I greatly appreciate this small glimpse of what's happening in China, and what could be done there... Last year I drew up a list of slogans for the values of each frontier AI company in America and China, so I could at least have a very crude idea of what takeover might mean in each case. Hopefully that list can soon be replaced with a genuine and much more sophisticated account of what each company thinks it's doing.
forever in second place
This is already how it is between generations, in the natural human life cycle. One generation grows old and weak, and eventually falls irreversibly behind the next, whether or not it achieved its dreams.
In a world run by human-friendly superintelligence, there is some possibility that matured superintelligences will allow individual humans to also develop into superintelligences, in a process analogous to child-rearing. So there's your chance at regaining parity with the new gods.
I've never been to South Africa, my concept of Cape Town was limited to "the hometown of Die Antwoord", and I'd never even heard of Table Mountain before this. I did find a cultural history of the mountain which associates it with Jan Smuts, and this year is the 100th anniversary of his invention of the word "holism", so that's interesting. I also learned that it carries the world's richest flower ecosystem.
But you underestimate how changed the world of 2238 (or 2380) could be. There may be no human beings at all, just new kinds of entities living and serving at the pleasure of a solar-system-spanning superintelligence descended from Elon Musk - for example.
One consequence of posthuman migration into outer space is that eclipses become a local phenomenon again. In the present, eclipses have a pan-human significance because we all live on Earth and see the same moon, even if only some of us are in its shadow. But if there are conscious beings on and around all the planets, and scattered throughout the rest of solar space, then a terrestrial eclipse is just how things look from one minor location in a larger interplanetary civilization.
Still, maybe for 229.5 seconds, the local sensor network and its inhabiting agents will devote themselves to tracking the shadow of Earth's moon as it passes across the mountain, and meditating on its meaning. Maybe they'll write a poem about it in omnimodal neuralese, and broadcast it to the rest of the solar system. And that will mean something in some supraconscious gestalt that we cannot presently imagine.
Among the unexplained jargon in Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep that pertains to theory and practice of creating superintelligence is ablative dissonance ("ablative dissonance was a commonplace of Applied Theology"). It's funny that ablation is now commonplace real-world jargon, for removing part of a deep learning model in order to see what happens. I suppose ablative dissonance in the real world, could refer either to cognitive dissonance in the model caused by removing part of it, or to contradictory evidence arising from different ablation studies...
The US under Trump 2.0 has a new national security concept which understands the world in terms of great powers and their regions of influence. The USA's region is the entire western hemisphere and that's where Greenland is (along with Canada and Venezuela), and the new America will not allow anything in the western hemisphere to be governed from outside the hemisphere. Instead they want to use Greenland however they see fit, e.g. as a base for continental missile defense.
They do not say this openly, but the European Union, I believe, is not regarded as a great power, but as a construct of America's erstwhile liberal empire. The implication is that the nations of Europe will individually end up as satellites of one great power or another (e.g. China, Russia, post-liberal America, or an emergent indigenous European power), or perhaps as non-aligned.
This insouciant territorial claim on Greenland is the flipside of the way in which America is reevaluating its relationship with all other nations on a bilateral basis. Countries which were used to being treated as equals and partners, at least publicly, now find themselves just another entry in a list of new tariffs, and the target of impulsive hostile declarations by Trump and his allies like Vance and Musk.
This does imply that insofar as the norms of the "rules-based order" depended on American backing to have any effect, they are headed for an irrelevance similar to that of the League of Nations in the 1930s. Anything in international relations that depends on America or routes through America will be shaped by mercurial mercantile realpolitik, or whatever the new principles are.
The one complication in this picture is that liberalism still has a big domestic constituency in America, and has a chance of ruling the country again. If the liberals regain power in America, they will be able to rebuild ties with liberals in Canada, the EU, and elsewhere, and reconstitute a version of liberal internationalism at least among themselves, if not for the whole globe.
Where does this archetype of the robot with a screen for a face, knobs for ears, rounded corners, and a small body come from? (I got it too)
I think the people who truly want climate change mitigation, but are pro-nuclear and pro-market, may be unwilling to call Greenpeace an enemy, because they regard the real enemy as those who work to outright deny the problem.
An example closer to home may be Taylor Lorenz's recent video "Tech Billionaires Want Us Dead", which describes the tech tycoons as "pro extinction" because of their AI accelerationism, and frames it all in terms of the TESCREAL narrative. I think it's likely that this kind of opposition to advanced AI, will overwhelm the EA-adjacent form of "Pause AI" activism.
Have you never heard it argued that "terminal values" in an AI are arbitrary?
I kinda want to outline a blog post that starts with a giant list of philosophical dilemmas that AIs will have to think about and come up with answers to
This sounds important, please do it.
I read and watch a lot of political content (too much), and I participate in forums on both sides of American politics. That's the closest I can give to a method. I also have a sporadic geopolitics blog.