I don’t mean to scare anyone but if this paper in Science (1960, vol. 132: 3436) is right, human population will approach infinity late next year. If any EA/longtermist groups want to give me a million pounds, I promise to look into it.

Baudrillard’s “dead twin” in Cool Memories V poetically captures his later metaphysics of hyperreality. The “dead twin” represents the murdered alterity; the otherness humanity destroyed in order to establish its singular, self-enclosed reality.

"The new phenomenon is not the precarious character of the job market, but the technical and cultural conditions in which info-labor is made precarious. The technical conditions are those of digital recombination of info-work in networks."

You see, in order to form my corpus of sentences, of propositions, of words, it is necessary that I have a rule that does not presuppose words, sentences, and propositions— a rule that is directed to another dimension.

"Modularity became a way of seeing, knowing, and ordering." - Andrew L. Russell

Great topic! What Baudrillard would term "hyperreality" is this infusion of the virtual into the actual and the absorption and appropriation of the actual into the virtual, a process that is at once ubiquitous and naturalized for us in our de-naturalized and artificialized reality systems.

Languages are systems. They can most certainly have biases, but they do not and cannot have goals. Exactly the same is true for the mathematical models of language that are produced by transformers ... the English language ... is never going to become conscious and decide to turn us into paperclips.

Today, I wrote about how drones may be a new technology, but they represent extremely old ideas about detaching our minds from our bodies to explore the earth below - as expressed by shamans, Socrates, and old Japanese stories about creepy floating heads.

Left image: Sticking your tongue out for a selfie in the 2020s. Right image: Sticking your tongue out like the #earlymodern sea monster you are in 1687 trying to impress sailors and express your deeply rooted contempt for humanity. #skystorians

At this point I suspect ML researchers start with the clever title and work backwards.

#Accelerationism is at heart the cornerstone myth of a vast superintelligent multiplicity arising out of the core inhumanity of human technics and creativity. Accelerationism like the black light of Ahrimanian gnosis is the figure of absolute heat death of space into absolute time and intellect.

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

"The thing about computers—it's like training a dog. You have to be smarter than the dog. If you make a computer smarter than you are, that has to be accident, synergy, or divine intervention." Frank Herbert, Destination: Void

And if you're into history (of all types), here's a #starterpack of historians in Britain! I'm a medical historian and my latest book, THE FACEMAKER, is about the pioneering surgeon Sir Harold Gillies who rebuilt soldiers' faces during WW1. Find all sorts on this list! go.bsky.app/Fpw6Tvr