The philosophical problem that I see with the "AI overlord age" (although not directly related to AI) is that we'll then have the technology to change the inherent human desires you speak of, and at that point growing tomatoes just seems like a very inefficient way of satisfying a reward function that we can change to something simpler.

Maybe we wouldn't do it precisely because it'd dissolve the very notion of purpose? But it does feel to me like destroying (beating?) the game we're playing when there is no other game out there.

(Anyway, this is obviously a much better problem to face than weaponized use of a superintelligence!)

I guess I wouldn't have been so angry about any of this before I had children, but now I'm very much in favor of prolonged human existence.

I really hope someone with very deep pockets will find a way to steer the ship more towards AI safety. It's frustrating to see someone like Elon Musk, who was publicly worried about this very specific issue a few years ago, waste his time and money on buying Twitter.

Edit: I'm aware that there are funds available for AI alignment research, and I'm seriously thinking of switching into this field, mental health be damned. But it would help a lot more if someone could change Eric Schmidt's mind, for example.

However, all of this is moot if the team developing the AI does not even try to align it.

At this point I almost wish it was still the military that makes these advances in AI, not private companies. Anyone working on a military project has to have some sense that they're working on something dangerous.

Even the best-case scenario that some are describing, of uploading ourselves into some kind of post-singularity supercomputer in the hopes of being conscious there, doesn't seem very far from plain extinction.

https://explainextended.com/2016/12/31/happy-new-year-8/

I prefer this less sterile framing of it. It was the most fun that I ever had with a puzzle, so to anyone scrolling around on this page, I would recommend not jumping straight to the solution :)

I honestly think that only the Russian/Chinese model of a nationalized IT ecosystem has a chance to resist these trends.

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/maximum-vaccination

According to this Guardian article, the "Center for Countering Digital Hate" (also mentioned in your article) would be happy if Substack hadn't given it the platform:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/27/anti-vaxx...

The idea that Yet Another Generic NGO needs to "counter hate" because someone on the internet thinks the vaccine is not going to stop the pandemic is completely bonkers.

What I want to say is, a lot of the controversy around Substack seems to be that it is not aligned with the Right Side in the Culture War. I think they have some great writers, but they're not the next WikiLeaks or anything.

And if anything, governments have been too relaxed about the origin of the pandemic (which has now officially killed 6 million!), while panicking about other details.

Appeals to solidarity w.r.t. staying at home, wearing masks, getting vaccinated to flatten the curve all worked quite well in my bubble. Projects like Zero Covid would have required insanely high levels of compliance. If you say "anything involving solidarity with others does not work anymore", how high is your bar? What used to work but now doesn't?

(I'd guess that solidarity is lower than it used to be, but if anything I am surprised how much goodwill still exists considering growing inequality, atomization, erosion of public trust and all that.)

I have made my peace with all of these bureaucratic failures. Maybe a certain amount of contradiction and chaos is part of living in a democracy.

The scary part is that at the same time there has been an authoritarian push to crack down on "disinformation", you know, like the lab leak theory, or the conspiracy theory that vaccination will become mandatory. That has sent my trust from low into negative territory.

In my opinion, the Air is the perfect addition to a heavy Linux/Windows workstation. You get the full spectrum from iOS development to gaming, albeit at the cost of having to babysit two or three operating systems. You can use the Air for meetings or conferences, because everything that's not a game has a macOS version (think Microsoft Teams etc.)

Besides what you said, that's not a surprising correlation because it's easy for Multinational MegaCorp Inc. to have a multi-ethnic board after a few international mergers.

And then there are very opinionated shareholders like Vanguard and BlackRock, which receive voting rights for every Euro that I save for old age, who can make this outcome a self-fulfilling prophecy by punishing companies for lack of diversity.

I don't think it's possible to control for all of this.

It does not seem to matter what any majority wants. I have never seen a request to rename something because a majority of black/trans/female/... people considered a term offensive, or the majority of staff, or - as you say - the majority of people who are pushing for inclusive language. (Who gets to define this group? Do I count if I make sure to use singular they, but don't care about master branches?)

The way it works is that a person or institution high up declares a term offensive, and then it takes only one or two people to suggest a change in a company Slack or other public space. Nobody wants to be racist/sexist, so the path of least resistance is to go along and make the change. That's why it feels like power games - if things were decided by anonymous polls instead, then I think acceptance of either outcome would be much higher.

Two proposals that I've seen replace all endings with either -x or -ens.

German source - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lann_Hornscheidt#Gendertheorie...

Now one might think that these are outlandish ideas that will never fly, but...

> And teach everyone to use them.

...that's easy, because languages changes are implemented top-down. Considering how unpopular the neutral forms using : and * are in polls, it is absolutely fascinating to see them spread so quickly from academia, to tech (macOS, Spotify), to local governments, to normie coworkers. Nonbinary people wouldn't have to do the teaching themselves.

Edit:

> ...not the neuter ones in case that this were offensive in German...

My first intuition was that using the neutral gender would indeed be offensive. But children (das Kind) and girls (das Mädchen) are neutral - and it doesn't feel rude to refer to them as "it"? I think it could work.

What I found interesting about this particular bot is that it wants to replace "actress" by "actor". (Yes please!! You don't know how good you have it in English, where most occupations are gender-neutral.)

In contrast, the current progressive push in German is to replace generic/masculine Schauspieler (actor) with der*die Schauspieler*in (think "actr*ess"; male, female, and everything in between, a bit like latinx). Maybe it makes sense that German has a tendency to become ever more complicated like C++, while English becomes simpler? But it shows how fad-driven this whole thing is: Either gendered nouns are good or bad, why would it depend on the language?