YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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

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.

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.

"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"

    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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This isn't the best analogy, but it struck me the other night that "AI" feels like Jon Carpenter's "The Thing".

Especially the final scene where Childs and MacReady are trying to determine which (if any) of them is still human.

Also, early in the movie, MacReady loses to a computer chess program and pours whiskey into the computer, calling it a "cheating bitch."

Anyway, there are some parallels there.

And if LLM give us already what we need... why ask her for more complicated things? And so why would the AI improve or be improved?

You'd need to form some sort of a cult, and some sort of a space mini-town, and somehow reproduce food in space, and have some sort of renewable energy.

We haven't sent humans to even Mars yet. Rather than 'they would have visited if they exist, and since they haven't there's a great filter,' it's probably more that we just don't know what the limits are and there's no reason to think hard constraints like the speed of light can be addressed even in a million years.

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.

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.

Nick Land, "Machinic Desire," 1993.

> 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?

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.

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

The machines are operated by the labor forces, the real humans. However, the exponential compounding benefits of theses feedbacks loop us are mostly redirected to the ones owning the machines, the owner of the means of production.

Of course, the labor forces operating the machines/means of production benefits it, because they have either cheaper, or more goods. However they doesn't get this compounding effect.

AI is the god of the machines, the ultimate means of production. The amount of labor forces needed to operate it is very few. When the owner of capital invest a specific amount of money for their company, they get X amount of tokens, enabling them to work on Y amount of tasks. It's reward with low-risk.

The drift between capital owners and labor forces will become wider and wider. Until the labor forces doesn't have any more capacity of buying the goods produced. And then the system will implode.

Is the post-scarcity in the room with us right now? Right now, the only things that AI is making non-scarce for regular people is making cheap toys and doing menial tasks. But it doesn't put food on the table or cash in their pockets. So where is all this free value from automating everything going to go? The same place it always has, right to the very top.

I could understand seeing this argument 5 years ago. But now we are literally living in this partially automated world, and regular people are not doing any better. And, as the author showed in the article with direct quotes and receipts, it's not like they were ever going to do that anyway. Today, clinging onto the utopian view that maybe we're going to have all that value given back to us any second now is delusional.