> Read up on transhumanism to see what the stakes are...

Eh. Transhumanism is very good. Every medical intervention that improves or consensually prolongs the life of a human is transhumanist. Our natural state is incredibly godawful. [0] The best future for humanity is one where one need not work, need not get sick, need not die... where all of the awful parts of life are optional.

What the TESCREAL cult is peddling is incredibly bad. They have folks believing that not only are they ushering in the arrival of Robot Jesus, that nearly any terrible thing done now to speed up the project is justifiable because it hastens Robot Jesus's arrival. In actuality, the only thing that's hastened is the accumulation of wealth of awful humans like Altman, Amodei, Huang, and many others.

The core tenant of Rationalism [1] is great. It's just a huge shame that so many of the folks who were attracted to the philosophy ended up being so bad at learning how to do the one thing it tries to get you to do.

[0] Remember that it wasn't that long ago that humans had a 50/50 chance of dying before the age of five!

[1] Your brain is really bad at thinking carefully. You have to train yourself to think carefully despite how shitty your brain is at it. You will inevitably fail at this, but that's no reason to stop trying to get better at it.

▲ Exoristos 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> ... one need not work, need not get sick, need not die[.]

One of these is not like the others.

> Your brain is really bad at thinking carefully. You have to train yourself to think carefully despite how shitty your brain is at it.

What is "you" in this scenario if not your brain?

	▲	simoncion 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> One of these is not like the others. Nah. All three are covered by my original statement: `The best future for humanity is one where one need not work, need not get sick, need not die... where all of the awful parts of life are optional.` Work, sickness, and death are -for the most part- all things that are awful. As it turns out, there are many more than three awful aspects to being a present-day human. For brevity's sake, I picked three that seemed to me to be most likely to be widely understood and widely considered to be awful. > What is "you" in this scenario if not your brain? That's an excellent question. Are we the blob of fat that hangs out in our skull, our entire body (because of how changes in "distant" parts of it affect what our brain does), the parts of the patterns in our brain that seems to correspond to our conscious mind, some other thing or things? I am utterly unequipped to answer that question, but hope that we collectively get around to trying in earnest to answer it. Maybe we might even do that before we get around to collectively deciding that it's a catastrophically bad thing for people to go without food and shelter? [0] [0] Given what I see here in SF and elsewhere, it looks like we currently collectively consider it to be somewhere between "Not at all a problem" and "Yeah, maybe we should get around to fixing that some day. I _guess_.".

▲ jacquesm 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, and communism is great too [1].

[1] in theory.

	▲	simoncion 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And anarchy, yeah. The difference with those is that they're systems of governance... which means that they must scale if they're to be applied to large groups of people. And -well- they scale very poorly.