The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism by Patrick Wood, 2022
This is the everyman's introduction to Technocracy and Transhumanism. Both are primary to the World Economic Forum's Great Reset, in partnership with the United Nations, to replace Capitalism with an alternative economic system called Sustainable Development, aka Technocracy.
"Everyone's talking about AI, how it will change the world, and even suggesting it might end humanity as we know it. Dave Troy is joined by Dr. Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres, two prominent critics of AI doomerism, to cut through the noise, and look at where these ideas really came from, and offer suggestions on how we might look at these problems differently. And they also offer a picture of the darker side of these ideas and how they connect to Eugenics and other ideologies historically.
Together Émile and Timnit coined an acronym called TESCREAL, which stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism — and yeah, that's a lot of -isms. But it ties into other topics that we have covered in this series, including Russian Cosmism and Longtermism.
Dr. Gebru came to prominence in 2020 after she was fired from Google for speaking up about the company's lack of ethical guardrails in its AI development work. Émile Torres studies existential risk and has been a critic of the "longtermist" movement for several years."—Dave Troy >
#BigTech#SiliconValley#Authoritarianism#Technocracy: "To worship at the altar of mega-scale and to convince yourself that you should be the one making world-historic decisions on behalf of a global citizenry that did not elect you and may not share your values or lack thereof, you have to dispense with numerous inconveniences—humility and nuance among them. Many titans of Silicon Valley have made these trade-offs repeatedly. YouTube (owned by Google), Instagram (owned by Meta), and Twitter (which Elon Musk insists on calling X) have been as damaging to individual rights, civil society, and global democracy as Facebook was and is. Considering the way that generative AI is now being developed throughout Silicon Valley, we should brace for that damage to be multiplied many times over in the years ahead.
The behavior of these companies and the people who run them is often hypocritical, greedy, and status-obsessed. But underlying these venalities is something more dangerous, a clear and coherent ideology that is seldom called out for what it is: authoritarian technocracy. As the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley have matured, this ideology has only grown stronger, more self-righteous, more delusional, and—in the face of rising criticism—more aggrieved."
#Algorithms#PublicPolicy#Technocracy: "The debacle of RAND’s firefighting algorithm reflected the fallacy described in Seeing Like a State on two levels simultaneously. First, the government, seeking out an objective assessment, tried to simplify urban fires into a set of variables that anyone within that bureaucracy could understand and, if necessary, justify. Second, RAND’s algorithm was going through that exact same process—manipulating measurements, shorn from their real-world context, and pushing them though a digital bureaucracy made of ones and zeroes.
The smartphone you’re reading this article on while sipping your morning coffee (or maybe you’re sitting on the toilet, no judgment, just happy you’re reading) has far more computing power than the mainframes that ran RAND’s 1970s firefighting algorithm. But the problems RAND’s approach embodied—the desire for high-level institutional clarity overwhelming fine-grained, context-based local knowledge—have only gotten worse."
The Supreme #Court is laughably #corrupt and always has been. It’s not some special #institution detached from #politics, it’s just hidden behind layers of #technocracy and #institutional gate keeping so people can’t see that it’s just as corrupt as the other two branches of #government.
What comes after #capitalism? I keep seeing " #LateStageCapitalism " and accurate critiques of the status quo, but never any clear idea of what next. #Marxism and its relatives always seem to degenerate to a dictatorship of the #technocracy. What would Socialism 2.0 look like? Is it just #socialdemocacy i.e. a kinder gentler capitalism? Or is there a third way?
"Technocrats do not always make good democrats. Technocratic government is usually about a small number of experts, with a high opinion of themselves, coming up with supposed answers to a country’s problems, which other politicians, the state bureaucracy and the rest of society are then told to follow"
@junesim63#Technocracy and #democracy are fundamentally opposed. Technocracy always becomes #oligarchy with a secret police to enforce its out-of-touch edicts. But OTOH #technocrats are by definition the people who actually know how to steer the ship. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.