@mina
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I'm not sure anymore if I've watched Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Funny thing is, not having heard of it for more than a decade, you're now the 2nd person to recommend it in only 6 months. 😉
What is absolutely not funny, is that an influential key Longtermist strategist is now openly contemplating and propagating nuclear war as a fall-back strategy to avoid an AGI singularity from happening before Elmo can send of his arc to...
I'm not directly providing the link to a long insider article, as it is very deeply troubling and should be read only when not suffering from depression, etc.
They would literally kill 3 billion people to safeguard their vision coming true.
It is one of the things I wish I could "unread" and forget (2nd link), as almost all of us will not be able to do anything against it:
In the film "Doctor Strangelove and …" (1964), Peter Seller plays three roles: A British officer at a US military base, trying to avoid the third world war, the US president and Dr. Strangelove, the scientific Adviser to the president.
In the short video below (1m50s - I added subtitles) we see the outline of what "longtermists" like Elon Musk mean, when they talk about "taking humanity into space" and "preserve the human species".
You two are 100% correct. #Elmo and the other tech mogul #SciFi nerds from their high-school and college days are actually trying to realize part of these novels within their framework of beliefs, e.g. #Longtermism.
(If you listen to the two #TESCREAL interviews/podcasts* in my TL, it becomes clear.)
@HistoPol@mina@si_irini@Yeekasoose@mikako6@pmj Hey! Some of us (then) teenage SciFi nerds read and watched the same stuff, but reached entirely different conclusions! Not all of us thought they were blue prints to follow. The various Torment Nexii (Nexusus?) were dystopias.
Yes, very true. For me, they were sort of like a "Second Life", a fictitious "alternate reality" of what could have been or might be if...but nothing that would materialize in my life time, maybe apart from a lunar base.
Never have I been so wrong in an overall assessment:
What today's capitalism on steroids looks like, is pretty accurately described in the 1952(!) novel (series) "Space Merchants" by F. Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth.
They also predicted very accurately (in the 50s and 60s) the current #enshittification of technology in several short stories, and in the "March of the Morons" the dumbing down of modern civilization.
Same with me.
There are a lot of dystopias but there are things that are real now, computers for example, who could possibly believe that?
These guys see things for the future, that we don’t.
For good or worse…
I saw an interview with Gates, an old interview and he was talking about smartphones, decades before we saw the first smartphone.
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