32 Comments
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Dave Reed's avatar

Adam Becker did a great job of dismantling these beliefs in Technological Salvation® that are the underpinnings of the current hype cycle. His book "More Everything Forever" is a takedown of Bostrom, Kurzweil, Thiel, and Musk et al on every level from software, engineering, and physics to philosophical and ethical. I'm on a quest to get everyone I can to read or listen to it.

Sam Crain, Writer's avatar

Thank you for the recommendation. Will definitely be looking into this!

Susan H McCabe's avatar

This is horrifying! And it strikes me that these people somehow think they are immortal and immune to their own designs for carbon based beings.

Marliss Desens's avatar

That's what happens to billionaires who think they are the height of intellectualism.

Jennifer Akdemir's avatar

This is what happens when you allow sociopaths to amass huge wealth and power.....

Katie Galvin's avatar

These idiots have been told how smart they are their entire lives, treated like deities and all the while doing tons of drugs. Their ideas are not only sinister they are not proven by any means. No one should take them seriously. Minimizing our humanity and it's endless contributions while uplifting the potential future of bots is one giant scam perpetrated by a bunch of eternal scam artists.

Marliss Desens's avatar

We have to take their casual discussion of human destruction seriously and curb them.

Nilla's avatar

It's terrifying that they are all willing to destroy earth and everything on it. Wouldn't it be easier to just stop raping Earth, the one place for sure where we all exist? Why would I dream of destroying humans on earth so robots can live on Mars? I don't get it.

These short-sighted, power-hungry pricks are willing to kill every living thing in exchange for the bragging rights of who can get the most expensive government contact.

Here's an idea. Pay your fucking taxes! Make Earth the best it can be. And if billionaires have money left over, they can spend their own fucking money on their dick-measuring hallucinations.

Jana Linderman's avatar

Extreme emotional immaturity, narcissism, and fear of death combined with obscene wealth, drug use, and the scintilla of infantile logic you might pick up from auditing a freshman philosophy seminar.

That’s how you produce this group of arrogant, wildly destructive men who should absolutely NOT be making these decisions on behalf of their 8 billion fellow humans.

Maybe we should demonstrate that we can care for this planet and the people alive on it today before even contemplating spreading across the universe like a plague. Or the only thing that will exponentially grow and spread is our capacity for harm and destruction. And in that case we would deserve to die off.

Adam's avatar

TechBroFuckrz make head hurt.

Patric Martin's avatar

Pretty startling hesitation there Mr Thiel

Adam's avatar

Turds in the punchbowl of life. That's Thiel, Musk and all of their horrid ilk.

Oðrun's avatar

Odd for Musk to personally supply the minor backup functions with his many many spawn.

Joe F's avatar

These are the guys that can't get their autonomous cars NOT to crash and yet they want to crash out the human existence !

Sue's avatar

Musk and Thiel seem subhuman already…they don’t value the human race.

They are the Antichrist

Martin Anantharaman's avatar

Behold The Mastermind I talked about in my note of the same name: https://substack.com/@mpanantharaman/note/c-226833672

So he is indeed competely antisocial - but the deeper reason is that he is a deeply defective human (yes, with a categorizable deep personality disorder) - and so, of course, he is convinced that AI will overcome HIS shortcomings - and he doesn't care what noral humans think about that - they are like vermin for him.

Gunnar Jensen's avatar

So, basically being BORG = utopia, at least to the oily-garchs … 🙄 (pathetic, megalomaniacal losers terrified of their own pending mortality, and so, because the fruits of their greed allow, they’ll impose their “hive” reality on the rest of us … come on, mortality, kick it in the ass!)

Kathy Sutter's avatar

That's Why They Are Trying To Kill People Who They Think Are DISPOSABLE.