Hello. In... 3 hours at 3pm ET, we're going to get together and discuss chapters 5 & 6 of The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán.

(I don't really have much to say about Vance or chapter 5 because while I think the chapter is interesting, it's really only interesting to me inasmuch as this chapter illustrates how Peter Thiel can (and did) pick kind of any unremarkable guy who sends him a flattering email in 2011, and then mobilize resources and use his network and capital to transform Vance - or, and I cannot stress this enough, any unremarkable guy - into a useful tool. But I would totally welcome contrary comments today if anyone finds JD Vance interesting.)

Chapter 6 really hit a bunch of notes for me, and I was surprised and grateful to see how a lot of this comes together into the broader project of AI that I've described in the past as a political or ideological project rather than a technical one. I was especially impressed by the fact that he clocked that this project ("Artificial Intelligence") has been going on since arguably at least the mid-20th century, and that critically nobody today would really recognize that as AI as we understand it today (indeed, I would say that even today some of the less critical researchers/major figures of AI would strain a little bit to have a productive conversation with the people who were working on nominally the same project in the 60s and 70s... but that's my maybe lukewarm take).

Also, unfortunately, the timing of this chapter is really relevant to discourse, yet again. Durán uncannily writes on page 175 about how...

some AI critics obsess over a hypothetical threat of a "godlike" superintelligence, but AI already functions as an engine of scaled destruction—supercharging environmental ruin, political polarization, mass surveillance, sexual exploitation, digital disinformation, and economic inequality.

For people (mercifully) not on social media, friend of the reading group Nate Silver (lmao I'm kidding, sorry) apparently has serious beef with The AI Con by Dr. Emily Bender and Dr. Alex Hanna (actual friends of the reading group) basically because Bender and Hanna correctly make an observation in a similar vein to this point Durán makes, that we have laws for the crimes AI companies are committing, and we don't have some totally novel situation where AI is causing mass extinction events or an apocalypse. What we have, genuinely, are military generals committing atrocities using AI to manufacture paragraphs of pretext-shaped slop justifying bombing children. What we have is a federal government and military industrial complex cynically throwing around fears of national security 25 years after 9/11 to build data centers to power AI which, as previously discussed, the military uses to pretextually justify bombing civilians (not a new phenomenon in the US military's history, but an enhancing effect). (again Sophie Hurwitz's work, which people should follow btw).

AI existential risk folks (TESCREALists and whatever Silver is) seem to tend to traffic in fatalistic thinking that severely undermines even the most pragmatic attempts to form coalitions with them on otherwise nominally shared goals (one of several reasons committed organizers tend to advise against such coalitions), and one of the ways we see that is in this apocalyptic, doomed mindset that simultaneously sensationalizes AI with strained, fabulist narratives of "AI civilizations" and secret code written all over the web, as if embedded in the firmament of the sky itself, "with instructions to self-replicate" (or something, my apologies if I've misunderstood what these dumb fucks are on about lately; in my defense, I've been busy).

One of the things I'm really interested in is how Durán's perspective in chapter 6 totally doesn't get mixed up in conflating apocalyptic x-risk doomers with the left (which is a mistake a lot of people apparently make, and indeed a tactic a lot of x-risk folks take to poach people from the left into their cultish anxieties).

A conversation we might continue later today, or later, or not at all lol.

All of this might be the last opportunity while reading this book to vent about this stuff, so I'm taking it while I can.

When you're ready to join at 3p ET, you can click on this link or you can go here:

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

See you then.