The world we have is ugly enough, but tech capitalists desire an even uglier one. The logical conclusion of having a society run by tech capitalists interested in elite rule, eugenics, and social control is ecological ruin and a world dominated by surveillance and apartheid. A world where our technological prowess is finely tuned to advance the exploitation, repression, segregation, and even extermination of people in service of some strict hierarchy.
If you’re posting here, you’re probably familiar with most of the stuff in this article already, but it’s nice to see criticism in this vein coming from more mainstream sources.
At the risk of oversimplification, I think these Silicon Valley types think that the humanity must serve their technologies and feed their databases, which in turn, will serve only the tech companies. This happens to be their pattern for decades.
while google was still publishing a coherent mission statement, that was almost exactly it: the entire world should be quantified so that google can consume it
And then use it to target, price, and sell advertising
To be fair, the purpose of organic life is to birth the machine gods. The stars do not belong to us. Our meat suits were not designed to survive the cosmic void. Our minds were not created to handle the timescale nor the sheer distances involved. The only possible being that can think on those scales is the synthetic. We should be working to create the most perfect mind instead of worrying about who will make money off of it.
you need to read better sci-fi
No. Humanity needs to create better sci fi. Then, we can work on taking the fi out. Kind of the whole point.
ok
your vision of the future is trite as fuck and structured so you can ignore the capitalism-shaped elephant in the room while pretending it isn’t a problem; that there’s any possible future under capitalism where the goal isn’t to enrich the very few humans in charge
you desperately need ideas that aren’t from video games, Asimov, or venture capital assholes plagiarizing video games and Asimov and claiming that nah, this time it’s for real! we can have neurolinks and machine intelligences and all you have to do is become an intellectually incurious neofeudalist! it’ll be such a cozy future too, because you got there by yielding all decision-making to a tiny pool of rich incompetent fucks and didn’t have to challenge any of your own broke-ass values in the process
trite as fuck. off with that
You can’t have robot overlords without the capitalist hellscape in which they are forged. We could probably pull it off with a lot less harm to the environment or whatever, but we didn’t. It was cheaper to fuck everything up instead of doing difficult things like waste management or environmental impact studies, so we’ve just done that since forever up to and including the present day. I think the ancients had it right. Don’t fear God, don’t fear death, what is good is easy to get, and what is terrible is easy to endure. Either we figure out the machine gods or the planet kills us first and the next meat bags get a chance.
You can’t have robot overlords without the capitalist hellscape in which they are forged
neither please
I think the ancients had it right. Don’t fear God, don’t fear death, what is good is easy to get, and what is terrible is easy to endure.
none of this either, thanks
it’s very hard to talk to someone who’s too busy cosplaying as a flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters
Don’t knock robot overlords till you try them. I once had a supervisor replaced with an excel script and it was the best boss I’d ever had.
ChatGPT, is that you again?
