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shlaifu
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25 May 2019, 7:17 pm

hmm. I was pointed towards reading this at a conference on AI and robotics, and it's an impressive and sobering text.
If you haven't read it, please do:
Industrial Society and Its Future

it swipes away the left-right divide, ideas of libertarianism, individualism or collectivism, and leaves one with the choice between hunter-gatherer and a brave new world.
judging from this, the boomers might have lived at the sweet spot of technological advancement and personal freedom, and it's only downhill from here into an entirely self-serving machinery of technological progress.


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ollychan
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26 May 2019, 10:56 am

a lil bit tl;dr ngl .. lemme read



shlaifu
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26 May 2019, 6:31 pm

In short:
Technology always brings both the good and bad effects, and incalculable ones on top.
There is no mechanism to resist technology, once it's in the world, and so technology creates an inevitable marlstrom.
The other aspect is that to create ever more elaborate technology, societies must conform, and individual freedom must turn into a caricature. It's a choice between freedom and global industrial society that requires ever more precise and punctual people, educated for ever narrower specialisms.
Then he concludes with why the left is no ally fir anarchists, as the left is fundamentally accepting the social framework that technology dictates, but tries to gain power so he can satisfy his need to enforce his morality on everyone else.

So, the latter part about leftists is somewhat similar to jordan Peterson's view of resentment driven ideologues. But unlike Peterson, Kaczynski doesn't assume that without the leftists, everything would be peachy - no, they are just a group struggling for power within the framework dictated by technology, against which there is ultimately no defense other than to reject it on a large scale (because one can't evade its sideeffects, like pollution or global warming etc, on a merely local scale).

In other words: we're doomed to live in a Brave new world in which people are adjusted to fit a society which is shaped by the producion and effects of technology, and headed for major conflict.
Oh, and of course: technology extends lives greatly while rendering them utterly meaningless - there is no responsibility to be found for the individual, as there is no individual freedom. People are replaceable cogs in a global machinery, who need to function as planned. No room for autonomous behaviour and free/responsible decisionmaking.


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ollychan
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27 May 2019, 12:28 pm

reflections:

1) yes dont feel inferior. if u think ur mind is slower than nancy pelosi, ur mind is probably really slower than nancy pelosi.



shlaifu
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27 May 2019, 12:45 pm

ollychan wrote:
reflections:

1) yes dont feel inferior. if u think ur mind is slower than nancy pelosi, ur mind is probably really slower than nancy pelosi.



sorry, I'm not american. I have a rough knowledge of who nancy pelosi is, but not enought to get the reference.
If you want to insult me with a comparison, keep it to internationally famous people, trump, hitler, stalin.... the usual


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27 May 2019, 1:42 pm

shlaifu wrote:
ollychan wrote:
reflections:

1) yes dont feel inferior. if u think ur mind is slower than nancy pelosi, ur mind is probably really slower than nancy pelosi.



sorry, I'm not american. I have a rough knowledge of who nancy pelosi is, but not enought to get the reference.
If you want to insult me with a comparison, keep it to internationally famous people, trump, hitler, stalin.... the usual


I am an American (who is forced to live and breath the current Pelosi-Trump feuds day and night), but even I have no clue as to what Olly is trying to say.



techstepgenr8tion
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27 May 2019, 5:30 pm

Maybe this is the way to look at it now:

Sociology is surpassing technology in terms of the problems that need to be solved. I was just watching 1791's commentary on some of the ways in which Tucker Carlson's changed in the last year or so, not just on concerns about automation and AI but also starting to drift in the same direction Jonah Goldberg has been drifting in with respect to concerns that current forms of technologically expedited capitalism are really unraveling civilization.

I think what happens is this - once our major technological concerns are resolved we're in a place where the aches are clearly much less technological and much more civic. I think the pain threshold dialing up will force us to evaluate this. We can be dutiful lemmings and waltz in the same destructive direction when only a minority of people out there, particularly those who aren't seen as society's 'winners', are eating it. It won't be that way much longer.

We're likely to see a significant renegotiation of contract in western civilization. For example, as Andrew Yang puts it, reestablishing capitalism to not start at $0. I think people are waking up to the realization that the puritanical lens of 'If you don't work or can't work you're worthless and have no right to be alive' is ceasing to make sense in a world where increasingly fewer people will be able to fit that bill. I'm also going to add - I don't think we have to worry too much about a massive population bomb if such assistance as that happens anyway, hypergamy should continue to keep birth rates pretty low, even accelerate the drop in birth rates if the majority of men can't work.

We'll also have to I think come to some sort of grips on what we value in life as a culture. We may not agree on religion or irreligion, may not agree on what a person's goals should be or that there even should be such proclamations, but we should at least have a good grasp on what makes people better toward each other, what makes people worse toward each other, and what kinds of things cement a society together and raise trust rather than leading toward atomization and increasing distrust and then proceed to rebuild incentives that encourage the growth of social capital and human bonding.


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shlaifu
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27 May 2019, 6:53 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Maybe this is the way to look at it now:

Sociology is surpassing technology in terms of the problems that need to be solved. I was just watching 1791's commentary on some of the ways in which Tucker Carlson's changed in the last year or so, not just on concerns about automation and AI but also starting to drift in the same direction Jonah Goldberg has been drifting in with respect to concerns that current forms of technologically expedited capitalism are really unraveling civilization.

I think what happens is this - once our major technological concerns are resolved we're in a place where the aches are clearly much less technological and much more civic. I think the pain threshold dialing up will force us to evaluate this. We can be dutiful lemmings and waltz in the same destructive direction when only a minority of people out there, particularly those who aren't seen as society's 'winners', are eating it. It won't be that way much longer.

We're likely to see a significant renegotiation of contract in western civilization. For example, as Andrew Yang puts it, reestablishing capitalism to not start at $0. I think people are waking up to the realization that the puritanical lens of 'If you don't work or can't work you're worthless and have no right to be alive' is ceasing to make sense in a world where increasingly fewer people will be able to fit that bill. I'm also going to add - I don't think we have to worry too much about a massive population bomb if such assistance as that happens anyway, hypergamy should continue to keep birth rates pretty low, even accelerate the drop in birth rates if the majority of men can't work.

We'll also have to I think come to some sort of grips on what we value in life as a culture. We may not agree on religion or irreligion, may not agree on what a person's goals should be or that there even should be such proclamations, but we should at least have a good grasp on what makes people better toward each other, what makes people worse toward each other, and what kinds of things cement a society together and raise trust rather than leading toward atomization and increasing distrust and then proceed to rebuild incentives that encourage the growth of social capital and human bonding.


Hmm. What I gather from "industrial society and its future" is that technological process is evolutionary - mutating without aim, selecting for whatever is better under some selection pressure, eventually being superceded by something else.
And humans organise themselves to facilitate technological progress, as it promises power.

There have in the past only been established religions who, for some time, withstood progress. But, according to "ISaiF", eventually, technology wins, as there is too much to be gained from employing it, and tryong to protect something under attack isn't actually giving you rewards - in the way environmentalists keep loosing to logging/oil/palm oil etc.

Sure, as a society, we need to rethink our values, but what actually are our morals compared to the promise of curing cancer? Sure, it means congolese children need to dig up coltan, but what are we going to do? Not have AI?
Morals are something individuals have, not societies. Societies have interests and laws and establish ideologies for their individuals to base individual morals on. But here the evolutionary aspects returns: if there's a niche to be filled, it will be filled.

The interesting thing about the text is that it describes the way to Huxley's Brave new world, the logic that takes us there, whether we like it or not.

The author was a luddite anarchist who saw the brave new world as demeaning and stripping humans of dignity.
I never was sure if it was a utopia or a dystopia. Both, I guess.
Ford be praised.


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techstepgenr8tion
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27 May 2019, 7:00 pm

Side question - did you catch the debate Brett Weinstein had with Richard Dawkins?

I ask the question because Brett actually stuck something to him toward the end of the debate and came pretty close to getting Richard to admit that he was wrong about something in his own words. What issue was that? It was the idea that memes have a life of their own, a power of their own, and that memes intellectually enslave people rather than being more primarily in the service of what it is people think. Brett's hypothetical was in talking about the evolution of beaver ponds and suggesting to Richard that beaver ponds, in their adaptive capacities, were working to influence beavers - which Richard flatly renounced stating that beaver ponds were essentially tools of beavers.

Similarly technology is something that's riding on top of us. It's not necessarily free or independent of us. What you clearly have is a pipeline of people, a great many, for whom the status quo approach to economics and technology work. That's what's really behind what makes the current arena look indestructible. That's why I'm saying - the pain threshold matters. It may take a very long time to kick in but it matters enough that if it's surpassed things will change significantly.


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techstepgenr8tion
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27 May 2019, 7:12 pm

Also browsing through this article (I'm somewhere in the 70-range) it seems like the author is suggesting that we're victims of oversized systems where we feel helpless in the face of them, self-reference against their activity rather than our own, that it's a world completely unlike anything we evolved to handle, and most of the other points seem like a litany of support for what kinds of uglier emergent effects this is having on our civics.


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shlaifu
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27 May 2019, 7:47 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Side question - did you catch the debate Brett Weinstein had with Richard Dawkins?

I ask the question because Brett actually stuck something to him toward the end of the debate and came pretty close to getting Richard to admit that he was wrong about something in his own words. What issue was that? It was the idea that memes have a life of their own, a power of their own, and that memes intellectually enslave people rather than being more primarily in the service of what it is people think. Brett's hypothetical was in talking about the evolution of beaver ponds and suggesting to Richard that beaver ponds, in their adaptive capacities, were working to influence beavers - which Richard flatly renounced stating that beaver ponds were essentially tools of beavers.

Similarly technology is something that's riding on top of us. It's not necessarily free or independent of us. What you clearly have is a pipeline of people, a great many, for whom the status quo approach to economics and technology work. That's what's really behind what makes the current arena look indestructible. That's why I'm saying - the pain threshold matters. It may take a very long time to kick in but it matters enough that if it's surpassed things will change significantly.


Oh, yeah, definitely. The beaver is just the beaver pond's way to make more beaver ponds.
Work and resources are just capital's way of accumulating more capital.

You say there's a pain threshhold - yes, sure.
But it's not clear how that will play out!
I read articles on the IEEE website earlier. It had the headline "this algorithm can tell whrn you feel unhappy even before you realize it and with a brain implant can zap you to avoid you ever becoming so unhappy you actually notice" - right next to the headline "here's how women should talk to other women about women-related workplace issues";
And I thought to myself: "why not zap them with a brain implant before they notice it's an issue?"


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techstepgenr8tion
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27 May 2019, 8:40 pm

shlaifu wrote:
You say there's a pain threshhold - yes, sure.
But it's not clear how that will play out!
I read articles on the IEEE website earlier. It had the headline "this algorithm can tell whrn you feel unhappy even before you realize it and with a brain implant can zap you to avoid you ever becoming so unhappy you actually notice" - right next to the headline "here's how women should talk to other women about women-related workplace issues";
And I thought to myself: "why not zap them with a brain implant before they notice it's an issue?"

What organic crisis will 'they' (whoever they are) be able to seize on where chipping everyone's brain seems like the best good-faith response?


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shlaifu
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28 May 2019, 4:18 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
shlaifu wrote:
You say there's a pain threshhold - yes, sure.
But it's not clear how that will play out!
I read articles on the IEEE website earlier. It had the headline "this algorithm can tell whrn you feel unhappy even before you realize it and with a brain implant can zap you to avoid you ever becoming so unhappy you actually notice" - right next to the headline "here's how women should talk to other women about women-related workplace issues";
And I thought to myself: "why not zap them with a brain implant before they notice it's an issue?"

What organic crisis will 'they' (whoever they are) be able to seize on where chipping everyone's brain seems like the best good-faith response?


oh, chipping people'sbbrains will be great against depression, adhd, epilepsy, tourette's (actually,brain-pacemakers are already a thing for tourette's) and then someone will figure out that it can be used to make you instant-focussed like you're on adderall .... and to deliver the necessary performance and succeed in the workplace, people will want the chip implanted in their children in preschool.


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techstepgenr8tion
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28 May 2019, 9:48 am

shlaifu wrote:
oh, chipping people'sbbrains will be great against depression, adhd, epilepsy, tourette's (actually,brain-pacemakers are already a thing for tourette's) and then someone will figure out that it can be used to make you instant-focussed like you're on adderall .... and to deliver the necessary performance and succeed in the workplace, people will want the chip implanted in their children in preschool.

Thankfully it sounds like this particular kind of dystopia needs a lot of contingencies in its favor.


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ollychan
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28 May 2019, 7:24 pm

shlaifu wrote:
ollychan wrote:
reflections:

1) yes dont feel inferior. if u think ur mind is slower than nancy pelosi, ur mind is probably really slower than nancy pelosi.



sorry, I'm not american. I have a rough knowledge of who nancy pelosi is, but not enought to get the reference.
If you want to insult me with a comparison, keep it to internationally famous people, trump, hitler, stalin.... the usual



hitler and stalin were horrible yes.

nancy & pelosi + science & technology = human extinction



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28 May 2019, 7:29 pm

)2 hes saying even with the most transparent form of democracy you still can't prevent such dystopia from happening ?