Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Looks Like Musk Rat Love

Mehumans and soon-to-be-uplifted Great Apes and Cetacea, rejoice! Randian archetype and scam artist Elon Musk has managed to keep the non-story about keeping the world safe from non-existing Robot Gods alive for yet one more day by promising to devote ten million dollars to "run a global research program aimed at keeping AI beneficial to humanity." Geez, how much money does it take to rent a room for a libertechbrotarian circle jerk, anyway? I do hope these men of Science! and also Ethics! didn't let Elon get away with paying in digital muskcoin. "AI leaders" (what on earth could that possibly mean?) declared the prospect of getting millions of dollars "wonderful" but added that they "deserve much more funding than even this donation will provide." So, keep that collection plate nice and full if you hope to get uploaded as cyberangels in Holodeck Heaven one day, Robot Cultists! "I love technology, because it's what's made 2015 better than the stone age", said MIT professor and Future of Life Institute president Max Tegmark, I guess because maybe he got drunk when he heard about the donation? (That's really a quote, and from his own press release, it's right there if you click the link.) With thought leadership like that at the helm, who can doubt acceleration will keep accelerating, but, you know, ethically and stuff, into The Future of Robots we all want because we're not robots?

4 comments:

jimf said...

> Geez, how much money does it take to rent a room for a
> libertechbrotarian circle jerk, anyway?

No doubt the MIRI research staff will soon be tooling around
Palo Alto in electric cars, having their circle jerks
a la Tesla.

(I suppose one can always hope that some of them might
volunteer to ride aboard a future SpaceX launch.
Oh, gee, I guess that wasn't a very nice thing to
say. ;-> )

Dale Carrico said...

If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit by me.

Anonymous said...

A scam, based on Roko's basilisk?

Dale Carrico said...

If it weren't for Peter Thiel Musk would be the exemplary celebrity-CEO skim-and-scam artist. Years ago I already described Musk and Thiel as the Koch Brothers of reactionary futurology. PayPal was his catapult, as it was for Thiel, he skimmed collective coding labor into personal billions, SpaceX scams rubes into treating LEO amusement park rides and the mining of generations-old NASA tech as an Ayn Raelian private space program pretending to incubate interplanetary diaspora, Tesla scoops government millions while crowing about libertopia to build luxury sportscars nobody can afford as a "solution" to climate catastrophe, proposes BS futurological cartoons like Hyperloop to undermine real mass transit in a dumb America looking for any excuse not to do anything real about destroying the only world we have to live in. Under plutocracy there is no such thing as earning a mega-fortune, and tech-ceos exacerbate this truism by an order of magnitude with the deceptions and hyperbole with which tech "disruption" and "acceleration" and "innovation" are peddled. One will find a facile futurological fallacy like Roko's Basilisk at the foundation of every single definitive Muskian endeavor, not just this latest idiotic robocalypse scenario.