The AI cult/singularity bros is absolutely a bootlicking cult, if not licking the boots of the giant tech companies that have no intention of making the world better, then they’re licking the imaginary boots of some kind of AI-mommy that they predict will just “be invented” any day now, aaaannnny day, and that AI will make everyone wealthy.

Literally, they think an artificial super intelligence will help them pick stocks and invest and everyone will be rich. Don’t dare ask how, just believe it. Don’t ask what the several billion people are going to do who live subsistence lifestyles working land and manual labor to support our entire infrastructure. I guess they’ll also pick the right stocks and get rich and all the presidents and corporate leaders will just throw their hands in the air as their accumulated wealth becomes worthless overnight.

I am so tired of human ignorance and escapism. We gotta live in the now, and solve the problems we have right now, and stop finding creating ways to blame others so we don’t have to do the hard shit.

Can we also talk about how much everyone, everywhere relies on service industry workers and how much everyone would absolutely lose their goddamn minds if they had to make their own burgers and fries twice a week, AND how these staple institutions, jobs we deemed so important that we made people work at them during a pandemic, how much the prices of these sandwiches and snacks has gone up in the last few years, how even bringing up the possibility of increasing minimum wage for these difficult and demanding jobs leads to an entire social “discourse” and fierce debates about if people should be able to afford things.

And if you think your little 401k makes you a meaningful shareholder

“In this company we’re all like family, you don’t have to worry about anything.”

The more you think about it all, the less sense it makes. Congrats on discovering the tiny seed of free-will we all have inside us.

I don’t think any of this is even real to them. The same way that a majority of the white-nationalist 4-channers are just roleplaying and losing themselves in the storylines, as a species we tend to do that, we just get lost in a narrative because it explains how we feel.

The tankies are doing the same exact thing. They’re not impacting policy, they’re not marching for anything, they’re not taken seriously and it’s just another in-club that has its own language and imagery and secret handshakes and a unifying message to rally behind (America bad!) and instead of turning that criticism into actionable plans for changing representation and making anything better, they put on WW2 Russian Tanker helmets and have erotic fantasies about a communist uprising that will never happen.

Hasn’t been linked to reddit yet probably.

Getting away from reddit has shown me that there are unspoiled places in the digital world out there, communities of people who actually care about the topic and not performatism and internet attention.

I wish everyone was as aware of the response systems they have.

It also triggers in tech-bros the “I need to worship this shiny new thing like it’s literally a deity sent from heaven to grace all mankind” response.

Humans are so good at imagining things alive that just reading a story about Timmy the pencil is eliciting feelings of sympathy and reactions.

We are not good judges of things in general. Maybe one day these AI tools will actually help us and give us better perception and wisdom for dealing with the universe, but that end-goal is a lot further away than the tech-bros want to admit. We have decades of absolute slop and likely a few disasters to wade through.

And there’s going to be a LOT of people falling in love with super-advanced chat bots that don’t experience the world in any way.

I secured a major promotion at one point in my life using inkscape to create a business logo for the company I was climbing. I learned all about vector graphics and how they scale seamlessly, and loved it and gained a new appreciation for logo design in the pre-AI days. I did eventually make it to VP position in that company before the great economic collapse of '09 forced 80% layoffs.