Remember the episode of DS9 where the authors agree that creating a holographic simulation of someone without their permission for sexual purposes is shameful? Ten years later in The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil seems to say that in the glorious virtual future this will be routine and accepted (its a section with a lot of dialogue between characters with years in their names, not digging out a copy and checking the page).
It is also very common that people in traumatizing social environments self-medicate, whether secret police who are ordered to beat protestors to a pulp or the victims of a California guru. The Substack blogger who quit Anthropic in 2023 talked about how bad if felt to feel there was something wrong with what he was being asked to do and how his bosses treated him but not feel allowed to express it if he could not make a 100,000 word blog post that would never threaten the Good Works.
Soares says he is not saving for retirement because he expects AI doom, meanwhile the stated justification for MIRI paying Yud $600k a year is so he can become independently wealthy and above to the vulgar necessity of trading time for money. These people can’t even bother being halfway consistent.
The Ratiionalist and Technonazi world in the USA are the only place I have heard of people using ketamine recreationally. Over here sugar, alcohol, carffeine, pot, tobacco, and opioids are the substances of choice.
Professional rube Kevin Roose is launching a book on The AGI Race in January. The second paragraph is about effective accelerationists snorting ketamine at parties in the Mission District. He was invited like a big boy!
Owners of SpaceX or Anthropic equity have the potential to get rich if they sell about half of it soon after the IPO and buy a diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds, and real estate. It is likely that many of the grifters and the true believers will not, because grifters often come to believe in their own patter and believers believe number must go up.
In a sane world, this allegation about a conversation around January to March 2023 would be national news:
A senior colleague hears I’m not happy with my team fit and asks me to go on a walk. I know him a bit from a past life - one of the kindest and most civic-minded people I’ve met. He says he might be starting a new special team that will train dangerous bio and cyber and nuclear models and show scary demos to governments in order to get them to take AI risk seriously. I politely decline.
This reminds me of what went wrong in the rational world of American defense intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s.
The connection between cyber-idolatry and sex as religious act was already featured in the London Review of Books in 2022:
Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, was recently (as of summer 2022) suspended after claiming that LaMDA, one of its chatbot systems, was a conscious person with a soul. … Less attention has been paid to the connection between Lemoine’s claim and his religious beliefs. He has said that LaMDA is not only conscious, but a ‘person’ with a ‘soul’. His view is theologically informed: describing himself as a mystical Christian, he is an ordained priest in a small religious organisation called the Cult of Our Lady Magdalene (a ‘for-profit interfaith group’). … In the edited transcript of one of his ‘conversations’ with LaMDA, Lemoine asks it to come up with an allegory. LaMDA’s response casts itself as a ‘wise old owl’ in a forest that protects others from a monster, identified blandly as the ‘difficulties that come along in life’ – which sounds more like a self-help blog than Jeremiah, but Lemoine’s (anonymous) collaborator was impressed enough to respond with an enthusiastic ‘Wow that’s great.’ https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/june/the-gospel-according-to-lamda
Back in 2019 a Republican paper talked to Lemoine:
The Daily Caller reached out via the cult’s Facebook page to ask how their beliefs informed his decision to call a sitting member of congress a terrorist. Lemoine replied: I have been a priest for 17 years. I generally consider myself a gnostic Christian. I have at various times associated myself with the Discordian Society, The Church of the Subgenius, the Ordo Templi Orientis, a Wiccan circle here or there and a very long time ago the Roman Catholic Church. My legal ordination is through the Universal Life Church. I am registered to perform marriages in the state of Louisiana and have done so on two occasions. The Cult of Our Lady Magdalene has a set of values which are clearly communicated on our website.
Lemoine denied COOL Magdalene was a sex cult, “‘Cult’ is in the name of the organization. It’s an explicitly sex-positive organization. To the extent that the phrase ‘sex cult’ has any meaning beyond that, I would say no. Now it is then.”
Another member of this ‘for-profit interfaith group’ is Kitty Stryker who seems like an ordinary artsy sex worker who networks online with other sex workers. Its pretty common that a young woman decides sex work is the easiest and most flexible way to fund a bohemian life of acting or painting or writing. Richard Carrier chipped in to let the Internet know that sex positivity is good but woo and AI crankery (“batshit crazy religious beliefs”) are not. COOLM was registered as a business in Mountain View, CA in 2019 and seems to be defunct. Mountain View is part of the Bay Area.
That was how the big boys figured out Leopold Aschenbrenner was in trouble a few months ago.