Most frightening and/or depressing story: The people running Palantir and other companies focused on military/security/surveillance applications of information technology seem to have, at best, a faith-based belief that the United States can do no wrong. At worst, their beliefs are based on eugenics and white Christian nationalist attitudes which simply have no basis in fact or logic. I don’t believe the technology itself is good or evil, but pair in with these irrational beliefs and there are many frightening, depressing, dystopian paths I can imagine our country going down.
Most hopeful story: It’s a struggle to find a silver lining to the illegal, unprovoked U.S. war of aggression in Iran, but I mused that the artificial restriction on oil supply might create some long-term gain by accelerating the economic and geopolitical incentives to transition to other forms of energy. Such rational policy almost certainly could not have been achieved through international diplomacy in the current environment. This is not to minimize the very real and very avoidable near-term suffering and death the immoral choices of the Trump administration have caused. Even the cynical economic and financial elites who arguably control most policy have not been served by this irrational violence. In the future, I hope the world has some talented and courageous leaders who can find ways to bring about rational long-term solutions to problems without short-term mass murder.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: On the AI front, I looked at an argument that today’s AIs are pushing people toward the political center relative to social media, which is pushing people toward extreme views. This is true even for AIs like Grok that are demonstrably being trained on data that is intentionally biased toward extreme views. I am not confident this will always be the case, as we are already hearing about a trend toward more customization of AI to whatever the tastes of the paying customer are. And…I looked at David Chalmers’s concept of a “philosophical zombie” which displays all the traits of a human being externally but has no consciousness internally. This would seem to describe today’s large language models pretty well, or at least so the majority of us think at the moment. However, I recall Ray Kurzweil’s argument that there is not and never will be a scientific test for consciousness whether animal/vegetable/mineral (some argue plants are conscious on some level), which is simply a secular counterpart to the idea of a soul, and that over time if AIs act conscious in every respect we will gradually accept them as conscious and stop thinking much about it.
