[FRIAM] conservatism (was diversity)

[Steve Smith]

glen wrote:
> Definitely. Maybe I've been too deep in the vibe to notice. But the 
> recent surge in X-Risk news caught me by surprise. The reactionary 
> tone is eerily similar to that of the Tea Party. The rhetoric against 
> open models is understandable. The oligarchs want to ensure they're 
> the ones in charge on the other side of the veil. (I doubt they will be.) 

 From Doctorow's Craphound page - an excellent bit of ironic sendup of 
the Billionaire Bunker Bros  - Highly recommend:

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/the-masque-of-the-red-death/

    /My novella “The Masque of the Red Death
    <https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250242334>” is a tribute to Poe;
    it’s from my book Radicalized. It’s the story of a plute who brings
    his pals to his luxury bunker during civlizational collapse in the
    expectation of emerging once others have rebuilt./

> But the refusal and fear that keeps the reactionaries from classifying 
> the current tech alongside the prior tech is just lazy and stupid. And 
> I say this knowing that I'm already too old to keep up. As slow, old, 
> and unoptimized as I am, I still won't really toss up my hands and 
> lobby for or accede to the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. And 
> if it does pass, I'll work on my own tiny leaf node or tunnel to work 
> remotely at a more reasonable place until they kidnap me and send me 
> to CECOT ... I guess.

I was a strong supporter of the idea that "we've been here before" 
whether it was early Luddite throwing their wooden shoes in the gears of 
the machines or my Grandfathers born before Airplanes, Autos, Wireless, 
Telephone, Recorded Music, Radio, TV but experiencing all of the above 
well before their old age as well as watching hundreds of space launches 
and a stroll or two on the moon in their lifetimes.

One of them started journaling in 1918 as a 20 year old.  He was in 
France carrying dead and (more often) wounded or ill for the Hospital 
Corps while being mindful of mines and other latent ordnance, and trying 
to understand what the hell just happened or was happening or about to 
happen.   He continued to journal (yet more consistently) through his 
life, including comparing the Automobile Deaths in KY to the reported 
Deaths (US soldiers) in Vietnam in the 60s.  His last car had an 
AM/FM/Cassette player, air conditioning and a top speed of over 100mph.  
I think he never flew on an airplane.

  He wasn't one to *reflect* much on the meaning of all such, but he did 
enjoy reporting interesting factoids in juxtaposition.  One journal was 
one-line per day for roughly 50 years.   He had others.

Was all that *less* consequential than my being born between the failed 
Sputnik launch and the Successful one and watching (the same ) men walk 
on the moon before I hit puberty, then going to college with a sliderule 
and a minor skill at long division in my head while others showed up 
with (very expensive) first generation scientific calculators?  Or 
Hubbell and Webb and Space Shuttles and ISS and EVs and cordless phones 
unto cellular unto handheld do-everything mobile devices, and room-sized 
to rack sized to desktop to laptop computers and (psuedo) Self  Driving 
autos?  And AI of the 60s which kept wintering over (and over) until it 
exploded this decade on the heels of a global Pandemic as acute and 
broad as the one in 1918 that took my Grandfather's *first* wife?

But the rate of change or rate of change of change is acutely steeper 
and kicking us even further out of our natural time-to-change scale?  We 
*can* wait for change at the.pace of the Obituary Page (anybody seen 
McConnell lately) but moves a *lot* slower than AI model progression and 
the fucund application thereof...

my grandparents were likely the first of their line to actually learn to 
read and write (public school in the US emerging after their parents 
were born)...  I was typing at 14, writing code at 16 and now at near 70 
I'm hobknobbing with some amazingly clever and prolific 
psuedo-intelligences on a daily basis.  And of course, youse guys here too.

Running off a cliff following Coyote/Roadrunner Physics?  Just don't 
look down (or up?)




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