I like that you put a question mark at the end of "But the rate of change or rate of
change of change is acutely steeper and kicking us even further out of our natural
time-to-change scale?" Is it?
I've always felt like there's some kind of observation bias at work, here. First off, *what* is changing? If we think
"it" is changing faster, then what is it, the thing that's changing? My guess is that whatever "it" is, there
was something like it back in the day. And "it" was changing just as fast as "it" is changing today. Is
"it" changing faster now than during the Cambrian explosion? Or the Great Oxidation? Or the growth of the Mongol Empire?
Of course what we like looking at, do/must focus on, whatever that is, seems to
be changing faster. But I'm not convinced our lenses are at all objective.
Maybe it is true that after enzymes emerged, chemistry happens faster than before
enzymes. IDK; my chemistry is non-existent. And, similarly, after the internet, Sick
Memes happen faster, of which I'm equally ignorant. But without cordoning off the
"it", I'm worried we're talking nonsense.
On 9/11/26 12:41 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
glen wrote:
Definitely. Maybe I've been too deep in the vibe to notice. But the recent surge in X-Risk news caught me by surprise. The reactionary tone is eerily similar to that of the Tea Party. The rhetoric against open models is understandable. The oligarchs want to ensure they're the ones in charge on the other side of the veil. (I doubt they will be.)
From Doctorow's Craphound page - an excellent bit of ironic sendup of the
Billionaire Bunker Bros - Highly recommend:
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/the-masque-of-the-red-death/
/My novella “The Masque of the Red Death
<https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250242334>” is a tribute to Poe; it’s from
my book Radicalized. It’s the story of a plute who brings his pals to his luxury
bunker during civlizational collapse in the expectation of emerging once others have
rebuilt./
But the refusal and fear that keeps the reactionaries from classifying the
current tech alongside the prior tech is just lazy and stupid. And I say this
knowing that I'm already too old to keep up. As slow, old, and unoptimized as I
am, I still won't really toss up my hands and lobby for or accede to the Ban
Artificial Superintelligence Act. And if it does pass, I'll work on my own tiny
leaf node or tunnel to work remotely at a more reasonable place until they
kidnap me and send me to CECOT ... I guess.
I was a strong supporter of the idea that "we've been here before" whether it
was early Luddite throwing their wooden shoes in the gears of the machines or my
Grandfathers born before Airplanes, Autos, Wireless, Telephone, Recorded Music, Radio, TV
but experiencing all of the above well before their old age as well as watching hundreds
of space launches and a stroll or two on the moon in their lifetimes.
One of them started journaling in 1918 as a 20 year old. He was in France
carrying dead and (more often) wounded or ill for the Hospital Corps while
being mindful of mines and other latent ordnance, and trying to understand what
the hell just happened or was happening or about to happen. He continued to
journal (yet more consistently) through his life, including comparing the
Automobile Deaths in KY to the reported Deaths (US soldiers) in Vietnam in the
60s. His last car had an AM/FM/Cassette player, air conditioning and a top
speed of over 100mph. I think he never flew on an airplane.
He wasn't one to *reflect* much on the meaning of all such, but he did enjoy
reporting interesting factoids in juxtaposition. One journal was one-line per
day for roughly 50 years. He had others.
Was all that *less* consequential than my being born between the failed Sputnik
launch and the Successful one and watching (the same ) men walk on the moon
before I hit puberty, then going to college with a sliderule and a minor skill
at long division in my head while others showed up with (very expensive) first
generation scientific calculators? Or Hubbell and Webb and Space Shuttles and
ISS and EVs and cordless phones unto cellular unto handheld do-everything
mobile devices, and room-sized to rack sized to desktop to laptop computers and
(psuedo) Self Driving autos? And AI of the 60s which kept wintering over (and
over) until it exploded this decade on the heels of a global Pandemic as acute
and broad as the one in 1918 that took my Grandfather's *first* wife?
But the rate of change or rate of change of change is acutely steeper and
kicking us even further out of our natural time-to-change scale? We *can* wait
for change at the.pace of the Obituary Page (anybody seen McConnell lately) but
moves a *lot* slower than AI model progression and the fucund application
thereof...
my grandparents were likely the first of their line to actually learn to read
and write (public school in the US emerging after their parents were born)...
I was typing at 14, writing code at 16 and now at near 70 I'm hobknobbing with
some amazingly clever and prolific psuedo-intelligences on a daily basis. And
of course, youse guys here too.
Running off a cliff following Coyote/Roadrunner Physics? Just don't look down
(or up?)
--
8647 ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.
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