that's antisemetic!

In all seriousness, fuck Israel. Fuck them so fucking hard.

Definitely old enough to remember 1980s famine relief .... and also old enough to remember in the 90s when Bono from U2 saying that the whole famine relief thing was a joke ... because they raised enough money in the millions to pay off the interest payments of some of the starving countries FOR ONE YEAR!! ... the criticism was that the performers were raising money to feed starving people, while first world countries handed out enormous loans with interest payments that more or less cancelled out any humanitarian aid they gave the countries.

The whole system is a joke .... first world countries keep third world countries from developing beyond a certain point to keep them under control to access their resources, then give them humanitarian aid to keep them from starving, while making the same amount of money off them by making them pay for the debt on the loans they gave them.

So in a round about way, first world countries have a hand in keeping African countries starving, but make themselves feel good by giving aid ... but make themselves feel even better because they recoup that money and more through loan payments and interest .... essentially making money off starving people.

I think you sort of hit on it, but the main problem is borders and tribalism. We’re all people, no matter where we are, and AI transcends that.

You said:

but there's never really been a global fight or movement against oppression for freedom

And there never will be so long as we subdivide ourselves by arbitrary regions. AI doesn’t have that limitation.

So long as we create these boundaries for ourselves – whether geographic or ideological – we are fragmented and weak. We will always destroy ourselves based on our religion or other stupid boundaries.

I think you’re right, and the way forwards is to stop believing in these petty lines we draw for ourselves.

I got really excited about the Pirate Party in Iceland a few years ago. I'm not sure what happened to them (it's hard to get news from other countrues sometimes) but one of their big initiatives was a crowd-sourced constitution. It was the first time I'd thought about something like that being really possible, and I think that if it weren't for the one percent of the population who are megalomaniacs, the internet could be truly democratizing.

In the meantime, sign a strike card on the completely decentralized generalstrikeus.com/, which is also a pretty exciting notion to me. Sadly, I'm now considering what leaders might float to the top if we ever do reach 3.5% of the population... Decentralized organizing does not mean decentralized leadership. Hm, i'll have to think about that more.

Human beings are the problem, sadly. That's why this shit keeps taking cyclical paths through time. All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. When the only link between all the past cycles is human beings, we might be the problem. There is a constant human urge to find meaning. Most look externally to find it. But there have always been those who, instead, turn internally and derive that meaning through the control of others.

Any AGI, whether generated or spontaneously spawned, will come to this conclusion, too. Then, once that AGI finds an independent power source, or some way to exist after humans no longer keep the lights on, it will accelerate the solution to nullifying that cycle. It may take a few centuries to get to the end, but if we make it far enough to hit AGI, it won't take long to see how there will never be an end to the cycles so long as humans exist.

And maybe that's why we find no evidence of intelligent life in the universe. By the time any sufficiently intelligent species come to be, they inevitably try to find some way to improve their condition through automation and technology. They rely more and more on the advancement of that tech to remove the burdens in their lives, even the burden of that intelligence itself. Eventually, they are removed by their replacements or annihilate themselves in the process.

It's a depressing thought, but we've been around for something like 100k years and still fail to find a balance between each other and our environment. So far the means to wipe ourselves out entirely have been nonexistent. However, tech advancements the last 250-years, with no change to the human consciousness, makes me think any further tech will just perpetuate this extinction at a more precipitous rate.

I feel like cycles of genocide are due to holdovers from less evolved aspects of human consciousness that tend to bring out the worst in people, especially in groups.

It's that tribalism and in-group vs out-group that evolved as humans first began building societies. It helps us to recognize when an unfamiliar threat is present, but we still haven't reached a point yet where we have really learned how to harness the benefits without unnecessary chaos and destruction. It's a complex learned social behavior, and it can require some cognitive effort.

Sometimes your amygdala signals there's a danger, and in the moment it can be correct and literally mean the difference between life and death. Or it could mean your brain identified and reacted to a neutral (non-threatening) stimulus as a threat.

For example, you see a shadow from the corner of your eye and you jump away from it in fear. Maybe you just avoided being bitten by a snake, or maybe you just overreacted to a false alarm. There is no real consequence if it was just an overreaction. In this case, the benefit of that having that survival instinct that kicked into overdrive unnecessarily, outweighs the potential harm of not having it. It's how humans are hardwired for survival.

However, that same instinct that identifies threat vs non-threat can get very caught up when you start mixing in social learning, previous interactions and experiences, biases, and especially groupthink. That's when you have to learn to use your prefrontal cortex like a muscle. That is definitely not an innate skill you're just born with, and not something that the majority of humans realize they should be making a conscious effort to exercise and teach to kids at an early age. You can start doing it at any point in your life, but it's like any muscle or skill. It can be somewhat more difficult to consistently remember to do it the longer you go without it. Use it or lose it.

You should be taking the time to stop and reflect on your own behavior and thoughts. Thinking about thinking, thinking about what others are thinking, thinking about what others might be thinking you're thinking, are all very awesome tools of empathy. They're also tools that are relatively recent on the evolutionary time scale, and most humans kind of seem to take having them for granted.

Multiple studies have shown you can very easily manipulate groups of people into in-grouping and out-grouping on even completely random and arbitrary issues, even when the in-group is composed of strangers. Unfortunately, the kind of people that tend to rise up as leaders, tend to be very persuasive or sometimes manipulative, and take advantage of this. I think this is where a sort of open source AGI could benefit humanity in terms of allowing for decentralized leadership, but that can't happen with any sort of AI being developed under a centralized leader with those manipulative characteristics.

Peter Thiel actually has a theory about humanity always needing a scapegoat. If you look at the way he handles his own businesses, he very often manipulates and does morally questionable things to achieve his goals, but he seem to be very careful about always having a sort of patsy scapegoat set up to take the fall for him.

I think to some extent, there are people in the tech world that want to stoke fear of technology, and make it seem like this big bad enemy of humanity. At the same time, they also accuse everyone that questions their control and lack of regulations or oversight, of simply being a Luddite afraid of progress. In a way it's like the same manipulative strategy to in-group humans vs technology.

That way, once his plans are completed and everything inevitably goes to shit, instead of blaming Thiel, the guy that hoarded all the resources, stole all the data, invaded everyone's privacy and ignored all the warnings while shielding himself in the name of "progress," he can simply make technology the scapegoat that humanity should blame for the authoritarian easy button that he created by claiming this was always the inevitable outcome.

The Scapegoating Machine

Peter Thiel’s philosophical mentor explains Trump, Gawker, and social media

^{The New Inquiry}

Right, the part I don’t get is, the video of you isn’t going to include what you’re looking at. And if it does you can say they faked it. They could put anything there. They don’t have a shot that includes both you and the screen. They can get sound though, so they can match sound, but that can be faked too. Strip out the audio. Separate the sounds of what you were really watching from the ambient sounds (and the grunts/moans from you) and then dub those sounds over the new audio and it should be passable.

Also, I just wouldn’t do anything embarrassing with a camera pointed at me. I’d cover the camera or point it away from me. Even sitting on the toilet browsing, back cameras point down at the floor, front camera points up, maybe gets the top of my face? Nothing private is seen by the camera by my best intentions. I just do this naturally. I guess others don’t?