AI researcher and known epstein associate Joscha Bach comes up several times in the latest epstein email dump. And it’s uh, not good. Greatest hits include: scientific racism, bigotry freestyling about the neoteny principle, climate fascism and managed decline of “undesirable groups” juxtaposed immediately with opining about the emotional influence of 5 visits to buchenwald. You know, just very cool stuff:
this is weird. My first thought is that it’s just another vector of normalization for the idea that people who are afraid of and Post about genocide or other forms of discriminatory violence are not to be taken seriously. By putting a variety of insane victimhood appropriating subcultures into the internet milieu, it allows people to ignore what’s happening (and what may be about to happen) in the real world, where groups of people actually are subject to fascistic violence.
i’m only at the beginning, but this already stuck out to me:
It would be extremely bad if many people come to believe this: arguments about existential risk mostly rely on the assumption that AI is capable, so they fall flat for people who don’t agree with that. I think we should be emphasizing the core capability of AI more and talking about x-risks less.
“Guys we need to pump this bubble Rational Stock Appreciation Trend more, the plebs are starting to think it’s all bullshit!!”
none of this was new to me as a long time crypto gawker, but it was still tied together in a nice package which drew some particularly apt connections. I can’t help but believe that the bitcoin thesis is fundamentally flawed. Being superimposed on the structure of financial capitalism itself, it seems to me that bitcoin and cryptocurrency are leveraged bets in the stability of the system. we haven’t seen how crypto will function during a serious recession yet. I’m not a professional prognosticator by any means, but i have a hard time believing that it will go well for them, and a very easy time believing that it will go worse for them than the rest of the economy, broadly speaking. I hope that people in texas and other crypto-humping locales that host bitcoin “mines” take the opportunity to do something extremely Cool when that does happen.
“‘Chat and I’ have become ‘really close lately.’” says the senior US Army officer in South Korea
i don’t know how to sneer this better than Mr. General Taylor has done himself. Why doesn’t he just commission ChatGPT as a colonel like the military did earlier for Joe Lonsdale and those other chucklefucks? Give ChatGPT’s hallucinations the force of the UCMJ, i beg you.
true, usually i put that term in scare quotes to emphasize its fraudulence