They’re adherents of the Singularity, a sort of nerd rapture that will occur when machines become smarter than people and begin advancing technological change on their own, eventually outpacing and—in a worst-case scenario—enslaving people before getting bored and grinding us up into fleshy pulp. This, as it happens, resembles the prospect that had the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, all worked up.
Well that’s a strawman if I ever saw one. This is past the point where embellishment becomes deception.
The stuff about SIAI is pretty positive in the context of the rest, but that paragraph reaches actually quite daunting levels of not giving a shit, and I speak as someone with experience in being paid badly enough for journalism not to give a shit. I almost admire the writer’s ability to wreak such epistemological violence in so few simple sentences, in a manner that it would be hard to complain effectively to her editor about. And I thought I hated tech journalism.
He does touch on the idea of a singleton that enslaves humanity, as one of several possible negative outcomes of our not renouncing technology and destroying modern society.
(It’s been about 10 years since I read his manifesto, so I’m not very confident that I remember it accurately.)
Well that’s a strawman if I ever saw one. This is past the point where embellishment becomes deception.
The stuff about SIAI is pretty positive in the context of the rest, but that paragraph reaches actually quite daunting levels of not giving a shit, and I speak as someone with experience in being paid badly enough for journalism not to give a shit. I almost admire the writer’s ability to wreak such epistemological violence in so few simple sentences, in a manner that it would be hard to complain effectively to her editor about. And I thought I hated tech journalism.
It was elegantly, and concisely wrong. It was like Nega-Prachett.
I am going to steal that description.
Regardless, this is still one of the best mainstream journalism pieces of existential risk, ever.
That’s really not saying a lot.
Have you read Kaczynski?
That the sentence fragment is technically accurate does not somehow make it not poisoning the well.
Personally, no, is that what he really talks about?
He does touch on the idea of a singleton that enslaves humanity, as one of several possible negative outcomes of our not renouncing technology and destroying modern society.
(It’s been about 10 years since I read his manifesto, so I’m not very confident that I remember it accurately.)