☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆

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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: January 18th, 2020

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  • I get a strong impression that the whole extinction of humanity narrative is really just an astroturf marketing campaign by AI companies. They’re basically scaremongering because it gets in the news, and the goal is to convince investors how smart these things are. It’s the whole OpenAI claiming they’re on the verge of AGI right before pivoting to doing horny chatbots. These are useful tools, and I also use them day to day, but the hype around them is absolutely incredible.

    I think we have plenty of real risks to humanity to worry about, like the US starting a nuclear holocaust. We don’t need to waste time worrying about imaginary risks like AGI here.

    I’d also argue the whole energy consumption argument is very myopic. The reality is that these things have been getting more and more efficient, and there is little reason to think that’s not going to be continue being the case going forward. It’s completely new tech, and it’s basically just moved past proof of concept stages. There’s going to be a lot of optimization happening down the road. And even when you contextualize current energy usage, it’s not as crazy as people seem to think https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/

    We’re also starting to see stuff like this happening https://www.anuragk.com/blog/posts/Taalas.html












  • The term authoritarianism is utterly meaningless because all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.

    The reality is that every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.

    What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.

    The fact that you have political understanding of a small child really explains a lot about this whole discussion.