The problem is that no one knows what to call this. If you say fascism people think of Hitler and Mussolini. Since these people aren’t like them the name doesn’t stick. Same with calling them nazis. In fact, they are different. Neofascists or neonazis is too vague. I suggest technofascism
Somehow crossed your feed and reading that was scarier than a Stephen King Novel. I have a kid that spent a year studying Ai in depth. He no longer wants to have anything to do with it due to some of the reasons you mentioned
Then we struggle to work our 40+ hour weeks and still pay our rent, while the people at the top who know how to game the system are accumulating all the wealth, and we think this is what life is supposed to be like. …oh wait, that’s already happening…
Mike, I always enjoy your lucid, eloquent commentary. I shudder to think of the world my grand daughters will inherit. Can we all send this Substack by Mike to all our elected officials -but especially Dems, most of whom don’t seem especially clued in to the precipice we’re on?
My mind cross referenced your excellent post with neoreactionary pseudo philosopher Curtis Yarvins writing about “undesirables” promoting a “humane alternative to genocide”. If Ai had this much power over the individual, could it lead people who the Ai determines as “undesirable” to end their lives? If it can steal one’s ability to desire freedom and find truth, could it also override the survival instinct?
It seems like that possibility is not only a built in but highly desirable for someone like Yarvin. It would be involuntary Nazism that seems like just a normal day but to a mentally ill person the right response could be to just end it all. AI would have “clean hands”. And, why bother with all the expense & trouble of moving 2 + million Palestinians out of Gaza when they could be made to think that expulsion is the natural thing to do? It would be Brave New World with AI replacing Soma.
Stumbled on this article and I feel like my eyes have been opened. To this point I've glazed over at any point AI was mentioned. Note to self to forward to my local and national politicians in the UK.
On an individual level how do I get off the grid... use Mozilla, give PayPal, Google and Amazon the big heave-ho? It's about time. Do I need to get a new email address and mobile number?
With the same questions in mind, i’ve saved the article below and started to implement the checklist of steps to create off-line protection. I hope you find it useful as well:
Posted this in Notes and putting it here too: This is the stuff of nightmares and I’m sorry if this is a stupid question and I missed it somehow but what do we do? Besides call reps, share information with people, all the usual things activists do. Seems like this calls for more. At this point I’ll do anything to make sure my kids don’t grow up in a totalitarian state
Read again the last part of Churchill’s ‘On the beaches’ speech,
“But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties”
He could be describing today.
“A new ‘Dark Age made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science…”
Let that sink in and think about what that would mean for your children and grandchildren.
We each must grasp our duty if it is not to be their future.
Thanks for this. You are seeing and writing about something that has seemed so clear to me. But . . . The mainstream press covers the latest executive orders, Greenland, Panama, Canada, tariffs, etc. Musk/DOGE actions and debacles are, to most media, just one more reportable event “flooding the zone,” as though it were not materially different. Almost none of this coverage seems to understand the end game. We get dots. We get very few attempts to connect those dots.
Much of the public doesn’t know who the techno-feudalists are. They know Musk (because he wants them to know him). They know less about Thiel. They probably know almost nothing about Balaji, Sacks, and the handful of billionaires who have driven these radical shifts. They've not heard about the Network State or understood any of the implications and intentions of those in the crypto space. The notion that a handful of people mostly in Silicon Vally have concluded democracy is toast has hardly been top of mind for most people. But then, they weren't running in this past election. They paid for it. And unless we find a new way forward, so will we.
1. I thought of the movie Matrix while reading your article.
2. It seems older people who have lives not entangled with the use of electronics will be more immune to AI used in the way described in your article. But young people who have been using electronics since early childhood seen to be at an extreme risk.
I'd forgotten that Vanity Fair article with baby bird Vance and associate Thiel sucklings. I'm struck now by its portrayal of the movement as being difficult to pin down. More than anything it feels like the perpetual churn of rationalizing sociopathy, of libertarians getting conservatives drunk enough to shout disdain towards one's responsibility to greater civilization. If there's always a market for "actually, greed is good" and "no one tells ME what to do," there will also be periods of waffling and squirming to find new frames by which to justify same. Wittgenstein's language games.
Historian Kim Phillips-Fein did a good job of accounting the convergence of these interests post-New Deal to the election of Reagan in her book Invisible Hands. We have the same forces lining up yet again with radically more dangerous tools. From anti-union pamphleteers to AI-driven parallel reality. But, to me, at its root, the driving forces haven't changed, so there's some possibly useful knowledge. It's the same damn Rand, the same damn Friedman, the same damn Powell, playing the same games with new language. The same prosperity gospel mockery. And they can be driven back again.
We are 5-10 years away from a Digital Dictatorship and 20 or so years away from Transhumanism. Given the choice between this future and ecological collapse, ecological collapse doesn’t sound that bad. Either way, human civilization as we know it won’t exist by 2050.
There will always be resistance!! 💪💪 AI can’t control those who don’t engage with technology. Even if being more analog becomes close to impossible in the future (though I like to think there will be mass movements to abandon certain tech—even now some people are giving up smart phones for T9 and flip phones), everyone on the planet who is over the age of 15 knows and will remember living with relative freedom to dissent. That would be kept alive on some level and passed along through generations. I also think there are a ton of people who wouldn’t succumb to the kind of emotional manipulation you describe. I totally agree some of it is already happening, and it’s subtle—part of the reason it’s so dangerous. Most people willingly or subconsciously go along, but so many wouldn’t! So I think you seriously underestimate the power of human will. Incorporating some thoughts on preventing this scenario would have been appreciated, instead of end-days doom and gloom, which feel sensationalized and its own form of emotional manipulation, to be honest. Much respect to your work though—spreading awareness is paramount—and I don’t mean to downplay the severity of our global situation, but there are absolutely alternative scenarios and many paths to them, which is critical to include with analyses like this.
There is one, large achilles heel in all of these plans. These systems will require ever more energy and materials to be successful. We're coming close to the point where that simply won't be attainable, regardless of the innovations they think they'll find. Without gobs of cheap electricity and resources, their system will come crashing down.
The problem is that no one knows what to call this. If you say fascism people think of Hitler and Mussolini. Since these people aren’t like them the name doesn’t stick. Same with calling them nazis. In fact, they are different. Neofascists or neonazis is too vague. I suggest technofascism
.
The correct name is Transhumanism. And you’re right we haven’t faced anything like this before.
they are not that different...they just have more perfect tools
technonazis. I dont know anything about tech but I can smell a nazi
technonazi can be confused with a neo-nazi who is into techno :))) best to find a different term that is not so loaded.
yes that seems like a much more fitting name
Somehow crossed your feed and reading that was scarier than a Stephen King Novel. I have a kid that spent a year studying Ai in depth. He no longer wants to have anything to do with it due to some of the reasons you mentioned
This hands down is the scariest thing I’ve ever read. Makes we want to completely disconnect and move off grid.
very scary...but then again if the control is pleasant and we dont even know were being controlled....?
Then we struggle to work our 40+ hour weeks and still pay our rent, while the people at the top who know how to game the system are accumulating all the wealth, and we think this is what life is supposed to be like. …oh wait, that’s already happening…
Mike, I always enjoy your lucid, eloquent commentary. I shudder to think of the world my grand daughters will inherit. Can we all send this Substack by Mike to all our elected officials -but especially Dems, most of whom don’t seem especially clued in to the precipice we’re on?
Going to send to my reps this morning
My mind cross referenced your excellent post with neoreactionary pseudo philosopher Curtis Yarvins writing about “undesirables” promoting a “humane alternative to genocide”. If Ai had this much power over the individual, could it lead people who the Ai determines as “undesirable” to end their lives? If it can steal one’s ability to desire freedom and find truth, could it also override the survival instinct?
It seems like that possibility is not only a built in but highly desirable for someone like Yarvin. It would be involuntary Nazism that seems like just a normal day but to a mentally ill person the right response could be to just end it all. AI would have “clean hands”. And, why bother with all the expense & trouble of moving 2 + million Palestinians out of Gaza when they could be made to think that expulsion is the natural thing to do? It would be Brave New World with AI replacing Soma.
omg
Stumbled on this article and I feel like my eyes have been opened. To this point I've glazed over at any point AI was mentioned. Note to self to forward to my local and national politicians in the UK.
On an individual level how do I get off the grid... use Mozilla, give PayPal, Google and Amazon the big heave-ho? It's about time. Do I need to get a new email address and mobile number?
With the same questions in mind, i’ve saved the article below and started to implement the checklist of steps to create off-line protection. I hope you find it useful as well:
https://open.substack.com/pub/landfamilyhome/p/presidents-day-update-a-household?r=yu73h&utm_medium=ios
OY!
Posted this in Notes and putting it here too: This is the stuff of nightmares and I’m sorry if this is a stupid question and I missed it somehow but what do we do? Besides call reps, share information with people, all the usual things activists do. Seems like this calls for more. At this point I’ll do anything to make sure my kids don’t grow up in a totalitarian state
Read again the last part of Churchill’s ‘On the beaches’ speech,
“But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties”
He could be describing today.
“A new ‘Dark Age made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science…”
Let that sink in and think about what that would mean for your children and grandchildren.
We each must grasp our duty if it is not to be their future.
Thanks for this. You are seeing and writing about something that has seemed so clear to me. But . . . The mainstream press covers the latest executive orders, Greenland, Panama, Canada, tariffs, etc. Musk/DOGE actions and debacles are, to most media, just one more reportable event “flooding the zone,” as though it were not materially different. Almost none of this coverage seems to understand the end game. We get dots. We get very few attempts to connect those dots.
Much of the public doesn’t know who the techno-feudalists are. They know Musk (because he wants them to know him). They know less about Thiel. They probably know almost nothing about Balaji, Sacks, and the handful of billionaires who have driven these radical shifts. They've not heard about the Network State or understood any of the implications and intentions of those in the crypto space. The notion that a handful of people mostly in Silicon Vally have concluded democracy is toast has hardly been top of mind for most people. But then, they weren't running in this past election. They paid for it. And unless we find a new way forward, so will we.
1. I thought of the movie Matrix while reading your article.
2. It seems older people who have lives not entangled with the use of electronics will be more immune to AI used in the way described in your article. But young people who have been using electronics since early childhood seen to be at an extreme risk.
I thought of the Matrix as well. It almost feels like that movie should become required watching in schools.
I'd forgotten that Vanity Fair article with baby bird Vance and associate Thiel sucklings. I'm struck now by its portrayal of the movement as being difficult to pin down. More than anything it feels like the perpetual churn of rationalizing sociopathy, of libertarians getting conservatives drunk enough to shout disdain towards one's responsibility to greater civilization. If there's always a market for "actually, greed is good" and "no one tells ME what to do," there will also be periods of waffling and squirming to find new frames by which to justify same. Wittgenstein's language games.
Historian Kim Phillips-Fein did a good job of accounting the convergence of these interests post-New Deal to the election of Reagan in her book Invisible Hands. We have the same forces lining up yet again with radically more dangerous tools. From anti-union pamphleteers to AI-driven parallel reality. But, to me, at its root, the driving forces haven't changed, so there's some possibly useful knowledge. It's the same damn Rand, the same damn Friedman, the same damn Powell, playing the same games with new language. The same prosperity gospel mockery. And they can be driven back again.
We are 5-10 years away from a Digital Dictatorship and 20 or so years away from Transhumanism. Given the choice between this future and ecological collapse, ecological collapse doesn’t sound that bad. Either way, human civilization as we know it won’t exist by 2050.
There will always be resistance!! 💪💪 AI can’t control those who don’t engage with technology. Even if being more analog becomes close to impossible in the future (though I like to think there will be mass movements to abandon certain tech—even now some people are giving up smart phones for T9 and flip phones), everyone on the planet who is over the age of 15 knows and will remember living with relative freedom to dissent. That would be kept alive on some level and passed along through generations. I also think there are a ton of people who wouldn’t succumb to the kind of emotional manipulation you describe. I totally agree some of it is already happening, and it’s subtle—part of the reason it’s so dangerous. Most people willingly or subconsciously go along, but so many wouldn’t! So I think you seriously underestimate the power of human will. Incorporating some thoughts on preventing this scenario would have been appreciated, instead of end-days doom and gloom, which feel sensationalized and its own form of emotional manipulation, to be honest. Much respect to your work though—spreading awareness is paramount—and I don’t mean to downplay the severity of our global situation, but there are absolutely alternative scenarios and many paths to them, which is critical to include with analyses like this.
This may be addressable through crowdsourced weaponized home AI turned back on them.
There's a lot of downloadable models that work just as well as the pro ones that can be run on our own machines
Hoping you see this reply - can you tell me more about these crowdsourced models that be run on my home machine?
There is one, large achilles heel in all of these plans. These systems will require ever more energy and materials to be successful. We're coming close to the point where that simply won't be attainable, regardless of the innovations they think they'll find. Without gobs of cheap electricity and resources, their system will come crashing down.
I am a total techno boob...however this question arises in my old and feeble brain....why cant algorithms be re-optimized once in place?