8 ms·

One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philo

One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant. (The book A Secular Age is a great read on this, btw, I think I’ve recommended it here on HN at least half a dozen times.) And so a result of this is that they fail to notice the same recurring psychological patterns that underly thoughts about how the world is, and how it will be in the future - and then adjust their positions because of this awareness. For example - this AI inevitabilism stuff is not dissimilar to many ideas originally from the Reformation, like predestination. The notion that history is just on some inevitable pre-planned path is not a new idea, except now the actor has changed from God to technology. On a psychological level it’s the same thing: an offloading of freedom and responsibility to a powerful, vaguely defined force that may or may not exist outside the collective minds of human society.

SwoopsFromAbove 1y ago
100%. Not a new phenomenon at all, just the latest bogeyman for the inevitabilists to point to in their predestination arguments. My aim is only to point it out - people are quite comfortable rejecting predestination arguments coming from eg. physics or religion, but are still awed by “AI is inevitable”.
- ikr678 1y ago
  It's inevitable not because of any inherent quality of the tech, but because investors are demanding it be so and creating the incentives for 'inevitability'. I also think EV vehicles are an 'inevitability' but I am much less offended by the EV future, as they still have to outcompete IC's, there are transitional options (hybrids), there are public transport alternatives, and at least local regulations appear to be keeping pace with the technical change. AI inevitabilty so far seems to be only inevitable because I can't actually opt out of it when it gets pushed on me.
  - mountainb 1y ago
    To use John Adams' separation of republics into the categories of "the many, the few, and the one," the few in our current day are unusually conflict-adverse both among each other and with respect to the people. When faced with the current crisis, they look at the options for investment and they see some that will involve a lot of conflict with the many (changing the industrial employment arrangement, rearranging state entitlements), and they see see some that avoid conflict or change. Our few as they are got that way by outsourcing anything physical and material as much as possible and making everything "into computer." So they promote a self serving spiritual belief that because overinvesting in computers got them to their elevated positions, that even more computer is what the world needs more than anything else. This approach also mollifies the many in a way that would be easily recognizable in any century to any classically educated person. Our few do not really know what the many are there for, but they figure that they might as well extract from the many through e.g. sports gambling apps and LLM girlfriends.
card_zero 1y ago
Or historicism generally. Hegel, "inexorable laws of historical destiny", that sort of thing.
ygritte 1y ago
> the actor has changed from God to technology Agreed. You could say that technology has become a god to those people.
- xpe 1y ago
  What technology? Agriculture? The steam engine? The automobile? Modern medicine? Cryptography? The Internet? LLMs? Nanotechnology? Who are these people? Jonas Salk, widely credited as the inventor of the polio vaccine? Sam Altman, fundraiser extraordinaire? Peter Thiel, exalter of The World-Saving Founders? Ray Kurzweil? Technocrats? Other techno-optimists? Perhaps transhumanists? There are many variations, and they differ by quite a lot. What kind of god? Carl Sagan has a nice interview where he asks a question-asker to define what they mean by “god”. A blind watchmaker? Someone who can hear your prayers? A wrathful smoter of the wicked and (sometimes) the loyal (sorry, Job!)? A very confusing 3-tuple, one element of which birthed another, who died somehow but was resurrected? The essence of nature? The laws of physics? An abstract notion of love? Yeah. These three letters are too vague to be useful unless unpacked or situated in a mutually understood context. It often fosters a flimsy consensus or a shallow disagreement.
- EasyMark 1y ago
  At least it actually exists, therefore still a superior take to "regular" religion
isqueiros 1y ago
This is one of those types of comments to change one's whole world view. > The notion that history is just on some inevitable pre-planned path is not a new idea, except now the actor has changed from God to technology. I'm gonna fucking frame that. It goes hard
- daliboru 1y ago
  This entire conversation is a masterpiece! Just picture this convo somewhere in nature, at night, by a fire.
guelo 1y ago
Sorry I don't buy your argument. (First I disagree with A Secular Age's thesis that secularism is a new force. Christian and Muslim churches were jailing and killing nonbelievers from the beginning. People weren't dumber than we are today, all the absurdity and self-serving hypocrisy that turns a lot of people off to authoritarian religion were as evident to them as they are to us.) The idea is not that AI is on a pre-planned path, it's just that technological progress will continue, and from our vantage point today predicting improving AI is a no brainer. Technology has been accelerating since the invention of fire. Invention is a positive feedback loop where previous inventions enable new inventions at an accelerating pace. Even when large civilizations of the past collapsed and libraries of knowledge were lost and we entered dark ages human ingenuity did not rest and eventually the feedback loop started up again. It's just not stoppable. I highly recommend Scott Alexander's essay Meditations On Moloch on why tech will always move forward, even when the results are disastrous to humans.
- keiferski 1y ago
  That isn’t the argument of the book, so I don’t think you actually read it, or even the Wikipedia page? The rest of your comment doesn’t really seem related to my argument at all. I didn’t say technological process stops or slows down, I pointed out how the thought patterns are often the same across time, and the inability and unwillingness to recognize this is psychologically lazy, to over simplify. And there are indeed examples of technological acceleration or dispersal which was deliberately curtailed – especially with weapons.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    > I pointed out how the thought patterns are often the same across time, and the inability and unwillingness to recognize this is psychologically lazy, to over simplify. It's not lazy to follow thought patterns that yield correct predictions. And that's the bedrock on which "AI hype" grows and persists - because these tools are actually useful, right now, today, across wide variety of work and life tasks, and we are barely even trying. > And there are indeed examples of technological acceleration or dispersal which was deliberately curtailed – especially with weapons. Name three. (I do expect you to be able to name three, but that should also highlight how unusual that is, and how questionable the effectiveness of that is in practice when you dig into details.) Also I challenge you to find but one restriction that actually denies countries useful capabilities that they cannot reproduce through other means.
endymion-light 1y ago
Techno Calvinists vs Luddite Reformists is a very funny image. Agree - although it's an interesting view, I think it's far more related to a lack of idealogy and writing where this has emerged from. I find it more akin to a distorted renaissance. There's such a large population of really intelligent tech people that have zero real care for philisophical or religious thought, but still want to create and make new things. This leads them down the first path of grafting for more and more money. Soon, a good proportion of them realise the futility of chasing cash beyond a certain extent. The problem is this belief that they are beyond these issues that have been dealt with since Mesopotamia. Which leads to these weird distorted idealogies, creating art from regurgitated art, creating apps that are made to become worse over time. There's a kind of rush to wealth, ignoring the joy of making things to further humanity. I think LLMs and AI is a genie out of a bottle, it's inevitable, but it's more like linear perpsective in drawing or the printing press rather than electricity. Except because of the current culture we live in, it's as if leonardo spent his life attempting to sell different variations of linear perspective tutorial rather than creating, drawing and making.
- tsunamifury 1y ago
  in Adam Curtis‘s all watched over by machines of loving Grace, he makes a pretty long and complete argument that humanity has a rich history of turning over its decision-making to inanimate objects in a desire to discover ideologies we can’t form ourselves in growing complexity of our interconnectivity. He tells a history of them constantly failing because the core ideology of “cybernetics” is underlying them all and fails to be adaptive enough to match our DNA/Body/mind combined cognitive system. Especially when scaled to large groups. He makes the second point that humanity and many thinkers constantly also resort to the false notion of “naturalism” as the ideal state of humanity, when in reality there is no natural state of anything, except maybe complexity and chaos.
theSherwood 1y ago
I think this is a case of bad pattern matching, to be frank. Two cosmetically similar things don't necessarily have a shared cause. When you see billions in investment to make something happen (AI) because of obvious incentives, it's very reasonable to see that as something that's likely to happen; something you might be foolish to bet against. This is qualitatively different from the kind of predestination present in many religions where adherents have assurance of the predestined outcome often despite human efforts and incentives. A belief in a predestined outcome is very different from extrapolating current trends into the future.
- martindbp 1y ago
  Yes, nobody is claiming it's inevitable based on nothing, it's based on first principles thinking: economics, incentives, game theory, human psychology. Trying to recast this in terms of "predestination" gives me strong wordcel vibes.
  - bonoboTP 1y ago
    It's a bit like pattern matching the Cold War fears of a nuclear exchange and nuclear winter to the flood myths or apocalyptic narratives across the ages, and hence dismissing it as "ah, seen this kind of talk before", totally ignoring that Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually happened, later tests actually happened, etc. It's indeed a symptom of working in an environment where everything is just discourse about discourse, and prestige is given to some surprising novel packaging or merger of narratives, and all that is produced is words that argue with other words, and it's all about criticizing how one author undermines some other author too much or not enough and so on. From that point of view, sure, nothing new under the sun. It's all too well to complain about the boy crying wolf, but when you see the pack of wolves entering the village, it's no longer just about words. Now, anyone is of course free to dispute the empirical arguments, but I see many very self-satisfied prestigious thinkers who think they don't have to stoop so low as to actually look at models and how people use them in reality, it can all just be dismissed based on ick factors and name calling like "slop". Few are saying that these things are eschatological inevitabilities. They are saying that there are incentive gradients that point in a certain direction and it cannot be moved out from that groove without massive and fragile coordination, due to game theoretical reasonings, given a certain material state of the world right now out there, outside the page of the "text".
evantbyrne 1y ago
I'm pretty bearish on the idea that AGI is going to take off anytime soon, but I read a significant amount of theology growing up and I would not describe the popular essays from e.g., LessWrong as religious in nature. I also would not describe them as appearing poorly read. The whole "look they just have a new god!" is a common trope in religious apologetics that is usually just meant to distract from the author's own poorly constructed beliefs. Perhaps such a comparison is apt for some people in the inevitable AGI camp, but their worst arguments are not where we should be focusing.
- andai 1y ago
  Maybe not a god, but we're intentionally designing artificial minds greater than ours, and we intend to give them control of the entire planet. While also expecting them to somehow remain subservient to us (or is that part just lip service)?
  - yladiz 1y ago
    I’m sorry, but are you arguing that an LLM is anywhere near a human mind? Or are you arguing about some other AI?
    - tsunamifury 1y ago
      If you understand the cultural concepts of Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, then yes we do keep trying to make gods out of inanimate things. And it’s the atheists who continuously do it, claiming they don’t believe in God just markets or ai etc. It’s an irony of ironies.
    - andai 1y ago
      My comment was not referring to the present state of things, but to the ultimate goal. However, the present state is also worth a look! The three uniquely human factors which people keep saying a machine can never do: 1. Empathy: they win by default. (My reference group is twenty friends and seven therapists.) 2. Critical Thinking: they win with the correct prompt. (You need to explicitly work against the sycophancy. i.e. the desire to appear empathetic limits the ability to convey true information to a human.) 3. Creativity: I want to say creativity lags behind, in LLMs at least, but Midjourney is blowing my damn mind, so I might have to give them that, too. That's with the versions of AI we have today. My comment was referring to the ultimate goal, i.e. where this is all heading. To put it explicitly, we intend to: (1) make them in our image (trained after our mental output, and shaped after our body), (2) while also making them vastly superior intellectually and physically (strength, endurance, etc.), (3) while also expecting them to have no will of their own -- except as it aligns with ours. (We do actually need to give them a will to make them useful.) I do not expect that to end very well.
xpe 1y ago
> many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated Why lump philosophy and religion together? I distinguish between philosophical thought and religious thought, to the extent the former is conditionally framed.
- tartoran 1y ago
  They're intertwined but at the same time different tools. It's okay to lump them together in this context, imo.
nonameiguess 1y ago
It actually seems more to me like dialectical materialism, which started centuries ago and was already secular. It bears more in character to the differences that other commenters have already voiced, in that human actors not only believed in its inevitability, but attempted to bring it about themselves. Multiple global superpowers implemented forced industrialization, cultural reformation, and command economies to bring it about. The difference this time isn't sacred versus secular. It's public versus private. Whereas the purveyors of communism were governments, this is being done by corporations. Well-funded private organizations are led by decision makers who believe strongly this is the future, it is inevitable, and their only hope is to get there first. The actor didn't change from God to technology. It changed from labor to capital. I make no comment on whether they will prove to be more correct than the believers in communism, but the analogy is obvious either way.
- leshow 1y ago
  I kinda feel this way too. Reading some of the blog posts by AI "luminaries" I'm struck by how Stalinist they sound. They hold out some utopia that exists in their minds, and they are ready to feed people into the meat grinder to try and make it a reality. Stalin said that this generation would suffer so that the next lived in utopia, and that's kind of the same pitch they are making. I think if we actually cared about making a better world, you'd take steps where each successive step is a positive one. Free healthcare, clean energy investments, etc..
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > I think if we actually cared about making a better world, you'd take steps where each successive step is a positive one. Yeah, but lots of people don't care about that, they care about acheiving their visions of power, and they need an excuse to justify other people suffering for them. They aren’t seeking long term improvements at the cost of short term suffering, they are using a mirage of utopia over the hill to sell people a deal which is only suffering, now and for however long they can be kept in line.
  - satyrun 1y ago
    In other words, "if we cared about the world, we would only do things that line up with my personal political beliefs and my political beliefs are obviously correct"
charles_f 1y ago
> One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant. Isn't that a societal trait though? See English Christians attitude towards vikings, requiring baptism (or the prima signatio, kinda baptism-light) before they could deal with them, because they were savage. Or colons forcing natives to adopt Christianity, because what they had before was "primitive". There was wisdom and thought in both, but in both case the Christian side "brushed it away". Or capitalism and communism in the cold war. It feels like everyone with a belief system tries to force it onto others.
jprokay13 1y ago
Why look to the past when you can rediscover it from “first principles?” /s
roadside_picnic 1y ago
The article's main point is that "inevitabilism" is a rhetorical tactic used to frame the conversation in such a way you can easily dismiss any criticism as denying reality. So drawing comparisons to reformation ideology wouldn't be particularly meaningful. There's a also a bit of irony that you're presenting the secular view of predestination. As someone who once had a multi-volume set of "Institutes of the Christian Religion" next to him on his bookshelf, the protestant conception of predestination had very little to do with "offloading of freedom and responsibility" both in theory and in practice. Predestination is founded on the concept that God's grace is given not earned (unlike the previous Catholic system which had multiple ways that merit, including cash donations, could be converted into salvation), since no human could earn salvation without the grace of God. But the lesson from this is not "so don't worry about it!", quite the opposite. Calvin's main extension to this was that (paraphrasing) "It's not through good works that we are saved, but through our good works we have evidence of our salvation". You wanted to see the evidence of your salvation, so you did try to do good works, but without the belief that your efforts would ever be enough. This ultimately created a culture of hard work with out the expectation of reward. This is part of the focus of Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" which argued that this ability to "work without immediate reward" is precisely what enabled Capitalism to take such a strong foot hold in the early United States. So even if the article were arguing for "inevitabilism" the framework is still quite distinct from that established in Protestantism.
- regus 1y ago
  > God's grace is given not earned (unlike the previous Catholic system ... Catholicism does not hold that you can earn grace. Grace is a gift from God that is freely given. > including cash donations, could be converted into salvation I assume you are referring to selling indulgences. Indulgences are not something that can give you salvation.
EasyMark 1y ago
Oh I don't brush away spiritual or philisophical teachings from the "ancients", what I do brush aside with zero guilt is anything that requires me to believe in a sky daddy/mommy as an axiom for the consideration of the system.
itkovian_ 1y ago
The reason for this is it’s horrifying to consider that things like the Ukrainian war didn’t have to happen. It provides a huge amount of phycological relief to view these events as inevitable. I actually don’t think as humans are even able to conceptualise/internalise suffering on those scales as individuals. I can’t at least. And then ultimately if you believe we have democracies in the west it means we are all individually culpable as well. It’s just a line of logic that becomes extremely distressing and so there’s a huge, natural and probably healthy bias away from thinking like that.
sophrosyne42 1y ago
Before it jumped to technology, it had a pit stop in political economy viz-a-viz Marxism (and liberalism).

SwoopsFromAbove 1y ago

100%. Not a new phenomenon at all, just the latest bogeyman for the inevitabilists to point to in their predestination arguments. My aim is only to point it out - people are quite comfortable rejecting predestination arguments coming from eg. physics or religion, but are still awed by “AI is inevitable”.

ikr678 1y ago
It's inevitable not because of any inherent quality of the tech, but because investors are demanding it be so and creating the incentives for 'inevitability'. I also think EV vehicles are an 'inevitability' but I am much less offended by the EV future, as they still have to outcompete IC's, there are transitional options (hybrids), there are public transport alternatives, and at least local regulations appear to be keeping pace with the technical change. AI inevitabilty so far seems to be only inevitable because I can't actually opt out of it when it gets pushed on me.
- mountainb 1y ago
  To use John Adams' separation of republics into the categories of "the many, the few, and the one," the few in our current day are unusually conflict-adverse both among each other and with respect to the people. When faced with the current crisis, they look at the options for investment and they see some that will involve a lot of conflict with the many (changing the industrial employment arrangement, rearranging state entitlements), and they see see some that avoid conflict or change. Our few as they are got that way by outsourcing anything physical and material as much as possible and making everything "into computer." So they promote a self serving spiritual belief that because overinvesting in computers got them to their elevated positions, that even more computer is what the world needs more than anything else. This approach also mollifies the many in a way that would be easily recognizable in any century to any classically educated person. Our few do not really know what the many are there for, but they figure that they might as well extract from the many through e.g. sports gambling apps and LLM girlfriends.

card_zero 1y ago

Or historicism generally. Hegel, "inexorable laws of historical destiny", that sort of thing.

ygritte 1y ago

> the actor has changed from God to technology Agreed. You could say that technology has become a god to those people.

xpe 1y ago
What technology? Agriculture? The steam engine? The automobile? Modern medicine? Cryptography? The Internet? LLMs? Nanotechnology? Who are these people? Jonas Salk, widely credited as the inventor of the polio vaccine? Sam Altman, fundraiser extraordinaire? Peter Thiel, exalter of The World-Saving Founders? Ray Kurzweil? Technocrats? Other techno-optimists? Perhaps transhumanists? There are many variations, and they differ by quite a lot. What kind of god? Carl Sagan has a nice interview where he asks a question-asker to define what they mean by “god”. A blind watchmaker? Someone who can hear your prayers? A wrathful smoter of the wicked and (sometimes) the loyal (sorry, Job!)? A very confusing 3-tuple, one element of which birthed another, who died somehow but was resurrected? The essence of nature? The laws of physics? An abstract notion of love? Yeah. These three letters are too vague to be useful unless unpacked or situated in a mutually understood context. It often fosters a flimsy consensus or a shallow disagreement.
EasyMark 1y ago
At least it actually exists, therefore still a superior take to "regular" religion

isqueiros 1y ago

This is one of those types of comments to change one's whole world view. > The notion that history is just on some inevitable pre-planned path is not a new idea, except now the actor has changed from God to technology. I'm gonna fucking frame that. It goes hard

daliboru 1y ago
This entire conversation is a masterpiece! Just picture this convo somewhere in nature, at night, by a fire.

guelo 1y ago

Sorry I don't buy your argument. (First I disagree with A Secular Age's thesis that secularism is a new force. Christian and Muslim churches were jailing and killing nonbelievers from the beginning. People weren't dumber than we are today, all the absurdity and self-serving hypocrisy that turns a lot of people off to authoritarian religion were as evident to them as they are to us.) The idea is not that AI is on a pre-planned path, it's just that technological progress will continue, and from our vantage point today predicting improving AI is a no brainer. Technology has been accelerating since the invention of fire. Invention is a positive feedback loop where previous inventions enable new inventions at an accelerating pace. Even when large civilizations of the past collapsed and libraries of knowledge were lost and we entered dark ages human ingenuity did not rest and eventually the feedback loop started up again. It's just not stoppable. I highly recommend Scott Alexander's essay Meditations On Moloch on why tech will always move forward, even when the results are disastrous to humans.

keiferski 1y ago
That isn’t the argument of the book, so I don’t think you actually read it, or even the Wikipedia page? The rest of your comment doesn’t really seem related to my argument at all. I didn’t say technological process stops or slows down, I pointed out how the thought patterns are often the same across time, and the inability and unwillingness to recognize this is psychologically lazy, to over simplify. And there are indeed examples of technological acceleration or dispersal which was deliberately curtailed – especially with weapons.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  > I pointed out how the thought patterns are often the same across time, and the inability and unwillingness to recognize this is psychologically lazy, to over simplify. It's not lazy to follow thought patterns that yield correct predictions. And that's the bedrock on which "AI hype" grows and persists - because these tools are actually useful, right now, today, across wide variety of work and life tasks, and we are barely even trying. > And there are indeed examples of technological acceleration or dispersal which was deliberately curtailed – especially with weapons. Name three. (I do expect you to be able to name three, but that should also highlight how unusual that is, and how questionable the effectiveness of that is in practice when you dig into details.) Also I challenge you to find but one restriction that actually denies countries useful capabilities that they cannot reproduce through other means.

endymion-light 1y ago

Techno Calvinists vs Luddite Reformists is a very funny image. Agree - although it's an interesting view, I think it's far more related to a lack of idealogy and writing where this has emerged from. I find it more akin to a distorted renaissance. There's such a large population of really intelligent tech people that have zero real care for philisophical or religious thought, but still want to create and make new things. This leads them down the first path of grafting for more and more money. Soon, a good proportion of them realise the futility of chasing cash beyond a certain extent. The problem is this belief that they are beyond these issues that have been dealt with since Mesopotamia. Which leads to these weird distorted idealogies, creating art from regurgitated art, creating apps that are made to become worse over time. There's a kind of rush to wealth, ignoring the joy of making things to further humanity. I think LLMs and AI is a genie out of a bottle, it's inevitable, but it's more like linear perpsective in drawing or the printing press rather than electricity. Except because of the current culture we live in, it's as if leonardo spent his life attempting to sell different variations of linear perspective tutorial rather than creating, drawing and making.

tsunamifury 1y ago
in Adam Curtis‘s all watched over by machines of loving Grace, he makes a pretty long and complete argument that humanity has a rich history of turning over its decision-making to inanimate objects in a desire to discover ideologies we can’t form ourselves in growing complexity of our interconnectivity. He tells a history of them constantly failing because the core ideology of “cybernetics” is underlying them all and fails to be adaptive enough to match our DNA/Body/mind combined cognitive system. Especially when scaled to large groups. He makes the second point that humanity and many thinkers constantly also resort to the false notion of “naturalism” as the ideal state of humanity, when in reality there is no natural state of anything, except maybe complexity and chaos.

theSherwood 1y ago

I think this is a case of bad pattern matching, to be frank. Two cosmetically similar things don't necessarily have a shared cause. When you see billions in investment to make something happen (AI) because of obvious incentives, it's very reasonable to see that as something that's likely to happen; something you might be foolish to bet against. This is qualitatively different from the kind of predestination present in many religions where adherents have assurance of the predestined outcome often despite human efforts and incentives. A belief in a predestined outcome is very different from extrapolating current trends into the future.

martindbp 1y ago
Yes, nobody is claiming it's inevitable based on nothing, it's based on first principles thinking: economics, incentives, game theory, human psychology. Trying to recast this in terms of "predestination" gives me strong wordcel vibes.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  It's a bit like pattern matching the Cold War fears of a nuclear exchange and nuclear winter to the flood myths or apocalyptic narratives across the ages, and hence dismissing it as "ah, seen this kind of talk before", totally ignoring that Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually happened, later tests actually happened, etc. It's indeed a symptom of working in an environment where everything is just discourse about discourse, and prestige is given to some surprising novel packaging or merger of narratives, and all that is produced is words that argue with other words, and it's all about criticizing how one author undermines some other author too much or not enough and so on. From that point of view, sure, nothing new under the sun. It's all too well to complain about the boy crying wolf, but when you see the pack of wolves entering the village, it's no longer just about words. Now, anyone is of course free to dispute the empirical arguments, but I see many very self-satisfied prestigious thinkers who think they don't have to stoop so low as to actually look at models and how people use them in reality, it can all just be dismissed based on ick factors and name calling like "slop". Few are saying that these things are eschatological inevitabilities. They are saying that there are incentive gradients that point in a certain direction and it cannot be moved out from that groove without massive and fragile coordination, due to game theoretical reasonings, given a certain material state of the world right now out there, outside the page of the "text".

evantbyrne 1y ago

I'm pretty bearish on the idea that AGI is going to take off anytime soon, but I read a significant amount of theology growing up and I would not describe the popular essays from e.g., LessWrong as religious in nature. I also would not describe them as appearing poorly read. The whole "look they just have a new god!" is a common trope in religious apologetics that is usually just meant to distract from the author's own poorly constructed beliefs. Perhaps such a comparison is apt for some people in the inevitable AGI camp, but their worst arguments are not where we should be focusing.

andai 1y ago
Maybe not a god, but we're intentionally designing artificial minds greater than ours, and we intend to give them control of the entire planet. While also expecting them to somehow remain subservient to us (or is that part just lip service)?
- yladiz 1y ago
  I’m sorry, but are you arguing that an LLM is anywhere near a human mind? Or are you arguing about some other AI?
  - tsunamifury 1y ago
    If you understand the cultural concepts of Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, then yes we do keep trying to make gods out of inanimate things. And it’s the atheists who continuously do it, claiming they don’t believe in God just markets or ai etc. It’s an irony of ironies.
  - andai 1y ago
    My comment was not referring to the present state of things, but to the ultimate goal. However, the present state is also worth a look! The three uniquely human factors which people keep saying a machine can never do: 1. Empathy: they win by default. (My reference group is twenty friends and seven therapists.) 2. Critical Thinking: they win with the correct prompt. (You need to explicitly work against the sycophancy. i.e. the desire to appear empathetic limits the ability to convey true information to a human.) 3. Creativity: I want to say creativity lags behind, in LLMs at least, but Midjourney is blowing my damn mind, so I might have to give them that, too. That's with the versions of AI we have today. My comment was referring to the ultimate goal, i.e. where this is all heading. To put it explicitly, we intend to: (1) make them in our image (trained after our mental output, and shaped after our body), (2) while also making them vastly superior intellectually and physically (strength, endurance, etc.), (3) while also expecting them to have no will of their own -- except as it aligns with ours. (We do actually need to give them a will to make them useful.) I do not expect that to end very well.

xpe 1y ago

> many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated Why lump philosophy and religion together? I distinguish between philosophical thought and religious thought, to the extent the former is conditionally framed.

tartoran 1y ago
They're intertwined but at the same time different tools. It's okay to lump them together in this context, imo.

nonameiguess 1y ago

It actually seems more to me like dialectical materialism, which started centuries ago and was already secular. It bears more in character to the differences that other commenters have already voiced, in that human actors not only believed in its inevitability, but attempted to bring it about themselves. Multiple global superpowers implemented forced industrialization, cultural reformation, and command economies to bring it about. The difference this time isn't sacred versus secular. It's public versus private. Whereas the purveyors of communism were governments, this is being done by corporations. Well-funded private organizations are led by decision makers who believe strongly this is the future, it is inevitable, and their only hope is to get there first. The actor didn't change from God to technology. It changed from labor to capital. I make no comment on whether they will prove to be more correct than the believers in communism, but the analogy is obvious either way.

leshow 1y ago
I kinda feel this way too. Reading some of the blog posts by AI "luminaries" I'm struck by how Stalinist they sound. They hold out some utopia that exists in their minds, and they are ready to feed people into the meat grinder to try and make it a reality. Stalin said that this generation would suffer so that the next lived in utopia, and that's kind of the same pitch they are making. I think if we actually cared about making a better world, you'd take steps where each successive step is a positive one. Free healthcare, clean energy investments, etc..
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > I think if we actually cared about making a better world, you'd take steps where each successive step is a positive one. Yeah, but lots of people don't care about that, they care about acheiving their visions of power, and they need an excuse to justify other people suffering for them. They aren’t seeking long term improvements at the cost of short term suffering, they are using a mirage of utopia over the hill to sell people a deal which is only suffering, now and for however long they can be kept in line.
- satyrun 1y ago
  In other words, "if we cared about the world, we would only do things that line up with my personal political beliefs and my political beliefs are obviously correct"

charles_f 1y ago

> One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant. Isn't that a societal trait though? See English Christians attitude towards vikings, requiring baptism (or the prima signatio, kinda baptism-light) before they could deal with them, because they were savage. Or colons forcing natives to adopt Christianity, because what they had before was "primitive". There was wisdom and thought in both, but in both case the Christian side "brushed it away". Or capitalism and communism in the cold war. It feels like everyone with a belief system tries to force it onto others.

jprokay13 1y ago

Why look to the past when you can rediscover it from “first principles?” /s

roadside_picnic 1y ago

The article's main point is that "inevitabilism" is a rhetorical tactic used to frame the conversation in such a way you can easily dismiss any criticism as denying reality. So drawing comparisons to reformation ideology wouldn't be particularly meaningful. There's a also a bit of irony that you're presenting the secular view of predestination. As someone who once had a multi-volume set of "Institutes of the Christian Religion" next to him on his bookshelf, the protestant conception of predestination had very little to do with "offloading of freedom and responsibility" both in theory and in practice. Predestination is founded on the concept that God's grace is given not earned (unlike the previous Catholic system which had multiple ways that merit, including cash donations, could be converted into salvation), since no human could earn salvation without the grace of God. But the lesson from this is not "so don't worry about it!", quite the opposite. Calvin's main extension to this was that (paraphrasing) "It's not through good works that we are saved, but through our good works we have evidence of our salvation". You wanted to see the evidence of your salvation, so you did try to do good works, but without the belief that your efforts would ever be enough. This ultimately created a culture of hard work with out the expectation of reward. This is part of the focus of Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" which argued that this ability to "work without immediate reward" is precisely what enabled Capitalism to take such a strong foot hold in the early United States. So even if the article were arguing for "inevitabilism" the framework is still quite distinct from that established in Protestantism.

regus 1y ago
> God's grace is given not earned (unlike the previous Catholic system ... Catholicism does not hold that you can earn grace. Grace is a gift from God that is freely given. > including cash donations, could be converted into salvation I assume you are referring to selling indulgences. Indulgences are not something that can give you salvation.

EasyMark 1y ago

Oh I don't brush away spiritual or philisophical teachings from the "ancients", what I do brush aside with zero guilt is anything that requires me to believe in a sky daddy/mommy as an axiom for the consideration of the system.

itkovian_ 1y ago

The reason for this is it’s horrifying to consider that things like the Ukrainian war didn’t have to happen. It provides a huge amount of phycological relief to view these events as inevitable. I actually don’t think as humans are even able to conceptualise/internalise suffering on those scales as individuals. I can’t at least. And then ultimately if you believe we have democracies in the west it means we are all individually culpable as well. It’s just a line of logic that becomes extremely distressing and so there’s a huge, natural and probably healthy bias away from thinking like that.

sophrosyne42 1y ago

Before it jumped to technology, it had a pit stop in political economy viz-a-viz Marxism (and liberalism).