Posted by smilelamp 2 hours ago
Now we are told explaining, understanding things, asking new questions is more important than proving things. So where is the math community medals/awards for this job?
The climate effect argument against AI is so intellectually dishonest. It’s the same as saying that Tao is on the side of stopping the advancement of Cancer research.
I thought the people clowning him were dumb, but the people arguing for either side are really fighting on a mud pit.
Very much worth noting for those about to read this! haha I got a couple of paragraphs in and shook my head.
The luddites and doomers should do the world a favor and go establish a commune in rural Alaska, then they can be happy and the rest of us can get back to building and playing with amazing technology!
The luddites were rational.
Telling people to fuck off and go away when they were here first is hideous. You should be humiliated. You should feel unwelcome.
The luddites were not rational.
Telling people they should be humiliated and that they should feel unwelcome is hideous.
I didn't tell people to fuck off. I told them to go do what they want to do and we'll do what we want to do. That's called a win/win.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/12/politics/data-center-backlash...
Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Is it collective mental illness? Economic hysteria? A cult of virtual personality?
It's simultaneously irrational, obsessive, ecologically and politically catastrophic, and all-consuming - none of which are good things.
Datacenters in space are visionary -- they are maximally energy rate dense and they expand the area of energy absorption. Might be 100 years too early but that is where we are headed, after we turn all of the available biosphere of earth into computronium, that is.
The only superior technology left would be von Neumann probes.
> Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Money. Capitalism. It's all a fucking grift. Always has been.
If you thought AI was going to usher in a post scarcity golden age of infinite wealth where all disease, hunger, want and inequality are solved and everyone gets to live their lives purely for pleasure and intellectual pursuit, where the Eschaton is in their Heaven and all is right in the world, and humanity spreads out amongst the stars as beings of transcendent posthuman machine intellect or some shit you read in a sci-fi book then congratulations, you're the mark.
if I had guaranteed access to housing, healthcare, and food I'd stop immediately
right now my contract is more or less "we'll keep paying you if you continue providing us with the arbitrary value we require" which is certainly more difficult to reckon with