Oh yay new features

Do you get more science or less if you use a baseball bat?

They'll kill you too, but ✨ 𝓰𝓮𝓷𝓽𝓵𝔂 ✨

October 26, 2016. They've just kept quiet about it.

You're the one that's gonna be in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

Food for thought, though: we thought the same thing about all other animals until only a couple of decades ago, and are still struggling over the topic.

We are still far away from genetically designing human babies.

Actually we're not, it's just illegal.

My takeaway from BNW was a warning against blindly embracing a society built only on good feelings and numbing anything that forces us to confront pain. The oppression was more or less a side effect of it.

Everyone in the upper classes were okay that lower classes were being oppressed because they all were just as happy thanks to Soma. The pain of the outsiders didn't mean anything because they "chose" to live like that.

Genetic engineering was just a plot device to explain how the classes were chosen.

I haven't read it in a while, but I kind of took the genetic engineering as a metaphor for being forced into the role/ class the ruling body wants you to be in

Then I advise reading the rest. You don't make profit if you don't solve a problem people have.

If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.

You kidding, right? Those stories have been dime a dozen since the late 90s at least.

24 warned us about having an evil, terrorist US president. As have done a few movies in the past. Streaming platforms were pretty much masturbating themselves over "Confederate US AU" script offerings as early as 2014. Not to mention the nowadays trite trodden trope of "Nazi US AU".

Heck, you don't even need fiction. Chile's cup in 1973 was paid for by the CIA as a social experiment to produce the rising and establishment of a dictatorship.

If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.

You don't need a sci-fi novel for that. History books are enough.

Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush.

No it isn't. Global connectivity is just putting a spotlight on the the fact that most people are and always have been fucking stupid and/or dangerously undereducated.

They named it Palantir! The thing that was awesome that everyone then had to stop using because someone ruined it for everyone else.

they kneeeeeeewwwwwwww!!!!!!!

We are communicating right now over a medium that those "cyberpunks" warned us about.

Are you telling me Star Wars isn't a cautionary tale about lightsabers?

But this is exactly contrary to my point, a science fiction author isn't qualified or motivated to give a realistic "understanding" of the Torment Nexus. His skillset is focused on writing stories and the stories he writes need to contain danger and conflict, so he's not necessarily going to interpret the idea of the Torment Nexus in a realistic way.

We have all of those things and the dystopic predictions of the authors who predicted them haven't come remotely true. All of these examples prove my point.

We have autonomous weaponized drones and they aren't running around massacring humanity like the Terminator depicted. Frankly, I'd trust them to obey the Geneva Conventions more thoroughly than human soldiers usually do.

We have had mass surveillance for decades, Snowden revealed that, and there's no totalitarian global state as depicted in 1984.

We've had nuclear weapons for almost 80 years now and they were only used in anger twice, at the very beginning of that. A good case can be made that nuclear weapons kept the world at large-scale peace for much of that period.

Various companies have made attempts at "Corporate controlled hypercommercialized microtransaction-filled metaverses" over the years and they have generally failed because nobody wanted them and freer alternatives exist. No need to ban anything.

Netflix's Squid Game is not a "real-life" Squid Game. Did you watch Squid Game? That was a private spectacle for the benefit of ultra-wealthy elites and people died in them. Deliberately and in large quantities. Netflix is just making a dumb TV show. Do you really think they'd benefit from massacring the contestants?

"MoviePass to track people’s eyes through their phone’s cameras to make sure they don’t look away from ads” - ok, let's see how long that lasts when there are competitors that don't do that.

"Soulless AI facsimile of dead relatives" - firstly, please show me a method for determining the presence or absence of a soul. Secondly, show me why these facsimiles are inherently "bad" somehow. People keep photographs of their dead loved ones, if that makes you uncomfortable then don't keep one.

Each and every one of these technologies were depicted in fiction over-the-top unrealistic ways that emphasized their bad aspects. In reality none of them have matched those depictions to any significant degree. That's my whole point here.

The current stuff is smoke and mirrors and not intelligent in any meaningful sense, but that doesn't mean it isn't dangerous. It doesn't have to be robots with guns to screw over people. Just imagine trying to get PharmaGPT to let you refill your meds, or having to deal with BankGPT trying to figure out why it transfered your rent payment twice. And companies are sure as hell thinking about using this stuff to get rid of human decisionmakers.

We thought we were getting Skynet but, instead we got Super Clippy and I Can't Believe It's Not Art Theft

Do you see any reason to think enough iterations of random nodes in a large enough network could result in emergent conscious intelligence?

Or are you more of a spiritualist than a materialist when it comes to the mind?

Well, yeah. If you can get a machine to do the job for you, then you should.