[FRIAM] thread bent toward Utopian/Dystopian Singularities

Fri Jul 11 15:08:51 EDT 2025

It occurred to me that the recent Grok Nazi stuff maybe wasn’t just poor impulse control and not to just to flex his power.

What if it was to show investors that Grok can extract and mimic cultural behaviors?  That would be valuable for super PACs and other people spending money on advertising.   If you want to reach certain audiences online you need to act like them.   

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2025 11:52 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] thread bent toward Utopian/Dystopian Singularities

If you want to go back to the past of the future, I found Star Trek: Strange New Worlds [Long Strange Trip??] playing on Max the other day, and the premier episode explains how we destroyed ourselves before finding the federation.  Fighting over definitions of freedom or some such.

Then watching The Last of Us made me see how the zombie apocalypse is the perfect entertainment for our age, since both left and right can project themselves into the narrative as human and the opposition as the zombies.

-- rec --

On Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 12:29 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com> > wrote:

This seems interesting for a pivoting virologist.  

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682222001908

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of steve smith
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2025 9:23 AM
To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> 
Subject: [FRIAM] thread bent toward Utopian/Dystopian Singularities

On 7/11/25 7:44 AM, glen wrote:

https://www.mbdialogues.org/ 

"We invite groups and individuals who are interested in organizing discussions about mirror biology to submit an expression of interest for funding." 

The "Strange Attractor" path we are on is closer and closer to any number of possible exit routes from the Basin we know as the Holocene  than we have been before?   Crises tend to bring out the innovation in us (for better and for worse)?  Or is that just a neo-Darwinist fallacy?

I think most of us here might fit the technoProgressive <https://ieet.org/philosophy/>  title, though clearly we have those whose lens is technoUtopian while others are more cautious.   My contributions are mostly just contrarian, hanging as far out the other side of the boat as I can to keep it from tipping immediately into a "weak" or "fizzled" singularity.  Is there a clean path into the singularity or is it (socioeconomic) "tidal forces" all the way down?  I sometimes feel like a mid-level surfer knowing that the next "big one" is actually a Tsunami and I might as well paddle out toward it and see if I can catch "one last ride" knowing it likely ends rather dramatically bad for everyone whether they are "riding the wave", "running for high ground" or "cowering in a bunker"...

Re: Mirror biology.  My  nephew, a freshly minted materials scientist specializing in phase change materials (PCM) , unable to enter the very "chilled" job market, will naturally be drawn to ICE9 development?:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine

?Fortunately? I introduced him to Wellstone <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queendom_of_Sol#The_Wellstone>   via Wil McCarthy quite young, so programmable matter is more his style. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Matter

<random aside>Unfortunately he's "stuck" on a QC line for a company which Uses PCM to build milspec field-portable human-blood coolers/heaters.  Their only customers now are US (and maybe IDF?) special forces because of the cost of the units (and the value to a small combat team far from support in saving a life).   But they are trying to re-engineer into the more general EMT space.  No more arm-to-arm transfusions like in WWII movies?  Is Seal Team 9 fully constrained to have compatible blood types?</aside>

McCarthy is one of those fascinating SF writers who has a firm foot in the more serious Sci/Tech world.  For better or worse, his patents and inventions have barely made it above water... barely.  He's making his living as a patent law guy right now.  His flagship company is going forward without him.

https://www.ravenwindow.com/

With MTG (marjory taylor greene) pushing weather-manipulation conspiracies (leading to vigilante attacks on weather-radar installations?) I think of J. Storrs Hall Weather Machine <https://web.archive.org/web/20090826074614/http:/www.acceleratingfuture.com/people-blog/?p=2637> .  But it is his Utility Fog <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog>  that I find most profound (in the vein of McCarthy's Wellstone).   With Hall's Weather-Machine swarm I suppose we could implement the most grandiose version of the Vegas Spher possible?  Or maybe 

Grey Goo <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo>  anyone?

  _____  

addendum re: Ice IX/9 (is that the name of one of Elno's as-yet-unclaimed children?):

While none of the 20+ known water ice polymorphs behaves like Ice-Nine, some have exotic traits:

*	Ice VII: Stable at high pressure, can exist at room temperature if compressed
*	Ice XI: Ferroelectric, proposed for astrochemistry
*	Ice XIX (most recent): Still under investigation

But no known phase of water ice propagates itself through ambient liquid water like Vonnegut’s Ice-Nine.

Attribution:  GPT4o

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