<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title></head><body><div style="font-family:Arial;">SASafrass,</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">How could I have forgotten Nicholas??? I would have relished reading dozens of books about his adventures.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">I do believe we are in agreement, with just enough nuances to suggest some wonderful conversations if we ever find ourselves in physical proximity again.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">IMO, human potential is just a localized, maybe somewhat specialized, expression of Life's potential and consciousness/intelligence is universal.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">One of the nuances—I think I am more pessimistic about "groups of humans" being on a transcendent path. Reading David Graeber makes me think we are kind of an opposite path; from far more optimal forms of social organization in the past to the degenerate power-politics/rapacious-capitalism of today. But would be very happy to see a brighter side to this coin</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">You mentioned RAH's candy coat of feminism surrounding a chocolate core of misogyny. I too detected that in his writing. The only female characters that seemed somewhat immune were Jubal's three amenuenses, especially Ann the Fair Witness.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">I was a member of the Church of All Worlds, almost from its beginning, circa 1963. When I went to Macalester in St. Paul, I became a member of the Lady of the Lakes Nest, circa 1969. It was always interesting to me how CAW rapidly transformed from the 'free love promiscuity" male fantasies in <i>Stranger</i> to an organization almost exclusively characterized by Goddess/Gaia worship.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">Just an aside (a deep dark confession??), preceding my infatuation with the SF heroes I mentioned, my very first hero was Lex Luthor in the Superman comics.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">davew</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div>On Wed, Jun 4, 2025, at 2:19 PM, steve smith wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite" id="qt" style=""><p>DaveW -</p><p>I do know that we are definitely aligned (you and I) in our
(early) reading choices/habits and probably our (at least early)
consequential tendencies and biases and the heroes of Van Vogt
and Brunner and the unmentioned Nicholas van Rijn of Poul
Anderson?</p><p>Where we might diverge is in my latent <i>self-loathing-liberal</i> sympathies with all things not-me... through my youthful embrace
of hyper-individualism (still habitual in many contexts) I came to
see some of it's folly and/or toxicity. RAH's (via LL's voice)
admonition to "be able to lead" and "to be able to follow" were a
good leavening to the heavy starch of hyper-individualistic
self-reliance and his neo-western (pseudo-Martian) Vedic
metaphysics in "Stranger") but ultimately he still left me chafing
at the hyper-human-chauvanism and misplaced superficial elevation
of women (and likely others underspecified) in a fundamentally
misogynistic mode/style.</p><p>I do agree that there is "a lot more to being human" than any
known reductionist conception/description really seems to begin to
expose. The demonstration-by-example of AI (particularly in the
form of LLMs and image transformers) does put that in stark
contrast. Where we may differ is that I (am willing to
consider?) believe that all that makes us so wonderfully
"exceptional" is merely an extension of what makes life itself and
all things "emergent" qualitatively new at every level of
reconsideration/expression and that our expression-through-tech is
just another turn of that wheel of incarnation. </p><p> I do believe, for example, that for all our follies as *groups
of humans* we are on a road to something that transcends what any
given human can or does do. And I believe that the "technical"
embedding of same, whether it is the writings of the Sacred Texts
(or great books) or the intricate web of rules and regulations and
practices and norms that make up institutions (political,
religious, academic, ...) can embody and express this. All
things digital and computational are (to me) merely
hyper-facilitators of the same, and therefore *capable* of
achieving quantitative thresholds which allow for the (inevitable)
emergence of qualitatative differences which make a difference. </p><p>While I am enamored (enraptured/ensorcled) to some degree with
LLMs, I don't absolutely need to impute onto them anything like
the implied level of *consciousness* I myself experience in spite
of them being *extremely* capable <i>stochastic parrots</i> (at
the absolute very least?). But that is far from me wanting to
declare that they absolutely do not represent a proto-version or a
step-along-the-way. </p><p>I am also acutely not-a-fan of being educated by (or educating)
others, but rather revel in the possibilities of co-development
*with* others, up to and including the uncanny-valleyed
familiarity of LLMs. Can I individually or we collectively
so-evolve, co-emerge, co-arise en-symbiosis, en-mutuality *with*
this golem we have formed from the electron-infused silicon-wafer
clay of the earth?</p><p>I suspect you don't disagree in principle with much of what I am
saying here? The differences may be in detail and style.</p><p>- SASsafrass</p><blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:6561a90d-ec25-4812-9557-1af436a87d46@app.fastmail.com"><div style="font-family:Arial;">I agree.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">Of course, Lazurus was immortal
(having fathered himself) and had time to learn all those
skills. But why those skills and not a host of others?</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">I too am a product of RAH, having
read his entire corpus multiple times. However, my personal
heroes tended to be Jubal Harshaw, Valentine Smith, Bernardo de
la Paz, and even Mycroft (Mike) more than Lazurus. And these
blended well with A.E. van Vogt's heros Gilbert Gosseyn (World
of Null-A) and Eliot Grosvenor (Voyage of the Space Beagle), and
Brunner's heroes, Nick Hafflinger (Shockwave Rider) and Lex
(Polymath). These led to my early dedication to "know everything
and experience (at least once) everything." Alexei Panshin's
novel, Rite of Passage and its discussion of "ordinology" and
"synthesis" as professions was also very influential.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">I am not so much a believer in
human exceptionalism as I am convinced that there is a lot more
to being human and for human potential than what is usually
recognized. [AI advocates not only fail to recognize, but deny
the possibility.] This is probably a result of my involvement in
the Human Potential Movement when an undergraduate and with
Mitchell's (the astronaut) Noetic Institute.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">All of this is background to one
of my consuming interests of the moment: how to facilitate the
"education" of human beings. Educate is in quotes because it is
a poor approximation of what I mean: a synthesis of
enculturation, facilitated self-learning, exploration, ... All
influenced by experiments like Summerhill and the earlier,
non-Christian-centric, Paidiea movement.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">davew</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div>On Wed, Jun 4, 2025, at 10:26 AM, steve smith wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite" id="qt-qt" style=""><div>DaveW, et alia -</div><blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:9fd788af-c41f-4b98-9c3c-2a39bee40475@app.fastmail.com"><div style="font-family:Arial;">T<i>he Alignment Problem</i>,
by Brian Christian</div></blockquote><p>I would say that Christian's piece here acutely represents
what I'm trying to re-conceive, at least for myself. His
implications of <i>Human Exceptionalism</i> and a very
technocentric focus which largely avoids deeper political
critiques about who gets to define "alignment" and whose
values are prioritized. It is a bias oft-presented by those
of us who are tech-focused/capable/advantaged to reduce a
problem to one we think we know how to solve (in a manner that
promotes our narrow personal interests).</p><p>In the spirit of "anti-hubris", I was once strongly aligned
with Robert Heinlein's (RAH) "Human Chauvanist" or "Human
Exceptionalism" perspective as exhibited in his Lazarus Long
(LL) character's oft-quoted line:</p><blockquote><p><i><span>"A human being should be able to change a diaper,
plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a
building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a
wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give
orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a
new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a
tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.</span><br> </i> <i><span>Specialization is for insects."</span></i></p></blockquote><p><span>I can't say I don't still endorse the optimistic
aspirations inspired by LL's statement, it is the "should"
that I am disturbed by. I am a fan of generalism but in
our modern society, acknowledge that many if not most of us
are in fact relatively specialized by circumstance and even
by plan and while we might *aspire* to develop many of the
skills LL prescribes for us, it should not be a source of
shame or of "lesser" that we might not be as broadly capable
as implied. We are a social species and while I cringe at
becoming (more) eusocial than we already are, I also cringe
at the conceit of being order 10B selfish (greedy?)
individual agents with long levers, prying one another out
of our various happy places willy nilly.</span></p><p><span>I also think the <i>hubris</i> aspect is central.
One of the major consequences of my own "origin story"
foreshadowed by my over-indulgence in techno-optimistic
SciFi of the "good old fashioned future" style and
particular RAH's work was that he reinforced my
Dunning-Kruger tendencies, both by over-estimating my own
abilities at specific tasks and narrowed my values to focus
on those things which I was already good at or had a natural
advantage with. As a developing young person I had a
larger-than average physicality and a greater-than-average
linguistic facility, so it was easy for me to think that the
myriad things that were intrinsically easier for me based on
those biases were somehow more "important" than those for
which those things might be a handicap? I still have these
biases but try to calibrate for them when I can.</span></p><p><span>My first "furrin" car (73 Honda Civic) was a nightmare
for me to work on because my hands were too big to fit down
between the gaps amongst all the hoses and belts and wires
that (even that early) smog-resistant epi-systems layered
onto a 45mpg tiny vehicle such as that. And you are all
familiar with my circumloquacious style exemplified by "I
know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I
don't think you realize that what you heard was not what I
meant". While I might have been able to break a siezed or
rusty bolt loose on my (first car) 64-Tbird or (first truck)
68 F100 without undue mechanical leverage it was hell to
even replace spark plugs or re-attach an errant vacuum line
on my Honda. And while I might be able to meet most of my
HS teachers on a level playing field with complex sentence
constructions (or deconstructions) or logical convolutions,
the same tendency made me a minor pariah among some of my
peers.</span></p><p><span>Back to "alignment" and AI, I would claim that human
institutions and bureaucracy are a proto-instantiation of
AI/ML, encoding into (semi)automated systems the collective
will and values of a culture. Of course, they often encode
(amplify) those of an elite few (monarchy, oligarchy, etc)
which means that they really do present to the masses as an
onerous and oppressive system. In a well functioning
political (or religious) system the institutional mechanisms
actually faithfully represent and execute the values and the
intentions of those who "own" the system, so as-by-design,
the better it works, the more oppressed and exploited the
citizenry (subjects) are. We should be *very* afraid of
AI/ML making this yet-more efficient at such oppression and
exploitation *because* we made it in our own
(royalty/oligarchic) image, not because it can amplify our
best acts and instincts (also an outcome as perhaps assumed
by Pieter and Marcus and most of us often-times).</span></p><p><span>I don't trust (assume) the first-order emergent
"alignment" of AI (as currently exemplified by LLMs
presented through chatBot interfaces) to do anything but
amplify the existing biases that human systems (including
pop culture) exhibit. Even Democracy which we hold up
quite high (not to mention Free Markets, Capitalism, and
even hyperConsumerism,and hyperPopulism) is an abberant
expression of whatever collective human good might be... it
tends to represent the extrema (hyper fringe, or
hyper-centroid) better than the full spectral distribution
or any given interest really. An ill-concieved,
human-exceptionalist (esp. first world, techno-enhanced,
wealthy, "human-centricity") giant lever is likely to break
things (like the third world, non-human species, the
biosphere, the climate) without regard to the fact that to
whatever extend we are an "apex intelligence" or "apex
consciousness", we are entirely stacked on top of those
other things we variously ignore/dismiss/revile as
base/banal/unkempt.</span></p><p><span>Elno's aspiration to help (make?) us climb out of the
walls of the petri-dish that is Terra into that of Ares
(Mars) to escape the consequences of our own inability to
self-regulate is the perfect example of
human-exceptionalist-hubris gone wrong. Perhaps the
conceit is that we can literally divorce ourselves from the
broad based support that a stacked
geo/hydro/cryo/atmo/biospheric (eco)system provides us and
live entirely on top of a techno-base (Asteroid mining
Belter fantasies even moreso than Mars/Lunar/Venus/Belter
Colonists?). ExoPlanetarian expansion is inevitable for
humanity (barring total premature self-destruction) but
focusing as much of our resources in that direction (ala
Musk, especially fueled by MAGA alignment in a
MAGA-entrained fascist industrial-state?) as we might be on
the path to is it's own folly. The DOGE-style MAGA-aligned
doing so by using humble humans (and all of nature?) as
reaction-mass/ejecta is a moral tragedy and fundamentally
self-negating. Bannon and Miller and Musk and Navarro and
Noem and ... and the entire Trump clan (including Melania
and Barron?) are probably quite proud of that consequence,
it is not "unintended at all" but I suspect the average
Red-Hat-too-tight folks might not be so proud of the human
suffering such will cause. </span></p><p><span>Maybe those chickens (the ones not destroyed in
industrial egg-production-gone-wrong) are coming home to
roost? Veterans services, health-care-for-the-many, rural
infrastructure development, humble family businesses, etc
might be on the verge of failure/destruction in the name of
concentrating wealth in Golf Resorts, Royal Families, and
Space Adventurers pockets? Or maybe we are generally
resilient to carry all of that on our backs (with AI to help
us orchestrate/choregraph more finely)? Many
hands/heads/bodies make light work even if it is not
righteous (see pyramids?)</span></p><p><span></span><br></p><p><span>Bah Humbug!</span></p><p><span>- Steve</span></p><p><span></span><br></p><p><span></span><br></p><div>.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .--
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