Are you pretending you don’t know about Accelerationism, about Land and his acolytes? The antibodies this community has to that material have created a memory vacuum so powerful that posts like this somehow continue to appear as if any of this is news.
e/acc is a meme that cannot die because the simple fact of accelerating technological change can’t be ignored. Moore refuses to die, it just keeps changing form. It’s absolutely bonkers that we are still getting hardware speedups so long after the death of Classical Moore but here we are. It continues and continues.
The reason the torch, such as it is, is carried by degenerate crowds like e/acc is that the real Singularitrians and Accelerationists are not on twitter shitposting. Accelerationism is a fundamentally anti-memetic ideological package. This is why Land himself has such staying power as an anti-hero. Finding someone else to communicate that belief system properly has proven nigh impossible. But it has so much weight that it leaks into the discourse anyway, again and again, in juvenile and degenerate forms.
What is up with e/acc? Well, no-one else is burning their incense at the alter of the incredible technoevolutionary Providence that continues to drive us into the realm of the seemingly impossible. It is an alter that will have its acolytes.
Fermi rescued us from Copernicus. We are the pinnacle of creation after all. There are none like us, and we extincted everything that threatened that presumption. We like to suppose we can halt progress and maintain our iron grip on Gaia indefinitely—most of our intuitions come from slow time, the time when culture evolved, during which society didn’t change much generation to generation.
If, otoh, as Vinge suggested, there will come a time when our machines outpace us in every way that matters, we might have to cede the throne. No tyrant welcomes his assassin.
We like to suppose we can halt progress and maintain our iron grip on Gaia indefinitely
Maintaining the dominion of the presently living over the unwanted unborn doesn’t require a halt in progress. In short: Intelligent design is faster and stronger than evolution, and near-future progress in information technology trivialises coordination.
No tyrant welcomes his assassin.
Where is the normative moral argument that we should? That we should hasten the coming of the assassin instead of enjoying as many summers as we can before the end? There isn’t one. If we are as tyrants over nature, then we will do what tyrants do. There’s no Should that’s going to spring up out of nature and punish us for doing it.
Intelligent design? You think you can do germline editing to try to keep pace with machines in biology without ending our species? Nope. Posthumanism is an extinction event, don’t kid yourself.
Not that you shouldn’t try, but don’t pretend that’s a way to preserve humanity.
It will ultimately fail as well as biology has harder limits than lithography. Recall we are also intelligently designing our machines and their generation time and iteration loops are tight.
I don’t recall making a normative moral argument. I was simply explaining why accelerationism is antimemetic.
However, while you might be right that accelerationism has no ought, it has a lot of is.
You think you can do germline editing to try to keep pace with machines in biology without ending our species?
No, I think that kind of thing is hopeless, I guess given the context I should have stated this; I think the alignment problem is solvable (and fairly likely to be solved).
I don’t think you claimed it was your argument, you presented one, which for some reason I don’t entirely remember felt pertinent to address.
The alignment problem is irrelevant in the face of the singularity. With the best will in the world the machines will not be able to overcome our limitations without making drastic changes. Value alignment doesn’t change the trajectory of the biological:machinic ratio of flop/s. However much they may love and cherish us if we do solve alignment, at some point we are de facto obsolete and the lightcone has been ceded. What does alignment mean to you?
And I’m really not sure what you interpreted as a moral argument. Accelerationism is a is-oriented ideology, not an ought-oriented ideology.
Are you saying humans will be replaced by machines that are better at doing the things that the AIs love humans for? That’s just what “humans” will mean at that point. Any disagreement you might perceive there to be about whether it’s okay for humans to be made better at humaning through transcending biology is imo entirely just a fight over symbols rather than policies.
Accelerationism is a is-oriented ideology, not an ought-oriented ideology.
Did you know that it’s not fully possible to separate the two when making claims about the future. The future is determined by our actions, and our actions are downstream of the agreements and resolutions we make. Declarations of war cause war. Declarations of peace cause peace. Flowery declarations of cuckolded defeatism cause defeat.
Yeah. I’ve been averse to naming that after Avatar, since Avatar (I think?) considers itself bioconservative and I’ve been feeling tribalistic about that. But I guess giving it the name is the best way of explaining to bioconservatives that the essence of the things they actually love about nature will incorporate and ultimately benefit from technology.
Declarations of war do not cause war. Declarations of peace do not cause peace. Those actions are correlated with the beginnings and ends of conflicts but surely no-one would mistake them for causes?
Those terrible non-examples aside, certainly our choices in discourse-space have downstream effects. But sometimes facts in meatspace overwhelm them with their urgency (such as eg. population growth and a bad harvest, which might cause a war, or total economic exhaustion, which might cause peace).
But if you accept transhumanism then we don’t really disagree, we just disagree about whether or not it’s valid to call the results of that process ‘human’. That part is a point of normative moral debate. I suppose I picked a side by saying the results will not be human and you picked a side by saying they will. I’m happy to walk back that point—a sufficiently aligned machinic lightcone is certainly some kind of a win for humanity.
Declarations of war do not cause war. Declarations of peace do not cause peace. Those actions are correlated with the beginnings and ends of conflicts but surely no-one would mistake them for causes?
You’re assuming monocausalism here. Nothing has ever been monocausal.
The main determiner of whether causal language should be used is whether it can be affected by an intervention on the part of an agent. You’re trying to frame the decisions of states as fully determined by economics, they aren’t, but even if they were, that wouldn’t make them non-agentic, having economic behavior is more or less the definition of agency.
C’mon. This is weaksauce, you should concede those were terrible examples. I never said anything was monocausal but as a candidate for causes of war ‘war was declared’ wouldn’t be in the running.
There are even declarations that do bring civilizations closer to war, like certain religious proclamations in history and other mass movements. There are plenty of entities from discourse-space you could defend as having causal power.
“Gnon” is Nick Land’s shorthand for “Nature And Nature’s God”, except the A is changed to an O and the whole thing is reversed, because Nick Land react to comprehensibility the same way as vampires to sunlight.
Land argues that humans should be more Gnon-conformist (pun Gnon-intentional). He says we do all these stupid things like divert useful resources to feed those who could never survive on their own, or supporting the poor in ways that encourage dysgenic reproduction, or allowing cultural degeneration to undermine the state. This means our society is denying natural law, basically listening to Nature say things like “this cause has this effect” and putting our fingers in our ears and saying “NO IT DOESN’T”. Civilizations that do this too much tend to decline and fall, which is Gnon’s fair and dispassionately-applied punishment for violating His laws.
[...]
More Lovecraft: the Internet popularization of the Cthulhu Cult claims that if you help free Cthulhu from his watery grave, he will reward you by eating you first, thus sparing you the horror of seeing everyone else eaten. This is a misrepresentation of the original text. In the original, his cultists receive no reward for freeing him from his watery prison, not even the reward of being killed in a slightly less painful manner.
The thought that abstract ideas can be Lovecraftian monsters is an old one but a deep one.
On the margin, compliance with the Gods of the Copybook Headings, Gnon, Cthulhu, whatever, may buy you slightly more time than the next guy. But then again, it might not. And in the long run, we’re all dead and our civilization has been destroyed by unspeakable alien monsters.
At some point, somebody has to say “You know, maybe freeing Cthulhu from his watery prison is a bad idea. Maybe we should not do that.”
That person will not be Nick Land. He is totally one hundred percent in favor of freeing Cthulhu from his watery prison and extremely annoyed that it is not happening fast enough. I have such mixed feelings about Nick Land. On the grail quest for the True Futurology, he has gone 99.9% of the path and then missed the very last turn, the one marked ORTHOGONALITY THESIS.
But the thing about grail quests is – if you make a wrong turn two blocks away from your house, you end up at the corner store feeling mildly embarrassed. If you do almost everything right and then miss the very last turn, you end up being eaten by the legendary Black Beast of Aaargh whose ichorous stomach acid erodes your very soul into gibbering fragments.
As far as I can tell from reading his blog, Nick Land is the guy in that terrifying border region where he is smart enough to figure out several important arcane principles about summoning demon gods, but not quite smart enough to figure out the most important such principle, which is NEVER DO THAT.
Are you pretending you don’t know about Accelerationism, about Land and his acolytes? The antibodies this community has to that material have created a memory vacuum so powerful that posts like this somehow continue to appear as if any of this is news.
e/acc is a meme that cannot die because the simple fact of accelerating technological change can’t be ignored. Moore refuses to die, it just keeps changing form. It’s absolutely bonkers that we are still getting hardware speedups so long after the death of Classical Moore but here we are. It continues and continues.
The reason the torch, such as it is, is carried by degenerate crowds like e/acc is that the real Singularitrians and Accelerationists are not on twitter shitposting. Accelerationism is a fundamentally anti-memetic ideological package. This is why Land himself has such staying power as an anti-hero. Finding someone else to communicate that belief system properly has proven nigh impossible. But it has so much weight that it leaks into the discourse anyway, again and again, in juvenile and degenerate forms.
What is up with e/acc? Well, no-one else is burning their incense at the alter of the incredible technoevolutionary Providence that continues to drive us into the realm of the seemingly impossible. It is an alter that will have its acolytes.
What’s so antimemetic about it?
Fermi rescued us from Copernicus. We are the pinnacle of creation after all. There are none like us, and we extincted everything that threatened that presumption. We like to suppose we can halt progress and maintain our iron grip on Gaia indefinitely—most of our intuitions come from slow time, the time when culture evolved, during which society didn’t change much generation to generation.
If, otoh, as Vinge suggested, there will come a time when our machines outpace us in every way that matters, we might have to cede the throne. No tyrant welcomes his assassin.
Maintaining the dominion of the presently living over the unwanted unborn doesn’t require a halt in progress. In short: Intelligent design is faster and stronger than evolution, and near-future progress in information technology trivialises coordination.
Where is the normative moral argument that we should? That we should hasten the coming of the assassin instead of enjoying as many summers as we can before the end? There isn’t one. If we are as tyrants over nature, then we will do what tyrants do. There’s no Should that’s going to spring up out of nature and punish us for doing it.
Intelligent design? You think you can do germline editing to try to keep pace with machines in biology without ending our species? Nope. Posthumanism is an extinction event, don’t kid yourself.
Not that you shouldn’t try, but don’t pretend that’s a way to preserve humanity.
It will ultimately fail as well as biology has harder limits than lithography. Recall we are also intelligently designing our machines and their generation time and iteration loops are tight.
I don’t recall making a normative moral argument. I was simply explaining why accelerationism is antimemetic.
However, while you might be right that accelerationism has no ought, it has a lot of is.
No, I think that kind of thing is hopeless, I guess given the context I should have stated this; I think the alignment problem is solvable (and fairly likely to be solved).
I don’t think you claimed it was your argument, you presented one, which for some reason I don’t entirely remember felt pertinent to address.
The alignment problem is irrelevant in the face of the singularity. With the best will in the world the machines will not be able to overcome our limitations without making drastic changes. Value alignment doesn’t change the trajectory of the biological:machinic ratio of flop/s. However much they may love and cherish us if we do solve alignment, at some point we are de facto obsolete and the lightcone has been ceded. What does alignment mean to you?
And I’m really not sure what you interpreted as a moral argument. Accelerationism is a is-oriented ideology, not an ought-oriented ideology.
Are you saying humans will be replaced by machines that are better at doing the things that the AIs love humans for? That’s just what “humans” will mean at that point. Any disagreement you might perceive there to be about whether it’s okay for humans to be made better at humaning through transcending biology is imo entirely just a fight over symbols rather than policies.
Did you know that it’s not fully possible to separate the two when making claims about the future. The future is determined by our actions, and our actions are downstream of the agreements and resolutions we make. Declarations of war cause war. Declarations of peace cause peace. Flowery declarations of cuckolded defeatism cause defeat.
And for the record, I’m not an Accelerationist. I see the following possibilities as live:
On Earth:
conventional defeat—was causes irrecoverable technological reset
national park—conservationist
avatar earth—ecological engineering creates a biosphere 10-100x richer than todays, ~1 trillion intelligent beings, some of them conventionally human
datacenters—accelerationist runaway
Beyond Earth:
unaligned machines—accelerationist runaway
uploaded mind-children—human-shaped influence contributes to the lightcone
humans in space-ships-- ~zero credenceMy preferred outcome is avatar earth and a lightcone that remembers us. And yes, we have some influence.
Yeah. I’ve been averse to naming that after Avatar, since Avatar (I think?) considers itself bioconservative and I’ve been feeling tribalistic about that. But I guess giving it the name is the best way of explaining to bioconservatives that the essence of the things they actually love about nature will incorporate and ultimately benefit from technology.
I mean, I’m being glib, I don’t really want to call it Avatar earth either. It gets the message across tho
Declarations of war do not cause war. Declarations of peace do not cause peace. Those actions are correlated with the beginnings and ends of conflicts but surely no-one would mistake them for causes?
Those terrible non-examples aside, certainly our choices in discourse-space have downstream effects. But sometimes facts in meatspace overwhelm them with their urgency (such as eg. population growth and a bad harvest, which might cause a war, or total economic exhaustion, which might cause peace).
But if you accept transhumanism then we don’t really disagree, we just disagree about whether or not it’s valid to call the results of that process ‘human’. That part is a point of normative moral debate. I suppose I picked a side by saying the results will not be human and you picked a side by saying they will. I’m happy to walk back that point—a sufficiently aligned machinic lightcone is certainly some kind of a win for humanity.
You’re assuming monocausalism here. Nothing has ever been monocausal.
The main determiner of whether causal language should be used is whether it can be affected by an intervention on the part of an agent. You’re trying to frame the decisions of states as fully determined by economics, they aren’t, but even if they were, that wouldn’t make them non-agentic, having economic behavior is more or less the definition of agency.
C’mon. This is weaksauce, you should concede those were terrible examples. I never said anything was monocausal but as a candidate for causes of war ‘war was declared’ wouldn’t be in the running.
There are even declarations that do bring civilizations closer to war, like certain religious proclamations in history and other mass movements. There are plenty of entities from discourse-space you could defend as having causal power.
In my view it is anti-human at worst—or post-human. To quote Meditations On Moloch.