PUMO

The majority of human discourse seems to break down into “it would be bad if this were true so it’s not true” or “it would be good if this were true so it’s true” with a side of “you caused this bad thing to happen by telling me about it”.

Because it's not about my beliefs, it's about yours. You could say "I'm a vitalist" or "Because X" and I would say "Understandable" and leave.

Technically you did say "because of all human knowledge" but that's way too ambiguous and purely rethorical.

I'm not really interested in convincing you otherwise, I just wanted to know the Why.

I just wanted to know your philosophical reason for believing Artificial General Intelligence is impossible, because you stated it with a lot of certainty and compared the reverse belief to a religion, which sounded like a very strong skepticism baked by a highly systematic justification.

Physics is the closest thing we have to certainty, you are right it's not the same as certainty. But that means anything less than it is even weaker when it comes to claiming something is impossible.

If your issue is that LLMs are burning the environment that really doesn't need some claim about the impossibility of AGI, it's just a different argument.

You seem to see urgency is a reason why this doesn't matter, but you can see on the other side people worried about misaligned superintelligence capable of killing us all and coming very very soon are just as urgent, which makes sense given their beliefs.

So, what it's true does matter.

Why? We need to prove what we *definitely* can't do, because not being able to currently do it isn't by itself convincing, since our capabilities change over time.

Systems with growth, reproduction, and metabolism?

Information subject to natural selection?

Sustained local reversion of entropy?

Just like saying we can't move faster than light no matter how good technology we get is a positive claim, that is extremely strongly backed by physics.

About what living beings are and what technology is plausible? You are right there is a philosophy there: Physicalism.

If you say we can *never* create machines that are intelligent or sentient, that has strong implications about the universe, it's a *positive claim*.

What should be the default assumption then?

Because your claim is too strong!

Living beings are mechanistic (because everything is), so why what they do couldn't be recreated artificially?

Creating intelligent machines is plausible in principle because for all we know we are intelligent machines made of physical stuff.

I mean the consequence of AI potentially being sentient, alive or highly intelligent. If it's categorically impossible, there should be some strong reason for that, but if there is not, the claim is at most a confident guess.

This is a separate issue from any harms AI as tools can do presently.

I mainly ask because it's a strong claim, and somewhat counterintuive (assuming physicalism), but if you have a strong reason I'm curious (though, alive, sentient, and intelligent are in principle separable).

It's also something whose truth value is extremely consequential for harm reduction.

Was lurking the discussion.

Based on what?

the only actually existing forms of transhumanism are subsets of transsexuality and the hyperborean dream enjoyers are not happy with reality so they will rather kill everyone than let a girl have four arms and a pancreas that works

Every mainstream attempt to grapple with the rise of Tate and other misogynist ideologues have posed them as a product of men’s despair. Few have posited them as an assault on women’s safety and dignity.

I have come to accept a simpler and more general argument against billionaires: by their very nature they impose centralized planning over economy they infest, becoming de-facto communist planners, and thus impose upon their habitat all the pathologies that rise from impossibility of planned econ

> publicly traded companies are part of the cathedral

Elon Musk's only profitable company, Tesla, has created a cumulative grand total net income of $34 billion in its more than 20 years of existence.

That's less than the total amount of US federal subsidies his empire has collectively received.

The economics of Elon Musk are as bad as the politics.

It would be really fucking funny though if the new edict at the Post meant that a bunch of left-libertarian sickos got in there like "Transness is the ultimate expression of personal liberty" and "Intellectual Property is an illegitimate suppressor of free markets, dismantle Amazon"

i mean yes it is *comical* the degree to which supposedly "materialist" marxists have largely ignored this domain of contestation (with exceptions like @mckenziewark.bsky.social) but also i think part of the problem is that tech radicals just suck at marketing

The left wing of nerddom: launch a surprisingly successful assault on an emerging form of property rights, build a counterculture and institutions around that struggle

Non nerd leftists: lol nerd shit

The She Made Him Do It Theory of Everything The rhetoric and logic of the abuse of power operates similarly at all scales, which is why I've found feminism such useful equipment for understanding authoritarians in public and political life. Bec...

These stories amount to "the left was so annoying about pronouns or liberals made people feel so guilty about plastic straws they had no choice but to get on board with the second coming of the Third Reich and the destruction of the planet."

Nothing says immutable biological fact like a need for heavy-handed enforcement

SEEING LIKE A TECH BRO

HOW CERTAIN SCHEMES TO MAKE THE HUMAN CONDITION WORSE HAVE FAILED

a principled opposition to principles. a movement who's only virtue is lack of virtue.

it is, somehow, a movement that seems to genuinely, explicitly think of *itself* as evil

Fascists correctly recognize the intense delusions of liberals, but attempting to attack those delusions is a Chesterton's fence situation. Those delusions were in many ways secondary expressions of the underlying benefits they codified, but that fascists are too smugly ignorant to see.