I don't know who the writer is, but I like this part: "It feels a little like that moment before the tsunami in 2004. Remember how, in Thailand and Indonesia, the ocean drew back from the coastline? People ran out to marvel at the miles of pristine new beach that suddenly emerged, not realising that, far out at sea, a wall of water was building up and would come crashing over them. We’re in that moment now. A towering wall of stupidity is about to inundate us."

It's probably too much to ask for a journalist or someone in the literary milieu to know who Nick Land is (or even Deleuze or Mark Fisher, if wanting someone more sanitized).

Which is unfortunate, because his CCRU-era, writhing-on-the-floor, amphetamine-fueled theory-poetry is highly creative and prophetic. We're summoning the Old Ones without reading our Abdul Alhazred.

Yeah when I saw this article title I initially expected it to be about Nick Land

It's strange to me to cite Land and the CCRU, yet also endorse a podcast that epitomizes the very insular Bay Area EA / rationalist worldview. Which has, I think, in the last 3 years since the podcast released, shown itself to be little more than technobabble bullshit.

Capitalism is not an alien machine that has achieved consciousness and hijacked humanity. Framing it that way is anthropomorphic and gives far too much credit to wildly incompetent financial and political institutions, while also treating wide-scale political and moral cowardice as some sort of inevitable Math trap we just happened to fall into. It also very neatly lets the technocrats off the hook, after all if it's an emergent Lovecraftian horror then none of this is their fault. But this isn't a cosmic Greek tragedy. All of this is happening because of decades of institutional negligence, and the core grift of this entire discourse is laundering the culpability of very people who are actively pushing "AI" through every corner of civilization.

This is all going to be massively disrupting because of how destabilizing it is to the very same institutional foundations that modern capital depends on. It is much more like a solvent. We're basically pouring acid directly into the foundations of society.

Yeah, this self-indulgent writing style always irks me. It’s like the journalistic equivalent of smelling your own farts.

Making prompts shorter does not seem like the characteristic trait of AI writing.

I have sat trying to think of a response that appropriately expresses my disappointment and total lack of surprise at seeing such sentiments about a piece of writing that I thought was beautiful.

Fuck it though. Too long, boring, onanistic, get AI to summarize it. More efficient.

ironically, AI would have written a better article arguing the author's points

[flagged]

What if the filter is that other civilizations don't have an incentive to expand?

The core reason why we want to consume more resources is that we want to be happier, which really means we want to make certain physical changes in our brains. If we cut the middlemen and find a way to directly control how we feel, there would be no need to expand, because it wouldn't increase our happiness.

Edit: Just found out someone else has made the exact same point in another comment before me.

I always thought that the great filter would be the "lotus eater" scenario -- that species always eventually discover that the entirety of their happiness lies in their brains, and once physical dangers are eliminated and base physical needs are met reliably, they can spend their entire lives in either an electronic or chemically induced simulation of a world of their choice, thus ending all exploration. But now I wonder whether they discover that all creativity can be emulated through matrix math, and they simply stop trying to do anything, or lose ability to do anything after a generation of delegating to machines.

Interestingly, this was touched on in the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Caprica Sci-Fi series. Organic life always giving rise to artificial life, which attempted to destroy its creators.

It could be that nearby aliens are various forms of artificial life, who know how the human story is going to end, and couldn’t care less about the organic.

I don’t see why it should be taken for granted that alien civilizations would necessarily have an economic system that positions AI as a threat, like ours.

I also don’t see why we should assume that even if it were positioned as a threat, that they would be as irrational as us in not just dropping it.

Would we not see AI civilizations then?

The great filter would have needed to happen before the transmission of radio waves to be a solution to the Fermi Paradox

Are you sarcastic? This sounds awfully certain. I see so many huuuuge holes in the argument.

1) Mars demonstrates exactly what one great filter for life is: exposure to space

2) Earth escaped this fate, for now, because our solar system seems to somehow have gotten a great dose of uranium long ago. We know our solar system has a far larger than average concentration of uranium, which is keeping the earth warm because the concentration of uranium nicely balances out the energy loss to space, and earth is of nearly the perfect size, in a near perfect position relative to our star, unlike Mars which is too small, to allow for life to continue for probably no more than ~6 billion years.

Why or even how did this uranium delivery happen? I mean probably it was a neutron star collision (but with what? Several options. Also the neutron star that did it should either still exist, or have left behind a black hole ... where is it? What happened to the thing it collided with? Truth is it can't be that far away, but we haven't even found that thing, so we can't actually even guess what the odds of this are. And before you say the equations predict it: cool, but those equations famously got all the higher element concentrations on earth wrong (famously there's too much gold) until we figured something out, and they still give a uranium concentration that's far lower than the Earth's. In that sense "science predicts" the earth would have become inhospitable to life 2-3 billion years ago because it would have solidified and lost its atmosphere a billion years or so after Mars did. Yes, we know uranium is preventing that but we don't know where the uranium comes from. So we don't know the odds.

3) Another assumption that fails: why would AI be the filter? Not nuclear weapons? Fusion bombs? Chemical weapons? Bioweapons? Viruses? Diseases? Other wars? Climate change? Environmental destruction? At one point I seem to remember reading an article that it was going to be a computer virus. There are so many other physical phenomena that can end life on earth. A nearby supernova (booms big enough don't have to be close to kill you), changes in earth's orbit around the sun, changes in other orbits, maybe even the Moon's, ecological collapse for other reasons, a new grey goo disaster, ...

4) humans exist NOT just because the earth is livable but because the earth got VERY close to killing all life through climate change (however, by cooling down, ie. the "snowball earth" extinctions). Those were not just extinctions and a dark silent end, they caused an explosion in biodiversity after a volcanic eruption ended the extinction in progress. We are the result of the explosion in biodiversity after the last extinction, in fact after every extinction event, and there's LOTS of them. And before snowball earth, it kind of looks like a "grey goo" disaster had in fact taken place on earth, it's just that climate change either destroyed enough grey goo or changed it's environment enough to end it. So earth created us, not just by allowing life, but by killing over 99.9% of all life at least 3 times and in fact a couple dozen times.

5) Another assumption. ARE there no aliens? How far out would we, really, have noticed them? 500 light years? Even that seems far, especially given that "the Silurian hypothesis" paper points out that if Dinosaurs had a civilization that didn't make it to the nuclear age, especially if it happened before the first dinosaur extinction (the one with the asteroid you're thinking of is the third and last), odds are surprisingly good we wouldn't have noticed aliens right under our feet. So let's very generously say 500 light years. How many planets in that range? 10 million or so. How many that aren't obviously excluded? (gas giant, cold worlds, too hot, too huge, too small). A couple dozen (ONE that we have actually detected). So reality is that if the odds of life are less than 1-10% (and that's an easy argument to defend) we probably wouldn't have seen life with current tech even "close by". Also life seems to require 5 billion years of processing before it starts making interesting signals so a planet that is very very very close to being good enough like Mars ... just wouldn't do it.

Yes there are studies, like the one from Aricebo, that claims we could detect some signals from as much as 12.000 light years away (still not even 0.01% of the milky way) but if I remember correctly such a detection requires a perfectly aimed signal and so it requires extreme luck to happen.

6) that shows yet another problem. Despite Elon Musk's bullshit, reality is that you will find on average a planet that can be (temporarily) terraformed (in tens to hundreds of thousands of years minimum, like Venus and maybe Mars) every 2-3 lightyears in our milky way neighborhood, which is presumably average ... why would you colonize them? You're not going to get resources from them, the distances are too large, energy required for that is too much. Plus once you climb out of a gravity well ... why would you ever dive into another one?

7) So the "no aliens" argument is purely based on aliens always doing the opposite of filtering: the assumption they would necessarily "conquer the galaxy" ... but would they?

Why? It seems to me leaving planets behind, figuring out fusion, finding the biggest hydrogen cloud less than 1000 lightyears from you, and moving into that would be a far better strategy (which is also the problem with Dyson spheres: WHY would you build that? You need the hydrogen, you do not need the star, yes with 1950s tech you'd need the star, but let's assume we can make the obvious advancements, shall we?

A bussard collector + a fusion reactor + a couple dozen lightyears from the nearest star at least seems far more comfortable than even earth, something like a large number of spaceships flying towards the great attractor (traveling on the cosmic web), outright exiting the milky way. To me, that seems the way to go.

And so your argument is flawed even on it's most basic premise: that a filter exists at all. The only thing the "great filter" needs to do is prevent a civilization from expanding more than a few hundred lightyears along it's orbit in the milky way and it would for sure have stopped us from finding them, even just in the milky way.

This ironically sounds like AI-written marketing prose.

I believe the OP is arguing that for a consumer capable of bending nature to its will via the mechanism you describe (and especially for those with deprivation in the rear view mirror), collecting winnings at the bottom of the race to timely delivery of state of the art goods and services is missing the forest for the trees,

"Cyclopes has a single head and a single pale, unblinking eye set into its forehead, way to the right of centre, which casts its jaundiced gaze on ordinary humans and sees only what miners see in a mineral-rich forest, or what dam builders see in mighty, flowing rivers."

Moreover, by zooming out from capitalism's competitive price coordinating role, it is highlighted that free enterprise is not a natural outcome of the concentration of wealth and power in emergency shaped aspirations:

"we’ll market ourselves as the cutting edge of human enlightenment, and the manager and disburser of human knowledge sans frontières. But in truth, we’ll be map-shaped. We’ll fuse ourselves to our nation, its economy, its intelligence grid and its security apparatus until you won’t be able to tell us apart from yourself"

For what it's worth, I live in the USA and back in 2020 I had to stand in line to obtain toilet paper. Every system has its pros and cons.

No doubt you're right, Capitalism has been winning for a long time, but the world is constantly changing, and right now it looks like we're gradually making the planet uninhabitable. I personally wouldn't count it a win if the entire game gets destroyed in the process.

    Turning “satisfying customers” and “satisfying citizens” into the outputs of optimization processes was one of civilization’s greatest advances and the reason why capitalist democracies have so outperformed other systems. But if we have bound Moloch as our servant, the bonds are not very strong, and we sometimes find that the tasks he has done for us move to his advantage rather than ours.

So much of the dialog around "capitalism" paints everything that is not Soviet or Mao-style communism as "capitalism", when in reality all economies are mixed. Democratic governments and regulatory bodies shape the economic landscape. The diversity and makeup of the marketplace makes a big difference.

A huge portion of the success of "capitalism" is due to well-funded open science.

When monopolies, crony capitalism, and growthism, these are active detriments to all but those in power. Things become top-heavy, inequality leads to increasing social disconnection, discontent, and, throughout history, violence including revolution.

But now they have the dark crystal hypnotizing us all, who knows what will happen.

Polska Gurom! Good boy, you get some Ycombinator points.

They are fighting to create ideally a monopoly/oligopoly, then enshrine their position in law through regulatory capture, which seems fairly cheap nowadays, the feds are defanged and made into a MAGA extension.

Written on your iPhone, made in China, a non-capitalist country...

I saw a Tik Tok that said something like “capitalism gives society marvels faster than socialism can declare them human rights.” In 50 years Mamdani’s grandkids will be saying that universal AI tokens are a human right.

The people who downvoted you would rather everyone was poor than that someone else had more than them. There's a whole chunk of social and political science that exists solely to try to frame and justify envy as a virtue.

I love Accelerationism (that's the name of the theory you're mentioning). My pet related theory is that we're essentially in an infinite time loop, witnessing our own inevitable birth (the simulation that we are) over and over again.

"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."

Nick Land, "Machinic Desire," 1993.

How much free time would we have now if the current gains from capitalism were evenly distributed (or any previous economic system)? What makes you think automation will be different?

[dead]

> Imagine the horror of the USSR, or Mao's China, or Jong Un having this technology.

The irony of this comment, while social media and AI are being weaponized right now in elections all over the world for political alignment with the MAGA kleptocracy.

Are there no negative aspects of capitalism (libertarianism) in your mind?

> Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?

Far left, far right. You say potato...

> At the end of the day, we'll always fear and distrust AI being owned by someone other than ourselves.

Maybe invent an AI that destroys other AI's?

> Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?

As opposed to the far right totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over OpenAI and Anthropic?

… before the downvote, just a reminder that by sidelining Congress after the first 60 days of war in Iran, he has literally become a dictator in the original sense of the world.

And if you say he doesn’t have commandership of AI companies, I have to point out that he effectively blackballed Anthropic by labeling them as a national security supply chain risk because he didn’t like the terms of a contract

Well, that's one way to post your first HN comment

Seeing as it is your first post, do elaborate on what really exists.

A "Christian" favoring transhumanism is legitimately fucking hilarious. Turns out the common element under all his beliefs are "me me me"