We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus

> Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?

> It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map.

That is so true. I actually met someone who seriously wished to do what he could to make reality like a cyberpunk novel, completely oblivious to the fact that the books are dystopias.

Tech people can be really, really, really dumb sometimes. That idiocy can go completely unchecked because they frequently arrogantly believe their type is smarter than everyone else.

I get the idea that some ideas are better not realized. I get one may not like people, or business models. But shitting on SpaceX and NuSpace in general, or most recently, on LLMs? That's plain ridiculous. Reminds me of a Douglas Adams quote about things invented after one's 35.

Such a sad, depressing outlook in times where we need to look forward, rekindle hope, have some dreams. And I don't mean we should ignore current problems - just that it's hard to solve anything when people have no hope and succumb to crabs-in-bucket mentality. And assigning blame to random convenient targets, particularly any one that dare to present a positive outlook (justified or not) is definitely not helping solve anything. It's just reinforcing the fucking depressing mess of a zeitgeist we have today.

Given sci-fi authors regularly speculate about all sorts of potential futures (and presents), is it really that hard to imagine that some of these futures might come true in some shape or form? It's really rich to trace modern implementations to decades-old ideas and then claim you were the one to create them. Get to pat oneself on the back while wagging a finger at the folks actually doing the building. Zuck's Metaverse would've likely existed without Snow Crash, though probably with a different name. And Motorola Razr would have likely existed without Star Trek communicators. I am not saying that all modern innovations are good ones or that some inspiration didn't take place, I just find the argument that their existence is entirely rooted in science fiction a weak one and full of survivorship bias.

I really can't take him seriously after that remark. No, language models are of course artificial intelligence, they are systems so impressive that they were considered decades away before GPT-3 released a few years ago, or, to most, even before ChatGPT, just one year ago. They of course aren't precisely the classical SciFi intelligence that Stross and his colleagues had in mind in the past decades, but that speaks against them, not against the status of language models as AI.

By the way, a better SF writer, Stanisław Lem, did predict something similar to language models: Systems that would read novels of one author and then produce similar novels as output. Basically an LM without fine-tuning.

What Stross does is the classic goal-post moving, where anything more narrow than human intelligence is ultimately dismissed as not real AI. As an added bonus, he lampoons concerns about such "real" AI scaling to superintelligence as being totally speculative. Basically, either it's not real or it's just irresponsible speculation, simple, case closed!

Hopefully the new Dune films will maintain its political leanings so a new generation will be able to 'prove' the rationality of feudalism and the radical efficiency of military sapphism.

I don't think it does. Imagine a pandemic without the comms and tech invented in the last 15 years.

Of course wearing a suit and being having a life in order aren't strictly casually related. But the much weaker claim that they are positively correlated is one I'd be surprised to see disproved.

Similarly, I find it hard to imagine someone who is T, E, S, C, R, and EA, but not L. They're out there, but all 7 ideas co-occur so often that they're an outlier among people who identify with, say, at least 4 of the 7 terms. There are many more such people who are straightforwardly all 7/7 than there are 6/7, even if there are six times as many ways to be 6/7 on TESCREAL.

Framed this way it makes the fact that the Big Five genuinely don't appear very correlated to one another very impressive.

(I'm not sure I fall under any of the 7 anymore, go figure. Maybe I'll come back one day. Credit where credit is due: The Russian Cosmist imperative to not just make everyone alive immortal, but resurrect everyone that ever died stirs my soul in a way few things have.)

Be careful of non-approved thinking!

Also strange is how caring about the future is dastardly 'longtermism', but caring enough about this generation to work on longevity is 'insane'. Really the only acceptable goals are averting climate catastrophe (presumably by stopping oil and gas consumption) and helping the global poor. It would be interesting to know whether the author thinks the global poor should be prevented from using fossil fuels to better their immediate economic situation at the expense of our long-term climate.

He might not agree with O'Neill's ideas on space colonization but it does not seem to be a fair to paint them in the same brush as his metaphorical Torment Nexus.

Tangent: what does an airplane's autopilot do? I always assumed it was basically doing lane-keeping within virtual flight-path lanes we've drawn in the sky. (Like the virtual 3D traffic grid above cities in depictions of cities with flying cars, but spread across the Atlantic.)

> Finally, I haven't really described Rationalism. It's a rather weird internet mediated cult that has congealed around philosopher of AI Eliezer Yudkowski over the past decade or so. Yudkowski has taken on board the idea of the AI Singularity—that we will achieve human-equivalent intelligence in a can, [...] and terrified himself with visions of paperclip maximizers, AIs programmed to turn the entire universe into paperclips [...] with maximum efficiency.

Here's your shipment of cheap strawmen, where do you want them delivered?

Yes we are the sum of our influences, good, bad and inbetween.

How could we not be?

But so what? Are we expecting people to not be influenced by the ideas of the past?

Could somebody help me with this? I'd like to understand it.

Yes and no. I've read perfectly good manuscripts (because their authors did put a lot of work on them) before they went through the pipe of traditional publishing. And then I re-read them at the other end. They weren't any better, just shorter and more mainstream. Also, they didn't sell well at all, no matter how trad-published they were, because, guess what, neither the author nor the trad-publisher were very good at marketing in this day and age :/ .

While I think Stross is right on the money with this article, I would hope that the 'like' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here; last thing we need is some idiot billionaire summoning demons (as was, indeed, basically the plot of at least one Laundry Files book...)

> And no tour of the idiocracy is complete without mentioning Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire CEO of Facebook, who blew through ten billion dollars trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash

IIRC Zuckerberg actually claimed to have been inspired by Rainbow's End. Presumably, in some alternate universe, taking inspiration from Vernor Vinge's other, better books, Facebook instead spent billions trying to make irritating talking spiders.

- "There should be a law" (1) really never solves anything, (2) pushes stuff in the next jurisdiction. See attempts at killing generally available cryptography and Cypherpunks. Genuine success by the techies there. Law / policy is insufficient by itself.

- Social media does get people thinking. A little. "The press should..." yeah maybe but the press doesn't so we do what we can.

- Scifi authors write scifi. It's what they do. And essays sell sci-fi. And their essays are broadly commented on: THEY have a voice. Not going to change.

- Outfunding the good while dis-incentivizing the bad might work: This is a field with massive ongoing progress that people are legitimately proud of. If these (many but finite number of) people can work "in the right direction", then they work less "in the wrong direction". Government funding might be the rare thing that can outspend advertising funding. Still, many people will chase AI work directly out of the large military budgets, in many countries with varied political systems. Meaning lots of people working in these directions no matter what. Meaning lots of spillovers from that no matter what else.

- Having the better AIs beat up the worse AIs? Hmmm, I don't want to be caught in the middle of this. Actually this is a field for sci-fi authors to plow some effort into. And for AI game theorists? What does this look like?

- Having the better AI fields be massively more profitable than the "bad" - so that the talented hopeful head in these directions more readily? Currently advertising AI and medical AI might be the highest profit potential, with military close in there? Self-driving AI probably pays well already now. But most of these run "general AI" labs in the name of "progress is progress".

- More money into "AI ethics"? So far the results are underwhelming but not a reason to stop.

Other practical suggestions?

Pedantically, I wonder about: "the readers Gernsback was cultivating didn't ask about the politics of radio" with this coming back to haunt them in the 1930s.

Both radio enthusiasts Gernsback are talking about the politics of radio and regulation as early as 1912.

Yeah, US Science Fiction, and US literature generally move in the direction of being increasingly willfully blind to politics, but I believe that's more of a post-war/cold war trend.

Whenever I see people talking about longtermism this way, I'm a bit confused. I've always thought of climate change being one of the things that longtermists care a lot about. I read 'What We Owe the Future' briefly, and could be misremembering, but I recall it being heavy on climate change being a major issue because of the long-lasting impact it could have. It feels like it became popular to shit on longtermism because some billionaires are into it, and the views of people who it resonates with are carelessly misconstrued.

If the label really is now just for a fuck-earth-colonize-space view, what is the acceptable term for the view that long-term impacts should be a primary concern when allocating resources towards solving problems?

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

I don't get it. The Culture ships ("minds") are not cautionary tales about AI, or space, or anything like that. They're just AI-controlled spaceships. I don't know what point Stross is trying to make with this particular sentence.

EDIT: it's been pointed out to me that this probably pointing out the irony of Musk being a hypercapitalist billionaire, while the Culture is a post-scarcity leftist utopia.

(I'm starting to really feel the point of demanding justice through violence. Some people are only willing to let others live at the moment their face hits the pavement.)

There is a lot of good that can come out of some of these movements. Sure, a large part of rationalism is very cult-like and silly and I myself not infrequently make fun of it for that. But there are also many interesting non cult-like thinkers in that community. I try to take the good where I can find it. As for tech billionaires, well I think that for example Elon Musk is a scam artist and a fraud for his robotaxi hype, but that does not negate the fact that his spacecraft seem to work well and are an interesting move forward in humanity's exploration of space. I think that there has been a lot of unrealistic over-optimism about the pace of AI technology development and we are probably not anywhere close to general artificial intelligence, and I certainly don't think that a tech singularity is right around the corner, but that does not negate the fact that there have been some genuine huge steps forward in AI in the last decade and there are many constructive and beneficial things that this technology can do.

If humanity consistently thought like Charlie Stross does, I am not sure that we would be out of the Stone Age yet.

*I say particular brand because not even all progressives agree with him. There are progressive rationalists, progressive transhumanists, etc.

Technologists inspired by SF, even dystopian SF, don't want the dystopia, but the other advances pictured with the abuses or problems elided or checked.

And, having seen one or more renditions of the dystopic aspects, have extra confidence (sometimes but not always misplaced) that by referencing & even popularizing the inspirational works, more people will work on a better version of what was depicted.

Even dystopic fiction, and cautionary talks likes Stross's here, are thus often, operationally, accelerative. "Well, now we've read the warning insert, & recommended it to everyone who'll listen, let's assemble this stuff without all those foreseeable mistakes."

(Compare: Truffaut's observation: "It is impossible to make an anti-war film." The mere exercise of converting it to a narrative, in that medium, creates an artifact that many people, & time, tends to transform into a glorification of related themes & extremes.)

Stasis where we are now, without radical new efficiencies (tech), would lead to a relatively short & nasty confined run for the human race. (And that's if it were even possible, which it's not without an oppressive/suppressive unitary world government.)

Degrowth and/or a return to a mythic nostalgic pastoralism would kill billions. (And is equally impossible without an oppressive/suppressive unitary world government.)

Even socialism/communism draws heavily from the hand-wavy extrapolative imaginings of Marx – a political economy science fiction writer, whose historical determinism prefigured 'dark singularitarian' Eliezer Yudkowsky's certainty "we're all gonna die". (Neither of these totalizing visions seem to yield much when the real world & real history prove more complicated.)

It's up-or-out for humanity – and so many people realizing that is why science fiction is more popular than ever, wherever it falls on the utopic-dystopic spectrum, as our best guide to finding the sweet spots, & avoiding the foreseeable problems, of a big and ever-changing future.

Exactly. Reminds me of the quote from genius modernist sculptor Naum Gabo: "Not to lie about the future is impossible and one can lie about it at will."

Finally somebody says something sensible about that crap instead of mindlessly echoing the hype.

This blogger completely misses the irony of having an extremely mainstream Californian outlook, probably because it's not the version that like billionaire men.

1) Pulling Ayn Rand in just to bash on her is both a stretch to what might be called science fiction and reeks of simply burning an effigy.

2) I think we're finally at the tipping point where the left has switched from relentlessly working some kind of reference to Trump into their ongoing outrage, or simply as a tribe-signaling device (see "Trump Derangement Syndrome") and on to the injection of Musk. Call it "Conservation of Goldstein."

3) Mentions Gernsback and not the most excellent sci-fi story "The Gernsback Continuum"? Poor showing.

4) Cory Doctorow's feelings about "The Cold Equations" are a real froth-fest and reek of a different sort of irrational optimism, the avoidance of what are called "lifeboat politics." I would avoid citing him on that particular issue.

5) Banging on Campbell like that, also tacky A) given that psi powers were absolutely under consideration for quite a long time, we're only about fifty years past that, roughly at the time there was scientific consensus that, yes, we do have plate tectonics, B) the statement that "a belief in psi powers implicitly supports an ideology of racial supremacy" absolutely does not track and is a cheap smear.

6) He name-drops Jack Parsons without pointing out his philosophies.

7) Because right now we have to have some kind of anti-Russian sentiment, he picks Nicholas Berdyaev, and just wildly ignores the parallel thoughts of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, which gave rise to Frank Tipler's concept of a grand unification at the end of the universe of all thinking beings. It might be summarized in the philosophy "Everything that rises must converge," which made its way into the writings of Flannery O'Connor and a Shriekback tune. But we have to shake our fists at those Ruskies, so we pick this one.

8) What a narrow slice of Rationalism he's introduced us to. "So, these Catholics, they're ritual cannibals," as if that were all we needed to know. And he seems to think that perhaps we ought not to look at the possible implications of the far-ranging impacts of AI, which doesn't need to be particularly intelligent or even malevolent to cause damage, especially if you're a man taken for a box of vegetables.

9) Worse yet, he's looked at the past of sci-fi writers and ignored the past of politics: recall Reagan's SDI proposal, getting smeared as "Star Wars."

No, this is just general rage at people with enough money to try out some wild ideas (and I am no fan at all of the whole Mars business). Wild ideas that size always need a lot of money behind them, and this has gone on through history. Most fall through, sometimes we land on the Moon, sometimes we invent nukes. They all sound science-fictiony when we start, but the core premise that the science fiction writers themselves created various concepts, without which the apparently bumbling golems of industry would not have anything to blow their money on? It's ridiculous.

People have pursued longevity probably roughly around the time as they figured out that they, too, were going to die. At first it would have been practical business, like avoiding tigers or not eating the red berries, but after a while it becomes prayers and on to potions.

Transhumanism? That's little more than wanting to exceed our limits. We probably first did it with tools, and also for cosmetic purposes, but then people wanted those reaches past what had been built-in to their bodies. Again, probably existed before writing, as humans dreamed of being ascended demigods.

Effective altruism, ah, the terrible concept of wanting your charity to go to someone who actually needed it. Existed since the first malingerer, the first false beggar was discovered. But let's mention Sam Bankman-Fried so we can make that concept sound bad.

Gosh, the more I look at this essay, the more the cheap tricks stand out. I feel like I could go on and on.

I'd vote to create a 10-50% tax on the morbidly rich, to be paid back to everyone in the world as UBI. 10% is the tithing rate, something that people understand. 50% represents civic duty, a moral responsibility to acknowledge society's role in maintaining the infrastructure that allows wealth creation. Or we could just tax them 100% for a while and.. nothing bad would happen. Which is hilariously tragic.

Of course billionaires want to pay 0% and fund effective altruism projects personally. That makes a big assumption though, that the rich know what needs to be fixed better than the poor. Which is nonsense from both religious and secular standpoints. Religious because all have equal dignity as conscious living beings. Secular because money is an arbitrary measure of fitness.

Billionaires are like children with little or no life experience outside of wealth acquisition. They're ultimate expressions of ego, with all soul stripped away, vying to become the emperor on Star Wars to live forever as the devil's right hand man. To put it lightly.

The opposite of a billionaire looks like Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Howard Zinn, John Lennon, Marianne Williamson, the list is long. Combatting billionaires outwardly like bullies is difficult. But combatting them inwardly by shifting our consciousness towards peace is viable.

Which looks like wokeism, progressism, leftism, socialism, communism, humanism, animism, pantheism, entertaining the idea of reincarnation.. all the bad words that billionaires hate on and spread sentiment against through propaganda. Again the list is long. But if we care about preventing the human race from being subjugated under the yoke of tech tyranny, they are good places to start.

There are meta levels to that. For example, Martin Luther King Jr advocated for labor as much as racial equality. Feminism defends human rights as well as gender equality. All the stuff they don't teach in schools is exactly the understanding needed to defeat the status quo.

I still hope that we find a way to transcend this suffering, even though I've seen no evidence of that happening so far in my lifetime. Sometimes I wonder if this is the revolution that will not be televised.

Like what would it take to really organize and roll out something like UBI through existing infrastructure, with philosophies borrowed from stuff like open source? And what force will the powers that be use to suppress that on all fronts? Once we view that world through that lens, the oppression becomes obvious and unmistakable as we watch all the capital in the world get siphoned into the corporate black holes of billionaires, so that it can't be used to, I dunno, give everyone all the food they need.

I wish I had the answers, but I have to get back to work to afford the crumbs of my existence.

I get it, it's fashionable in Europe to hate billionaire American industrialists, but at what point did our hatred of capitalists (note: I don't hate capitalists) decide to overshadow our, you know, lifelong lust for the stars?

Is there anyone else trying to build actual habitats (for actual people, not just a handful of taikonauts) in orbit on a timescale that would let people like Mr Stross and I see them (and perchance even use them) in our lifetime? The machinery of the state that European types like Stross seem to deify have not even announced plans in this direction, much less assembled teams and factories to move toward it. ESA and NASA and JAXA (nor Roscosmos or CNSA) ain't it, even if you 10x'd their funding. These are war and reconnaissance and research organizations, moving bulk humans off planet is completely orthogonal to any of their goals, stated or actual.

Every time I read a technologist's screed against Musk or Bezos or Zuckerberg (three people whose combined lifetime works do not even scratch a fraction of the economic value incinerated by the US military in 40 weeks) all I can see is sour grapes and ad hominem. These people did not create nor perpetuate the attributes of the dystopia you claim to reside in (that was the CIA). (It's also not actually a dystopia, or anything resembling one; ask any of the two billion people lifted out of dirt poverty (largely due to technology!) in the last three decades.)

The old planet will go to hell in its own way from its own inhabitants. I'd rather live in space where it's safer. (Also, how cool would it be to escape before Earth is finally fully conquered? This would mean that humans as a species successfully avoid a total hierarchy.)