Most of these are old since I’ve been reading more articles these days but here are a few good books or series I’ve read more than twice: The Hobbit, LOTR, the Silmarillion, Neuromancer, the Chronicles of Narnia, Hong Lou Meng, The Heart Sutra, The Bhagavad Gita, The Tao De Ching, The Wheel of Time series, No country for old men, Persuasion, Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice, The Way of Kings, The Talisman, the Dark Tower Series, and The Prophet.

GOOD LUCK! You got this!

Taking a part of the author’s argument one step further, I believe that any society requiring the violent oppression of its members (creation of underclasses, racism, misogyny, anti child behavior, slavery, stigma of poverty, etc) in order to exist is a terrible system that should be abolished. We cannot know the alternative immediately, and discovering it will be very difficult but alternatives are possible and do exist. Changing things will not require a bloody revolution or the apocalypse or space travel, just everyday people saying no repeatedly until the only thing left is something we can all tolerate and thrive in.

I enjoy LLMs and machine learning, and I use it in my day to day. However from my current political POV as long as AI evolves & grows as a tool of capitalism I’m not sure how it could be used for anything but hurting large numbers of people at once without the emotional strain of the action, no matter the intent of the developer.

Everyone wants positive outcomes from AI, but we’ve been propagandized to accept that the price of the positivity MUST be human lives because the threat of not controlling the machine is so huge that enslaving a majority of the global population as reverse centaurs is the only viable solution to the problem. Many of the arguments to explain why ultimate utility must mean the sacrifice of most of the world are silly, but I suspect at the root of it all is something very natural: in situations where you perceive an existential threat is looming, you take up the “winning” side. If the winning side says extreme heat waves are the price the answer is yes. If the winning side says suicides are the price, or school shootings, or cryptosporidium, or nuclear waste, we say yes please give me another.

This is…logical/normal I guess, but 1) what if they are lying; 2) we hate the world they are showing us; and 3) most of us have better ideas. I’m very much looking forward to more arguments and discussions and DISCOURSE (ew!) about alternatives to all of this but as a whole we’re not disgusted enough yet. In the meantime, there’s more than enough “pro- human” work to do.

It’s weird to me that the CEOs have to keep writing these War and Peace length missives to explain about how bad it all is and how they are the only ones who can stop it (they created it), but I’m just one of the poors!

Anyway, so if you are wondering whether to read this & why it’s useful: having a family member with an obsession that borders on delusion is boring/annoying at best and painful at worst. Don’t read the article if you don’t care a female author talking about her experience with her husband who is very into AI uncritically. Obviously this is not a female software engineer expressing her technical opinion about the technology.

Ok cool. Just wanted to make sure we’re all clear about what you will and won’t find in the article!