking up your parents, or sneaking out someone else's porn stash, which itself was pretty tame, whereas now “going looking for it” is a 5 second search on your smartphone, and the material you get is hard-core porn routinely involving weird fetishes.
I think you hit the nail on the head that the disagreement is about pessimism, but if my assesment of the world is accurate, I think I can get away with calling you that.
I'm not going to fight you too hard on that. It might be a qustion of where, as I notice a difference between diffferent parts of Europe. Maybe all that sun you're getting down under is good for you.
Not quite, but we're not far off. There are pro-pedo orgs that the MSM is running cover for, though they have to hide behind “we're trying to help them so they won't abuse anyone” (even as they host chatrooms where adults can talk to minors), and I can't think of anyone quite as prominent as Foucault.
I also only had second-hand reports, but the gods of the Internet dropped this on my lap today.
I think that data comes from here. I can’t do any parsing on mobile, but authors discuss the results here and here.
I’m more interested in the surge in “met at work/as coworkers.” Presumably, that’s due to women actually entering the workforce postwar. Except it also couples tightly with “met through friends,” which I’d have expected to be a dominant force in old-school dating. Weren’t introductions to eligible ladies a staple of Victorian mores? What happened?
Other weird features: no inflection point after WWII. Generally low prevalence for “met in college.” The “met online” trend taking a nice pause in 2008 before resuming exactly as it left off.
Oh, and then there’s the fact that some couples claimed to meet online in 1981. Lizardman constant, or just the nerdiest of nerds?
"Neighbors", "through family", and "grade school" is taking a dip in favor of "friends", "bar", and "work". Looks like an artifact of people putting marriage off until later.
How do you want to see a post WWII inflection point, if the chart starts in the 50's?
What's weird about that?
Early adopters plateauing out, only to be hit by smartphones.
Sexting over the DARPANET must have been exhilarating in it's own way.
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But we have evidence that sexual abuse of children was rampant in the past, especially in the immediate wake of the Sexual Revolution. I suppose you might think that we have lots of Jimmy Saville-types around right now, but then that's the claim without evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile#Sexual_abuse_by_Savile
In contrast, we have a lot of statistics on burglary that suggest it followed the same rise-and-fall pattern as most other crimes, for reasons that are still not understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Property_Crime_Rates_in_the_United_States.svg
Why graph for the claim about burglary (nice touch ending it at 2015), and no graph for sexual abuse?
As far as I know, there's no equivalent reliable quantitative data on the prevalence of child sexual abuse in the past. However, I'm no expert.
Note that "no equivalent reliable quantitative data" does not entail "We have no idea about the prevalence."
Also, I should clarify that my claim is that it's misleading to have a simile that presupposes that the changes in prevalence over time are analogous, not that we know the differences in prevalence are comparable. In particular, we don't have good reasons to think that the prevalence of child sexual abuse was lower e.g. in the 1970s, and we know that the prevalence was high. Whether it was higher or lower than today would require reliable quantitative data that isn't available AFAIK.
The Catholic Church sex abuse crisis(much better documented than average) peaked in the 70’s and declined starting sometime in the eighties, precipitously in the 90’s and early 2000’s, no evidence of an increase since then. To the extent that it generalizes(obviously it’s not fully representative), we could reasonably think that there was a lot more sexual abuse in 1970.
Good points.
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I want to live in the steampunk world of the late 19th century. Roll it back to imperialism and colonialism before the West decided to kill itself two generations in a row (over empires and colonies). If it's not then, the next most relevant time is pre-Napolean and pre-Revolution in the age of monarchs.
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I'm partial to the 90s or the 2000s. Noah has a pretty good piece on it. The 90s were a time of prosperity in the West on nearly all fronts. The 2000s were a time of international disasters and blunders (like 9/11, war on terror, authoritarians rising), but domestically we could still ignore it, as those problems wouldn't really come home to roost until the 2020s.
Other than that, the 80s weren't that bad, nor were the 50s. I'd skip the 60s and 70s.
The mid-late 90s were a pretty excellent time period to be alive.
I'd skip vietnam and nix nixon. I certainly wouldn't complain about going to see Queen in concert or buying in on the 90s tech sector.
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So, I'll dodge the techno-king question and express amazement at people saying "Forward!" or that they wouldn't roll things back.
I thought it was a foregone conclusion that the early 00s were a superior time to be alive. Freezing technology at that instant would have been perfectly fine. About the only thing that's made my life demonstrably better since then is Google Maps. Let me count the ways:
... I came of age before the time period you're discussing, and ended up a bi furry in a state that had a (admittedly rarely-enforced at the time) ban on sodomy. The sexuality-related tech of the time isn't the only or top-five biggest issues of that time, but there's a sizable portion of the populace for whom it didn't work out well for.
While I'm not happy about the extent traditional retail has gone tango uniform in the last two decades, it's also a place where advances are vast. Comparing DigiKey today to the DigiKey of 2004 is a tremendous change, and the Radio Shack of 1998-2004 was nowhere near able to contain a lot of the space it missed.
I was imagining a freeze on tech as opposed to culture. Things would have continued to evolve in a broadly similar direction, I believe, albeit at a slower pace. I suspect that furry sex wouldn't be in too different of a place today.
It does seem as though the state of the art for sex toys did get quite a bit better. I've never been a big toy guy, but I respect that a lot of the materials on the ones I do have just weren't available way back when. Not to mention vastly superior battery life and power.
That's fair.
I think there's been a bigger impact than might seem at first glance even removing the places where 'tech' and 'culture' feed each other. You mention sex toys, and everything from batteries to silicone mixes to improved 3d modeling software to better vacuum pumps have helped them, but there are similar changes in digital inking and scanner technology, fursuit build and comfort stuff, and 'normie' sex stuff like condoms.
I've got complicated feelings about Discord (or even less-culturally-awkward tech like Murmur/etc) and VRChat, but as much as online dating has fucked over the straight dating world, they've done a lot of good things for the gay ones, and that's even recognizing the nuclear wasteland that is grindr-likes.
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All good points. But the earlier decades had their charms too (at least for me, as a white American male).
The 40s allowed every healthy young person to sign up and be "a hero" in the greatest war the world has ever known, which for Americans mostly meant hanging around in England or the South Pacific islands, dating the local women. Then you have lifelong bragging rights as "the greatest generation."
The 50s: ridiculously strong economy. Just walk into your local factory, shake the boss's hand, and you've got a job that lets you buy a house and support a family. "Support a family" meant being head of the household, where the wife is fully devoted to taking care of you and the kids. Or go into the cities, rent an apartment ridiculously cheaply, and live as a beatnik, making a name for yourself in all the new forms of music. Or tour the world, which was all destroyed from WW2, so your American middle-class salary made you relatively rich. Buy yourself a new car every year, because each new model year is better than the one before and you can afford it. Or become a professor, since all the universities were hiring like mad.
The 60s: Much the same, but with better music and movies. You can also move out to California and be hippy, living in a commune for practically nothing or going surfing all day. If you were organized enough to buy a house there back then, it's probably worth millions now. Or get a regular office job, wear a suit and tie, have a secretary, and be on the golf course by 4 every day. Enjoy listening to the local news tell of amazing technological progress like "man lands on the moon" while your wife cooks you dinner and your 4 children play outside. Or if you're more adventurous, go to Vietnam, experience what it's like to kill a man, then go work off the stress by banging a dozen hookers (no worries about condoms or aids).
The 70s: Even better music and movies. Any guy with a guitar can instantly become a "rock star," possibly getting rich, but at least having a good time playing local shows. Or hang out in disco clubs, dancing with the beautiful women who flocked there. Take one of them with you to the drive-in theater, in the back of your massive Cadillac. Complain about the middle east and gas prices, but ultimately it's not your problem. Cities, beaches, and international travel are still very affordable. Host a party and impress everyone with your stereo, record collection, and maybe some blow.
The 80s: Get into finance and live like a king with some basic math. Or computer programming, or hardware electronics. Hang out at the local arcade, impressing people with your mad pac-man skills, or at home on the NES. Wear a crazy colored jacket. Watch "Cocktail" and then start a cocktail bar. Enjoy the feeling of your country's supreme military dominance and victory in the cold war. Watch all the classic sci-fi movies on first release, then over and over, and talk about them with your local crew. Rock out to the coolest hard rock shows of all time. Travel to Japan and see it at the height of its bubble, but while also being an exotic foreigner.
I think what all of these decades have in common was we were rich enough to have materialistic comforts and freedom, but still doing thingt in the real world instead of being all addicted to our screens. That, and relative status is also important for human happiness. I also like the aesthetics of pre-1940s architecture, clothes, and music, but there's probably too much poverty back then for me to enjoy.
I think for me the big issue is not having the constant worry that you have to over perform to stay in place. Up until the 1980s unless you went out of your way to screw up your life, you were generally going to live decently. Maybe not great, but decently. Parents generally didn’t have to overly worry about how good their kid was at school. He’d be fine.
To be fair I was cherry-picking some of the better lives. You could definitely screw up your life in the past by, say, working at a factory that closed down, or on a farm that was no longer profitable, or getting addicted to drugs that you didn't understand the dangers of.
It was always possible to mess up. But in the past, it was a lot harder to do so and the consequences were a lot less permanent. If you fucked up school, you aren’t doomed, you have lowered standards of living, but you could still expect a modest lifestyle where living on your own is feasible with a single job. The mythical permanent record is real, and because of credentialism it’s now not even good enough to keep your nose clean, but you need to get either blue collar job training or a college degree in the right subjects.
While modern jobs have lengthier training periods, I don’t think that failure is actually that much closer than it was- that’s just blue tribe neuroticism. If you fuck up in high school, well, transferring from community college to flyover tech is still a college degree and odds are you weren’t going to Harvard anyways. Living on your own at 70’s standards(eating at home every meal, often beanie weenies, tiny house, one car and not a nice one, no vacations except maybe camping in a state park) is still pretty in reach for most people who don’t get incarcerated or use drugs. We have social problems they didn’t, but it’s possible to bounce back from all the usual fuck ups.
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Starve to death in the Bengal famine.
Welcome to state socialism, enjoy your stay.
Post 2000s-
Whew, living in the Third World almost becomes bearable thanks to the internet.
It's easy for you Americans to forget that for most of the globe, things are the best they've ever been. Even your current struggles are a minor blip in the face of near unrelenting improvements of the things, which if they were gone, you'd miss the most.
Yeah, good thing you're not Chinese either in this scenario. Not much to look back at and feel good about, for at least a century.
https://www.statista.com/chart/4216/the-worlds-most-optimistic-countries/
It's a damn shame that no Indian warlord or petty king had 1% the sheer rizz or memorability of their Chinese counterparts.
On a more serious note, India was likely better to live in than China for at least the period stretching from the 1920s to the 70s. Certainly the average person/peasant didn't suffer nearly as much from the cupidity of their leaders. But the Chinese took the brakes off the capitalism train a decade or two before us, and that compounds, leaving aside HBD and better economic management.
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I would definitely not want to have lived in India in the past! At least, not as a regular person. Being a rich person might have been sweet, though.
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We're Americans, not Canadians. We want to know what's in it for us. If the benighted third-world masses are doing better that's great, but it doesn't offset the slightest drop in US QOL.
Speak for yourself, please.
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I think anywhere from a third to over half of your countrymen would disagree, not that I particularly care. The biggest contributions of the States to the rest of us has been through diffusion of technological innovation and global trade flourishing under Pax Americana, not from charity doled out from the kindness of your hearts.
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Yeah. And beyond that the whole “tech revolution” didn’t show up dramatically in any aggregate economic stats like GDP or productivity growth. My model for what happened is basically, we used to do a bunch of tasks using a red widget. Someone invented a blue widget that does those tasks 5% better (but they’re super annoying to use). As a society we switched en masse from red to blue widgets. The way people do their tasks is now very different and so it feels like there must have been some dramatic upgrade, but in reality:
The way gdp is calculated systemstically undercounts the gains from technology. If you sell 1 black and white tiny tv in 1960 for $2000 it adds the same to the gdp as selling 10 4k OLED tvs in 2023 for $200 each but the latter are obviously orders of magnitude more valuable. If you had a device with the capabilities of a modern smart phone in 1970 it would have been worth millions of dollars. Welfare recipients in 2023 have access to all the worlds books and movies at their fingertips. Literal kings would have killed for such a privilige. We are all rich beyond our ancestors wildest dreams and gdp reflects only a small fraction of that.
Quality increases show up by reducing the price index, making real GDP higher.
And even supposing these things are systematically missed and we are in fact much better off beyond what GDP reports, they should be apparent in measures of happiness or quality of life, and they are decidedly not.
And yet, here we are, complaining that we're still not rich enough. Decades of economic growth over the 20th century didn't make Americans happy, just greedier.
And tech is making our children much more depressed
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The people who will have power in the future are largely the same kind of people who have power today. As long as the AI God runs on hardware that physically exists (which seems likely), it will be subject to the realities of the systems of governance in extant human societies, at least in the near term. Musk has no army, few loyal servants, nobody willing to die for him. Even Biden has the above, symbolically and practically.
As for Moldbug’s king, if he happens it will, inevitably, be someone mildly disappointing in terms of previous accomplishments. If it’s Kulaks, I hope he remembers us fondly.
And what happens if my (as in nobody) AI first develops autonomous self replicating killer robots? We are not that far technologically.
A: It won't happen.
B: If it does, it they get iced by dudes with rifles because AI can't violate thermodynamics and energy density is energy density.
The battlefields of Ukraine have shown pretty conclusively that even extremely primitive killer robots >>> dudes with rifles.
Humans need to sleep, it's very hard to see or detect these tiny things, let alone shoot them down (with a rifle!) and these cheap drones are very easily replaceable.
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You know what dudes with rifles do when they're confronted by a swarm of tiny hunter-killer drones that move faster than the eye can track, let alone a rifle can hit?
Die.
Just peruse /r/CombatFootage till the truth of that statement becomes obvious. And these are human operated, just wait till they're hooked up with half decent facial recognition, swarm protocols and uniform/behavioral tracking.
If they manage to neutralize said swarm, the rifles will be doing approximately zero of the heavy lifting.
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A: It will happen. Too many regimes want to control their population fully. For them the machines to keep the people subdued would get rid of their main worry - the loyalty of their regime insiders. So there will always be money invested in this tech. Also there are few parts of the supply and military chain that really require humans (mostly science and imagination) if the ai is potent enough and self replicating industrial modules are close enough if you have the eventual ChatGPT 42 helping you.
B: If you produce autonomous weapons system faster than the other side bullets in the end you win.
As 2rafa rightfully pointed - the hard part is not the tech, but hiding it until the exponential function is unstoppable. You only have two places really - bottom of the ocean, or subterranean in the Antarctic. There is enough geothermal to go around.
Also can you elaborate on the thermodynamics thing - I can't understand what you mean.
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Yeah if you secretly develop a fleet of autonomous killer robots under the nose of the Pentagon, DARPA, the FBI and CIA and every other authority and they’re so good that they can destroy (enough of) the entire command structure of the world’s most powerful nations such that they unconditionally surrender to you, then you’ll be in power.
I consider that quite unlikely.
Fauci managed to do his gain of function research under the nose of both the US government and the Chinese government and they didn't stop him. The US government wanted to stop him, gain of function research was forbidden in the USA, which is why he had to send money to China to do it there. I'm pretty sure that the Chinese government would have stopped him if they had been keeping up with the technology and realized the stakes.
He managed it by being high-ranking insider. Applying that insight to "secretly develop a fleet of autonomous killer robots", if you are an insider working for DARPA, the Pentagon will help you keep it secret. The top people are politicians in the Joe Biden electoral sense. The level below that are politicians in the bureaucratic maneuvering sense. If you are the highest ranking technologist, who understands the details of the authorization mechanisms that confer control of the killer swarm, you are exposed to serious temptation.
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How long and are you sure? If you're thinking of the United States as the best evidence for this claim, it's important to remember that for the majority of American history, the franchise was heavily restricted. Whether democracy for all is a good idea rests on pretty thin evidence presently.
I do not desire a rollback. There's enough wrong with the past that I don't idealize it. The only way through is forward.
De jure universal male suffrage was less than a century after the founding(before that it was by state, with a large majority of free white males having the franchise) and women’s suffrage was 1919.
The US Republican system and constitutionalism prevented a lot of cock-ups, and I am a supporter of franchise restriction to property-owning males, but claiming that the latter is responsible for the former when it was in the rear view in advance of the civil war is ahistorical.
You might disagree, but I’d consider lack of female suffrage to be a pretty heavy restriction on the franchise.
Was it enough of a restriction to illegitimise extrapolations from its stability to the stability of other democracies?
I am not deeply wedded to this view, but I tend to think that women’s suffrage resulted in more moral crusades and emotional appeals in electoral politics, which I think is ultimately destabilizing. It’s obviously not something that will immediately destroy a county, but I think it probably weakens it over a long time scale. I think the same holds true for allowing non-property owners and, if they are a large enough portion of the population, non-parents the vote as well.
Do you have reliable evidence (not just particular examples of women being involved in moral crusades e.g. Prohibition) for this view?
I do not, hence why I’m not deeply wedded to my views. I’m not aware of any studies attempting to examine this question, and I’m highly doubtful that any study that came to the wrong conclusion could ever be published today. It matches some historical examples like Prohibition, and it also very closely matches my personal experiences. In almost every political discussion I’ve ever had, the men were, as a group, much better about governing their emotions and discussing an issue dispassionately than were the women. Differences like this obviously fall on overlapping bell curves, but the pattern is still clearly there. I could give dozens of examples, but they would just be anecdata. I’ll just say that I think Kipling was on to something when he wrote “The Female of the Species.”
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Half the population would be enough, I reckon.
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This is even worse than "from whence!"
Hence/thence/whence mean "from this/that/which place," so "from whence" is redundant, and "to whence" is nonsensical.
Hither/thither/whither/yonder indicate destination, so you might ask a passerby "Whence have you come, and whither are you going," though I suppose the contemporary verb conjugations might have been different.
So the question is whither to roll back the clock. Whence to roll back the clock? Hence, obviously.
Nope, the verb conjugations are correct for Shakespearean/early modern English. You could, optionally, use ‘ye’ in place of ‘you’, but the objective/subjective distinction for the you form was on its way out by Shakespeare’s day.
Now for old English the verb conjugations would be different, but that’s a totally separate language, although I suppose ‘whence came thu, ond whither gost thu?’ Is intelligible in writing.
Wasn't ye plural?
In old English it was, but by the era of Shakespeare the T-V distinction was so strong it could be singular or plural and only indicated respect.
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I was wondering if anyone would call me out on the use of whence. Congrats! 🧐
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Honestly, Elon Musk. You can say whatever you want about the man, but he has a track record of getting things done like no one else. I honestly can't think of any big-brain long-con candidate here. Reality places far too many constraints on this. Sam Altman would be my second pick.
I think a better question is "Who would be the public-facing King, his spokesperson, and the actual team of adults in the room who do the legwork?"
It's either him or previously ignored nobody that climbs the ladder of chaos. And ignored nobody is probably favored if you look at history.
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I'm continuously amazed by how exciting it is to watch for what Elon Musk does next. He might be the antiChrist, but if anyone's going to God-Emperor themselves it's him
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People won’t accept rule from a tech techno-king and would kill someone who tried to force it. The average person thinks of Steve Jobs, the most widely respected tech person, as a weird nerd who made their phone a bit better. People would turn on him in an instant the minute he tried to be more than a friendly salesman. And the average tech person is much closer to Zuckerberg than Jobs in terms of likability and charisma, and look at how much the public respects big Z.
And no, money won’t implicitly do it. The impact that a trillionaire will have on my life is basically null except indirectly through whatever makes him a trillionaire (eg if Bezos becomes a trillionaire the biggest impact he’d have on anybody is the $1000 worth of value that Amazon brought to everyone’s life.) You can’t really convert money into power in a functioning society beyond the incredibly limited scope of making your own life comfier.
Bribery and influence? If money can't buy power, somebody should tell big corporations and they'd sack all their lobbyists. Wealth is power and always has been. The sinews of war are infinite money.
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What the masses want or like is totally inconsequential. What matters is how many competent people are ready to be the ruling class of a techno-king and if they have means of displacing the current rulers.
I wager that number is big enough already given how popular e/acc is and how unpopular the managers have become.
But respect from "people" is the bottom tier predictor of political influence, much lower than how rich you are or how many men you command.
This is either a bad larp or you need to get out of your bubble. When you show anyone outside of a tiny naval gazing tech bubble what e/acc is it induces extreme cringe, and the libertarian mechs piloted by a squad of John Galts are at least a few decades away.
Sadly, they're the ones busily instantiating the Machine God. I think that lets them punch a tad bit above their weight class.
Groups that believe they are summoning a god are usually called cults and are generally ignored or disliked. In fiction, when they're right and do manage to manifest a god, it rarely goes well for them.
Being liked or disliked isn't particularly relevant when nobody goes to the trouble of stopping them, at least not yet. I'm sure someone will eventually try.
Insert standard response to "updating from fictional evidence".
I don't claim it's necessarily going to go well, just that I expect it to be more likely than not, but e/accs are the kind of idiots who don't mind being disassembled by ASI, and some, Beff included, would consider that to be a good thing. All we agree on is that creating such an entity is possible.
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e/acc has hugely negative net favorables, similar to satanism. In both cases, it's mostly internet edgelords who claim to want it.
Hotz, Buterin and Balaji, though certainly extremely online people, don't strike me as edgelords.
They're radicals. Which is a completely different thing.
As Dase covered in his event post, Buterin isn't e/acc, he's d/acc, a more sane approach that wants to maximize technological progress while minimizing niggling issues like AInotkilleveryone. I subscribe to the same.
I'm aware, I'm also more sympathetic to that approach. I'm just speaking broadly about these watered down versions of accelerationism finally filtering through to techies in a way that might result in a circulation of elites.
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I have never heard any of these names before. Unless the Hotz you refer to is George Hotz, but I only know his name because of the PS3 reverse engineering suit.
George Hotz is indeed Geohot, the PS3 hacker, but he did quite a many other things after that, mostly self driving and AI related. And generally has a big platform for commenting on tech from the techie point of view.
Vitalik Buterin is an early bitcoiner most known for co-founding Ethereum and originating large parts of the smart contract ecosystem and of the conceptual frame for blockchain as a technology in general. If you ever heard of crypto chances are the two names you recall are Satoshi's and his.
Balaji Srinivasan is the former CTO of Coinbase but is probably most known for his political activism and ideological work around the idea of a Network State as theorized in his eponymous book based on the work of Albert Hirschman.
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Wildly unpopular. Lizard man constant or below approval rating.
Unpopular for sure. But in the curious way that gets almost all of them reelected every election.
I thought the rest of my comment would be a big enough hint that the only measure of popularity that matters in my view is among the 10% of the population that even have a shot at becoming elite with a higher weight for the 2 to 1% that already are.
The Bolsheviks were lizardmen too, but power is not equally distributed in the population.
It matters a great deal that Musk, Buterin, Hotz and Thiel are talking publicly about accelerationism being something instrumental (as opposed to something only philosophy nerds know about) and coordinating along those lines.
It doesn't matter in the slightest that Joe Schmoe on the street doesn't even know what that means or is at best afraid of it. Much like it didn't matter in the slightest what Vasya Pupkin thought of bolchevism.
The Bolsheviks were not Lizardman-tier popular. They got 23% of the vote in the Constituent Assembly elections which were the closest approximation to a free election in post-Tsarist Russia (they happened after the October revolution but before the Bolsheviks consolidated power outside Petrograd) including majorities among the voters they were targetting (the urban working class in Petrograd and Moscow, and the enlisted men in the armed forces), and had already demonstrated enough support in the military to defeat the Kornilov coup. It may not have mattered what Vasya Pupkin thought, but given how things played out it sure-as-hell mattered what Private Ivan Ivanovich thought.
e/acc and the Tech Right do not have the level of elite or popular support they need to take over through anything that looks like politics - at the point Hanania wrote the linked essay the people he was lauding as the future of right-wing politics were backing deSantis. In so far as Balaji Srinivasan had a political project it was based on crypto-enabled exit, and it has already failed - it is now very obvious that the world is a sufficiently dangerous place that you want to be under the protection of a US or Chinese client regime if you own anything worth stealing - particularly if you own anything the Feds or Chicoms would want to steal themselves. The Dominic Cummings project (given the people involved, probably supported in the background by Peter Thiel and Robert Mercer) to replace Trump with someone the Tech Right see as competent and biddable ended up not happening, and if it had happened it would need "orbital mind control lasers complete" persuasion tech in order to beat Trump in a Republican primary.
The only way an e/acc is becoming a technoking is if they build a superintelligent AI and use it to pwn their opponents. And then our technoking will be the man (or possibly transwoman, but definitely someone with a Y chromosome and penis) who is de facto goal-donor to the AI (who is probably a first-tier tech lead who can ignore the de jure top management of his organisation until the AI is turned on, and pwn them afterwards). The only gold-owners who are sufficiently close to top technical AI teams to be de facto goal-donors are Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis. If the AI-enabled technoking isn't one of those two then it is some wunderkind we haven't met yet.
Isn't it a bit facile to measure it at the time they took power instead of say in 1903 when the term was coined and they were the minority in the RSDLP (despite being called the majority)? Or we could even start at the inception of the RSDLP when Russia was still so agrarian that the industrial workers as a whole were lizardmen at a whopping 3% of the population. Seems like that would be the more apt comparison with a movement for the technocapitalist class.
I suppose if we disagree about premises, we can only disagree about conclusions. I think this analysis is about as nonsensical as you probably think mine is.
I think Starlink is a million times more consequential than AI anything. I think that superintelligence is made up ill defined fantasy. I think crypto-enabled exit is coming along just fine.
We can at least agree on that being the most likely scenario.
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How much power does Hassabis actually have within Google?
I am arguing that that bureaucratic power within Alphabet Inc. is less relevant than you might think - the question is at the moment when (and if) Google Deepmind turns on a superintelligent AI, who is the person who is actually setting the direction of the team that determines what said AI. And I think that person is likely to be Demis Hassabis, or someone even lower down the org chart. If Sundar Pichai or Larry Page goes to Demis and tells him to build an AI that is programmed to make Larry technoking of the galaxy, and Demis goes and builds an AI programmed to make Demis technoking instead, I don't see how Larry finds out what is going on soon enough to make a difference.
It depends on how malleable the AGI is, how many people have direct access to those levers, and how much auditing/permission is required to modify its goals.
Current RLHF takes time, you don't simply just append "be helpful and harmless" to a system prompt and immediately finish your job. Even accounting for sweeping algorithmic changes and significantly faster turnover, I expect that the people designing and implementing a superhuman AGI to have something in the way of checks and balances for making sure that updates pushed to production are approved by an oversight committee, not just one dude, no matter how senior.
Like, these people are not stupid, if I can predict the risk from the head scientist telling the AI to hand over the keys to the kingdom, so can they. Let alone all the genius level AGI or narrowly superhuman AI implemented along the way.
There are potentially ways around this, like creating undetectable backdoors when feeding a model training data (an almost intractable problem, without making cryptography trivial first), but they're not possible to pull off without a great deal of premeditation, or a risk of whistleblowing.
I put more stock in a small group/cabal controlling an AGI far more than any one person, unless the company is under private ownership by one person, like in the case of Musk. And Grok, bless its heart, isn't SOTA, nor do I put particularly high odds on X AI overtaking the incumbents at OAI/DM/Anthropic.
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*will try
I wish them the best against someone who has an ASI at their beck and call.
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I am a very happy monkey when surrounded by the fruits of modernity.
About the earliest point in time I can see myself stomaching is maybe 7 or 8 years back, so I can whack myself on the head and pick a better med school, while not missing out too much on creature comforts like the internet and smartphones. My childhood is a story of being bored out of my mind, and seeking to remedy that, and it's only recently gotten much better.
In terms of potential demigod Singleton controllers:
Altman, Zuck, Musk, Dario, yada yada. Anyone who has a massive AI division or promising startup and also the leverage necessary to tweak the preferences of the incipient AGI within. Mere wealth, while nice to have, isn't nearly as good as being able to tell your high-powered ML PhDs what to do.
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Money translating into power has always been a transient phenomenon of immature nations, and the Marxist delusion that money and power are one and the same is instrumental to other Marxist delusions (eg: "why does Israel fight Gaza? Because colonization for natural resources!" I kid you not, have seen this take in the wild, it was even popular).
Nation states, themselves puppets to special interests groups with non-monetary primary motivations, have a non-quantitative categorical advantage over billionaires, trillionaires and whatever – they can just take your shit and use it to fund users of hard power, which they have authority over, to compel you. The army cannot be meaningfully bribed, neither can the police, neither can the police robot dogs, neither can the politruk overseeing tech lord's robot dog assembly business; indeed, the very attempt to do so means you're dead meat.
The state can only reach abolition through degeneration from within and loss of relative legitimacy in the eyes of its most relevant constituents; which it will prevent at all costs.
Sorry to burst your cyberpunk bubble: Big Tech Has No Power At All. Larry Summers is and will always be more powerful than Elon Musk. He, ontologically, belongs to a caste which can have power, and Musk does not.
Who has more power, Larry Summers, or some asshole with a rifle, the knowledge to use it correctly, and a willingness to die in the process of murdering Larry Summers?
Who has more power, the asshole or Musk?
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Larry of course. His first advantage is: he is real and nobody real cares enough to die in the process of assassinating him. (Consider that many Russians attribute the worst parts of the 90's to Chubais and indirectly Summers; yet nobody has bothered to go kill him. Granted, Westerners nowadays think we're basically a nation of limp-wristed cuckolds. But still – millions of people with "nothing to lose" over decades).
His second advantage is: he's put-together, well-known and well-connected, so even if he dies, his projects can continue, and indeed his tragic demise will possibly make him more powerful than when he was alive.
Then there's everything else people care about, like actual authority, security etc but that's a bit of an overkill.
Fun fact: https://www.writingtoiq.com/ estimates this comment to 102. I thought due to word "cuckolds" but my attempts to reword in order to increase score failed. (ps, ok, got 109 then i got lazy)
I tried 7 your comments, => 123 Hlynka's (N=7) => 111 comments Hlynka was replying to => 119 (*in case if comment Hlynka was replying to was too short, next parent comment by another person was tried)
These 7 your comments have weird distibution 91 102 119 129 137 143 143
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Yeah, this whole B can easily destroy A, therefore B is stronger than A argument really fails to hold water, even in cases where your principal objective is to destory each other. In DoTA there are often heroes which everyone agrees are severely overpowered, but get absolutely wrecked by other heroes, often those that other people agree are unplayable, e.g. Meepo vs Antimage is basically always favourable for Meepo even when Meepo is unplayable and AM is terrorising pubs. The fact that Meepo dumpsters AM doesn't mean Meepo is a stronger hero than AM overall.
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Larry Summers, for as long as he lives. Rifle guy can still only kill a dude, maybe several, if he gets lucky. Summers can reshape the reality of countless people like Rifle Guy. Possibly he can eve have men killed too, if he cares enough about it.
That, of course, doesn't mean he won't find himself shot, blown up, etc., if he pisses of enough people. There are always limits to power, but power does exist.
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Is "democratically elected" politicians using their power over Big Tech to control the bounds of discourse, so their agenda is always the only one that's on the table, really that far off from Cyberpunk?
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Does the Republicanism of 2001 still exist?
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