"If Anyone Build IT..." is a cool-sounding trope. Which pushes lots of human emotional buttons. Making that trope a great thing to push, if you goal is to get ahead in our attention economy.
From my PoV, our "shortish-term profits are the ONLY metric that matters" global techno-capitalist system is vastly more dangerous than AI.
... or "you can get ahead through telling people what they want to hear" or "people mistake dark personality traits for high agency", etc.
What gets me about 'rationalism' is how ahistorical it is. No reference to Korzybski or Teilhard de Chardin. There never was the movie Colossus the Forbin Project or the 1960s speculation that progress in computing would lead to accelerated progress in computing by an equation like
dx 2
-- = x
dt
all dreams that died when people realized that Simon's General Problem Solver wasn't useful, when SAT and P vs NP fomulated, the rise and fall of expert systems, logic giving way to databases, etc. It appeals though to the kind of young person who's family made a great fortune and wants to jump right into philanthropy or to the person who went to San Francisco because they felt marginalized someplace else and are looking for meaning living in the shadow of "Big Tech"
"If Anyone Build IT..." is a cool-sounding trope. Which pushes lots of human emotional buttons. Making that trope a great thing to push, if you goal is to get ahead in our attention economy.
From my PoV, our "shortish-term profits are the ONLY metric that matters" global techno-capitalist system is vastly more dangerous than AI.
... or "you can get ahead through telling people what they want to hear" or "people mistake dark personality traits for high agency", etc.
What gets me about 'rationalism' is how ahistorical it is. No reference to Korzybski or Teilhard de Chardin. There never was the movie Colossus the Forbin Project or the 1960s speculation that progress in computing would lead to accelerated progress in computing by an equation like
all dreams that died when people realized that Simon's General Problem Solver wasn't useful, when SAT and P vs NP fomulated, the rise and fall of expert systems, logic giving way to databases, etc. It appeals though to the kind of young person who's family made a great fortune and wants to jump right into philanthropy or to the person who went to San Francisco because they felt marginalized someplace else and are looking for meaning living in the shadow of "Big Tech">No reference to Korzybski or Teilhard de Chardin
Pointing a search engine at site:lesswrong.com finds many references to either thinker.
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