Apr 30, 2022·edited Apr 30, 2022Liked by John Carter
"Ringwraiths of Washington" The Nazgûl darkness! I like the image a lot.
I think you are on the money about Musk - big borg future ahead - don't trust his motivations at all - but as you say - good guy or black hat? Don't know. Probably doesn't matter as the tech and the control is coming upon us regardless.
Also you touched on something I feel is important as well but of course no one says it out loud for fear of being labeled a religious nut case, and that's "there are powers and principalities active in this world for whom this level of neurospiritual tyranny is a wet dream." Lots to be said in this space.
Came across your Substack via comments on The Good Citizen. Thought I would check it out. Good article on Musk and technocracy. I have followed Patrick Wood on technocracy for several years. Will be linking your article today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
Besides anyone that goes by the handle of John Carter and postcards from Barsoom can't be all bad. Always liked the John Carter and Tarzan stories when I was younger. The Frazetta art is perfect as well!!!!
It’s impossible to tell anything about musk. I love that he trolls the left. I’m not crazy about the world being taken over by technology that can be used to limit our geographic range (electric cars). Musk once said he thought human language would go extinct in 5-10 years with the aid of AI. Bizarre and implausible, I think. I’m fairly conspiratorial about these types. I’ve written about him a number of times on my substack.
I can safely say that if all our overlords (Schwab, Gates, Zuckerberg et al) are as intelligent as Musk, then we have nothing at all to fear. fElon is a huge fraud and buffoon. Just spend some time looking at $TSLAQ posts on Twitter, and you'll see the real Elon. It's all out there for everyone to see.
I find Elon's enthusiasm for 'AI' alittle alarming, as he's obviously a believer that such technology can become 'sentient' at some point, a claim that a former Google employee has already echoed.
The way I see 'sentient' AI becoming a reality, is either through 'transhumanism' or disembodied spirits - demons, interacting with such creations, thus giving the impression of organic sentience, when in reality, it will be more of a duality.
True 'sentience' can only come from God, through the spirit.
In terms of whether Elon is a white hat or black hat, I've always had a very uneasy feeling about him, a loose canon, who has recently began to talk out of both sides of his mouth.
I think we have a little less to fear from neural interfaces than many think, or at least a longer horizon before “oh gods what have we done?” The reason is that the interfaces that have been made up till recently (a few years since I last was reading that lit) work at one remove at least from our brain’s base function. In other words, our brain does something that is interpreted to mean X, but what or why our brain did it might be X’ or Y, and the machine can’t put X in the other direction.
By analogy, the dog here next to me kind of gets what I tell it. Molly doesn’t really understand words put together. when I say “pee” she hops up and goes to the door. Of course she does that whether I mean “let’s go out and empty your bladder” or “small round veggie thing that goes well with carrot.” Context is irrelevant, but since I don’t eat legumes she is right well enough. Yet she can’t talk beyond basic doggy noises and body language. We interface, but poorly, and much better in one direction than the other.
Back to machine human wetware interfaces. We hook a lot of electrical sensors to a person’s nerves, the say “think about reaching over with your robot arm and getting that juice” and then after many hours of trial and error the brain stumbles across the combination that stimulates the sensors to tell the arm to do that. Great, but the arm isn’t understanding what happened inside the brain, but rather the brain figured out how to make the arm react. It need not be the same brain process to produce that output each time, and different brains might do it differently in any case. Figuring out the internal mode from the external signal is nigh on impossible.
Going the other direction, if you can’t reverse engineer how all brains work to store ideas and memories very exactly, putting ideas into a head requires a lot of trial and error testing to figure out how the specific brain set up works. Hours and hours with a machine learning AI seeing what happens if you zap this spot, and what if you try it later after this one... I expect the human isn’t going to survive that as anything remotely recognizable as sane.
So long story short, you can do a one way human to machine control interface comparatively easily, in fact we have basic ones already. You just need to be paralyzed or missing limbs for them to be worth learning to use. Machine to human input/control interface is likely obscenely difficult to do directly, unless it turns out that our brain chemistry and wiring is actually a lot more standard that it seems such that we don’t need to be the subject of years of stimulus response AI testing to figure out how to get a specific response in our brain. Which, incidentally, would also require having learned what the specific output response in our brains mean as well. In effect, you almost have to learn to read minds before you can learn to read minds.
Much easier to just in a pain chip to zap you when you do something the surveillance system automatically detects as wrong think. So... good?
"Ringwraiths of Washington" The Nazgûl darkness! I like the image a lot.
I think you are on the money about Musk - big borg future ahead - don't trust his motivations at all - but as you say - good guy or black hat? Don't know. Probably doesn't matter as the tech and the control is coming upon us regardless.
Also you touched on something I feel is important as well but of course no one says it out loud for fear of being labeled a religious nut case, and that's "there are powers and principalities active in this world for whom this level of neurospiritual tyranny is a wet dream." Lots to be said in this space.
Came across your Substack via comments on The Good Citizen. Thought I would check it out. Good article on Musk and technocracy. I have followed Patrick Wood on technocracy for several years. Will be linking your article today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
Besides anyone that goes by the handle of John Carter and postcards from Barsoom can't be all bad. Always liked the John Carter and Tarzan stories when I was younger. The Frazetta art is perfect as well!!!!
Sharing the feelings and being a drop in an ocean makes me remember the Gaia planet from the foundation series of Asimov!
Enjoyable read. :)
It’s impossible to tell anything about musk. I love that he trolls the left. I’m not crazy about the world being taken over by technology that can be used to limit our geographic range (electric cars). Musk once said he thought human language would go extinct in 5-10 years with the aid of AI. Bizarre and implausible, I think. I’m fairly conspiratorial about these types. I’ve written about him a number of times on my substack.
For now I’m greatly enjoying his pithy tweets. 😁
I can safely say that if all our overlords (Schwab, Gates, Zuckerberg et al) are as intelligent as Musk, then we have nothing at all to fear. fElon is a huge fraud and buffoon. Just spend some time looking at $TSLAQ posts on Twitter, and you'll see the real Elon. It's all out there for everyone to see.
I find Elon's enthusiasm for 'AI' alittle alarming, as he's obviously a believer that such technology can become 'sentient' at some point, a claim that a former Google employee has already echoed.
The way I see 'sentient' AI becoming a reality, is either through 'transhumanism' or disembodied spirits - demons, interacting with such creations, thus giving the impression of organic sentience, when in reality, it will be more of a duality.
True 'sentience' can only come from God, through the spirit.
In terms of whether Elon is a white hat or black hat, I've always had a very uneasy feeling about him, a loose canon, who has recently began to talk out of both sides of his mouth.
God Bless xxx
I think we have a little less to fear from neural interfaces than many think, or at least a longer horizon before “oh gods what have we done?” The reason is that the interfaces that have been made up till recently (a few years since I last was reading that lit) work at one remove at least from our brain’s base function. In other words, our brain does something that is interpreted to mean X, but what or why our brain did it might be X’ or Y, and the machine can’t put X in the other direction.
By analogy, the dog here next to me kind of gets what I tell it. Molly doesn’t really understand words put together. when I say “pee” she hops up and goes to the door. Of course she does that whether I mean “let’s go out and empty your bladder” or “small round veggie thing that goes well with carrot.” Context is irrelevant, but since I don’t eat legumes she is right well enough. Yet she can’t talk beyond basic doggy noises and body language. We interface, but poorly, and much better in one direction than the other.
Back to machine human wetware interfaces. We hook a lot of electrical sensors to a person’s nerves, the say “think about reaching over with your robot arm and getting that juice” and then after many hours of trial and error the brain stumbles across the combination that stimulates the sensors to tell the arm to do that. Great, but the arm isn’t understanding what happened inside the brain, but rather the brain figured out how to make the arm react. It need not be the same brain process to produce that output each time, and different brains might do it differently in any case. Figuring out the internal mode from the external signal is nigh on impossible.
Going the other direction, if you can’t reverse engineer how all brains work to store ideas and memories very exactly, putting ideas into a head requires a lot of trial and error testing to figure out how the specific brain set up works. Hours and hours with a machine learning AI seeing what happens if you zap this spot, and what if you try it later after this one... I expect the human isn’t going to survive that as anything remotely recognizable as sane.
So long story short, you can do a one way human to machine control interface comparatively easily, in fact we have basic ones already. You just need to be paralyzed or missing limbs for them to be worth learning to use. Machine to human input/control interface is likely obscenely difficult to do directly, unless it turns out that our brain chemistry and wiring is actually a lot more standard that it seems such that we don’t need to be the subject of years of stimulus response AI testing to figure out how to get a specific response in our brain. Which, incidentally, would also require having learned what the specific output response in our brains mean as well. In effect, you almost have to learn to read minds before you can learn to read minds.
Much easier to just in a pain chip to zap you when you do something the surveillance system automatically detects as wrong think. So... good?
Love the blog, thanks for so much great content!
We cannot be neutral about neutralink!