ray kurzweil's 'the singularity is near' & any other technological singularity-related books you might care about

Read the other day that Kurzweil is moving to Google - a sign of end-times convergence?

ht forks

http://www.kurzweilai.net/what-our-civilization-needs-is-a-billion-year-plan

287,000,000 years from now:

"I'm very sorry sir, but you can't do that. It isn't mentioned in the plan our ancestors wrote 287,000,000 years ago."

i like the images in that article. didn't read the words.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/TemperatureOfSun.png

!!

body temperature will apparently be about 60 Celsius in 360 years' time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_of_the_sequence_1_to_10_and_their_logs_to_the_base_10.png

:/ well, imagine that image is showing how log scales work

He may as well have suggested that we put a penny into a savings account today at 3% interest so we'd have a gazillion dollars to spend in a couple thousand years, thereby solving everythng.

1.03 ^ 2000

4.7E+25. wow, i think you're onto something there...

oh, wait, minus 20% tax.

money, what could possibly go wrong?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/10/futurist_magazine_s_predictions_on_quantum_computing_big_data_and_more.html

heh, still reading through this but:

The question that seems never to come up when discussing population forecasts is: Why does population grow in some places and decline in others?

that's...actually probably the most common question that always comes up when discussing popular forecasts

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/12/comics-vs-cases.html

http://io9.com/what-will-life-be-like-when-digital-brains-outnumber-hu-1529764158

hanson strikes me as a really dumb smart person

he of the crystalline logic of "all claims of inequality are expressions of envy" and "all rules against sexual harassment are a status game of imposing class standards on the poor"

he's clearly a very brilliant + creative thinker who is wrong about everything he thinks - but i'd much prefer that to some dumb slob who is dogmatically "otm" about everything

i prefer dumb slobs who are somehow otm

otm is just CW for a niche audience

I hate these people. surrounded by them in the tech industry hub that I live in but ugh

what's cw when it's at home?

cw is aka conventional wisdom to its homies

ta, I might have higher standards of otm than mordy

i'm a descriptivist

http://riseofthecommonwoodpile.tumblr.com/post/77928533367/the-idea-of-the-technological-singularity-is-late

the idea of the technological singularity is late capitalism’s most brilliant move because it plays off any criticism of capitalism’s use of technology to disenfranchise and oppress by basically saying that technology under late capitalism just hasn’t progressed enough so we need to double down on it to save ourselves

it’s like if someone was stabbing you and you said “stop stabbing me” so they came up with this bullshit idea that said if you just get stabbed enough, all your stab wounds will be miraculously healed so the solution is actually to increase the size of the knife and the rate of stabbing

it’s a thing of beauty really

tbf that's the argument of marxism too - that technology under late capitalism hasn't progressed enough

http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html

u know that dude is king of the "neoreactionaries," right?

i'm not really familiar w/ "neoreactionaries" but i think the urbit stuff is very clear. not sure if it's explicitly ideologically complicit, but it surely doesn't need to be exclusively so?

very cool, not clear*

the urbit stuff is nonsense. this is a professional expert opinion.

it is carefully constructed, internally consistent, nonsense.

a physicist receives pages of scrawled calculations from a kook. they're on vacation and read the pages, for kicks. the pages contain formulae which make sense. but the formulae don't describe anything, they just aren't mathematically false. tile patterns in ancient mosques are mentioned, and formulae given for them. these are valid formulae, and pretty drawings of tiles. chaos is mentioned, and the mandelbrot formula is also given correctly, two ways. but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. the physicist shakes his head and thinks "this kook, under other circumstances, could maybe have been an engineer, or even a physicist. they can see elements of beauty, and they can perform some of the procedures that physicists perform correctly. but they cannot understand the purpose in what we do."

that is urbit.

feel like that could apply to chunks of his mencius moldbug stuff as well.

lol sterl

'Haskell fans' <--- battle of the interested parties!!

obviously we need to encourage impartial grant funding and science journalism about this disagreement so that unfettered exploration can lead to the truth

oh, wow

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/

http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-review-of-her-by-ray-kurzweil

do we have a thread for dark enlightenment stuff or is this the one?

http://thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/mouthbreathing_machiavellis

ha i just posted that to the right wingery thread

i've been posting about these guys for years!

imo these guys are beyond right wingery. they're like 25% really interesting, legitimately controversial ideas and then like 75% capital worship, racist, legit insanity. but that 25%... (reweigh those percentages as u see fit...)

lol i just realized that they remind me a little of zizek

they'd be thrilled to hear it

maybe i'll start a dark enlightenment thread on 77 so that if i ever do compliment their work they won't have the potential enjoyment of reading it

25% really interesting, legitimately controversial ideas

i'm curious what you're thinking of here

i have a taste for extremity and subcultures with their own lingo, so i find some of this stuff grimly fascinating if not compulsively readable. but it's 100% nasty rage, really

tbh i've only read very little so far so i'd want some more time before trying to make a complete case. what immediately resonated for me tho was a kind of challenging of democracy from this kinda pov of its inherent weakness and inability to adequately represent its own voters' interests. it reminded me of zizek's idea that dictatorships can be more responsive to popular needs than democracy bc democracy has this inherent steam valve in elections where ppl get to feel like they're changing things so nothing has to change. dictators can't be voted out so if they don't respond to popular needs they will be facing a violent challenge to their rule. obv this isn't an idea that i wholeheartedly embrace (it sounded a lot better pre-civil war Syria when you had these notable examples of dictators failing to respond to the needs of their people and immediately collapsing, and also i think we've seen in iran + turkey country that ostensibly have this zizekian steam valve in elections but there is still a threat of revolution). but i do think there are weaknesses in democracy that this kind of thinking intelligently gets at - and it's kinda a shock. also i like the sci-fi futurism elements too, which is why i posted the link here - bc for me it crosses over w/ singularity thinking + these utopian/dystopian technological futures that i find very compelling.

well, keep reading i guess

their problem with democracy is the opposite of zizek's problem with it, i'll say

I keep bumping into the dark enlightenment crowd while reading around the place lately – they seem to snap into place with that Houllebecq, Ligotti, Lovecraft literary anti-humanist thing, Nick Land's name seems in the air again lately, & there's sort of overlap too with Nick Bostrom & The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford (via… lesswrong I think - Eliezer Yudkowsky contributes a couple of chapters here.

Aesthetically, I can get parts of it (the pessimistic bits, at least), there's a monstrous uncaring mathematical universe thing there that's always good for a cheap frisson; intellectually, i got the impression that even their purported masterminds are a bit thin on the Enlightenment and 17th/18th century (but I should read more – not now, because I am at work, but I do mean to get to it); practically, it's angry ageing white men. Fuck em.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/magazine/can-the-nervous-system-be-hacked.html