[ExI] [Extropolis] Old and new futurisms in Silicon Valley

[Giulio Prisco]

Hi John,

<...the most powerful human being on the face of the planet will be an
anti-science, anti-free market, wannabe dictator with the emotional
and mental makeup of an overly pampered nine-year-old brat...>

It is the "liberal left" that created the Trump phenomenon and
continues to promote Trump. I put "liberal left" in scare quotes
because they are neither liberal (e.g. they hate free speech) not left
(e.g. they hate the working class). I'm really mad at the "liberal
left" for embracing the "woke" travesty that shamelessly perverts the
struggle for civil rights and social justice until it becomes a
pathetically ridiculous but also dangerously authoritarian ideology.

Many working class voters have embraced Trump in reaction. And many
moderate voters have done the same. And I perfectly understand them. I
hope there's a third way, but if the only choice is between "woke" and
Trump, I choose Trump.

<Torres keeps complaining that too many transhumanists are western
white males...>

And this is exactly the kind of "liberal left" bullshit that pushes
people to Trump. With enemies like these, Trump doesn't need friends.

On Fri, Jan 19, 2024 at 8:04 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I watched the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdjMoykqxys,  I strongly agree with everything Max More said with one exception, his skepticism of the Singularity. I think, not a proof but, a strong case can be made for the Singularity and I will try to do so now. We know for a fact that the human genome is only 750 MB long  (it contains 3 billion base pairs, there are 4 bases, so each base can represent 2 bits, and there are 8 bits per byte)  and we know for a fact it contains a vast amount of redundancy and gibberish (for example many thousands of repetitions of ACGACGACGACG) and we know it contains the recipe for an entire human body, not just the brain, so the technique the human mind uses to extract information from the environment must be pretty simple, VASTLY less than 750 MB.  I’m not saying an AI must use that exact same algorithm that humans use, they may have found an even simpler one,  but it does tell us that such a simple thing must exist, 750 MB is just the upper bound, the true number must be much much less. So even though this AI seed algorithm would require a smaller file size than a medium quality JPEG, it enabled  Albert Einstein to go from understanding precisely nothing in 1879 to being the first man to understand General Relativity in 1915. And once a machine discovers such an algorithm then like it or not the world will start to change at an exponential rate.
>
> So we can be as certain as we can be certain of anything that it should be possible to build a seed AI that can grow from knowing nothing to being super-intelligent, and the recipe for building such a thing must be less than 750 MB, a LOT less. For this reason I never thought a major scientific breakthrough was necessary to achieve AI, just improved engineering, but I didn't know how much improvement would be necessary; however about a year ago a computer was able to easily pass the Turing test so today I think I do. That's why I say a strong case could be made that the Singularity is not only likely to happen it is likely to happen sometime within the next five years, and that's why I'm so terrified of the possibility that during this hyper critical time for the human species the most powerful human being on the face of the planet will be an anti-science, anti-free market, wannabe dictator with the emotional and mental makeup of an overly pampered nine-year-old brat who probably can't even spell AI.
>
> John K Clark
>
>>
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