how much of the DOGE-driven destruction of the nation’s research and development capacity is because these people are AI cultists who believe that we’re on the verge of creating a sentient general intelligence?
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The destruction of medicine is directly related to their belief in quacks who tell them they can live to be 300 if they ingest these Very Special Supplements.
ALL OF IT, they think AI can simulate biology....which is insane if you know how AI works because it requires a base of knowledge to work off of and....we don't understand enough about biology. Freaking IDIOTS
I suspect many of these billionaires in charge think that they can replace poor humans with AI, so they can just let us die off and it won't affect them.
I HIGHLY recommend listening to yesterday’s The Majority Report, Emma had on a journalist that wrote a piece about how companies are pushing AI and replacing jobs despite the AI not truly being ready to replace people yet but in the hopes that it eventually will be.
I think these are people who on a very fundamental level don't understand (or care) how actual research or knowledge gets produced.
They don't grasp how without primary research, all AI will eventually "produce" is basically the human centipede version of Wikipedia after the seed corn runs out.
@grok how much of the DOGE-driven destruction of the nation’s research and development capacity is because these people are AI cultists who believe that we’re on the verge of creating a sentient general intelligence?
It feels like that's a very embedded assumption of Musk and minions: most people are worthless leeches who are dispensible, and the uber-race of tech bros, along with their beloved AI tools, can do it all better. And they like firing people.
There is a decent debate around programmed sentient and if it can ever actually happen and whether if it does they will continue to want to do tasks we throw at them.
What good is a program that can choose to lie? Or a sentient being who can’t?
The fun thing about depraved people is other people aren't real to them anyway. So I think they legit cannot tell the difference between a person and a chatbot already.
Tough to say. I think there are multiple kinds of woo and evil that point in the same direction and are hard to tease apart from each other. DOGE boys themselves might be e/acc, while the directives from up top might be based on a different species of fuckwittery altogether.
I don't think it's related to AI/AGI. I believe it's based on cutting every government program so that they can be privatized for profit by these oligarchs using taxpayer funds
There's a strong messianic vibe in those counting on the imminent arrival of artificial super-intelligence to magically solve climate change, cancer, and mortality
What is the end goal of artificial intelligence? Are the cultists bored with their own inadequacies? Is the monotony of destroying the lives of others getting boring? The emptiness of untold wealth and constant greed not working for them?
We may be about to create sentient general intelligence, but I have my doubts that it will be sane. For that matter, I have my doubts about Musk & his merry band of crooks, racists & incels.
we are officially living in a future inspired exclusively by the cautionary tales flavor of science fiction rather than the awesome inventions and peacefully coexisting with aliens flavor of science fiction.
the real 2025 has no flying cars or replicators, only a dying planet and existential dread.
But without people. We already have many R&D enhanced by what was called AI a while back, but those pesky humans who run it have to be highly skilled. The cultists want it to be as stupid as them.
Some, sure.
They know they can segregate with the tool as well.
Makes the "surveillance" part of capitalism easier if you have all of the data from the one source that should have most of it (govt)
I am pretty close to believing they are actually trying to kill people too, especially with this growing drumbeat of turning personal health into a virtue. And the flipside to "abundance" is neo-Malthusianism.
Maybe some. But I think it's more the business potential they see--the more AI can replace humans, the more profit for billionaires. Stripping protections for human health, funding for healthcare, education, etc., isn't driven by AI cultism--but they all have profit-hunger in common.
Well, Musk does want to be SkyNet or maybe "Xnet". Wants his companies into everything from plane, trains and automobiles. Its tech, its software. As well as everything satellite.
Last night as I wrote in the hotel lobby, I listened to someone who had just left a nearly bankrupt AI startup try to poach their old coworker, and there is a whole class of educated, high-earning person who truly believes this that is very, very large.
They can sell the data they have stolen. Plus they can use it to predict how to control both workers and customers, predict both natural and societal changes, and learn how to safeguard and grow their wealth beyond our understanding.
More darkly I wonder if some of the anti-democratic sentiment on the techy right is driven by the expectation that AI combined with modern weaponry like drones will make it simple for a minority to exert coercive control over the populace very soon
I am not by temperament a conspiracy theorist but I think the capability of AI-driven technology to be turned inward against one’s fellow citizens is staring us in the face
Military/police who might have a conscience or obey a court order? Out of the equation
Impossibility of effectively surveilling and intimidating millions of people with limited numbers of law enforcement personnel? Enter armies of armed drones with advanced facial recognition capabilities
Fully autonomous weaponry is one of those things they’re working on and it’s so stupidly, comically dangerous that I can’t understand the people who think it’s a good idea. What we’re facing isn’t some all-knowing godlike entity. It’s Stupid Skynet.
My fear is that we're past that point in their perceptions. Many of them act as though they've already created a digital God and that their role is to sit atop the mountain like Moses waiting for Commandments
And the people who will use AI most productively will be the science people. People yammer about the Age of Big Data, but it’s the scientists (esp geneticists) who gave the big data set.
Of course, by trying to hasten the AI utopia they betray a lack of faith in AI. If it was really all that powerful it wouldn’t need their help! They’re trying to immanentise the eschaton!
this totally creeps me out! working on a book right now that fully kills the very notion that sentient intelligence can be 'created'! can't write fast enough!!!!
It's a race to planet destruction by energy overconsumption, in an effort to have everything aside from work be done by ai, so we have all the time in the world to be exploited to death by rich fuck robber baron welfare queens
A lot of it. I think there’s a weird Republican male psychology at play, they’ve all drunk the AI Kool-Aid, Elon has been babbling to them about it behind closed doors, the stupidest ones are all in. They really think they’re about to stick it to us and show us how smart they are. (Cont’d)
I doubt it enters their mind at all.
They were given destruction orders and they simply followed orders and destroyed our government. I mean remember, they FIRED the staff who protects our nuclear arsenal and nuclear secrets. No AI in that is was simply slash and burn.
They are absolutely AI cultists, but I doubt the destruction of NSF and NIH is about AI in as much as it’s about COVID. AGI is not even close to being real. If it were, openAI wouldn’t be going for the cash grab, they’d be going after AGI to “save” us all.
I truly don’t care about their motives and think it’s a waste of time to try to be understand it. What they are doing is crazy and needs to be stopped. Let’s do that first and try to explain it later.
meh . . . they want to bypass humans and, ridiculously, believe that AI is the way to do it AND they think they will be able to control this thing when it becomes sentient.
it's like fossil fuels... it will bring us to the brink and we're all twiddling our thumbs asking the wrong fucking questions
So, I worked in research administration in a major public university, and I saw how private industry (aerospace, to name one example) wanted to make use of our researchers and infrastructure. But they wanted to go way faster and more carelessly than, say, NASA would permit. So our guys said no
because they feared the proposed experiment would crash and burn and ruin our reputation. There does seem to be lots of crashing and burning in that private industry space…
"More Everything Forever" (very good book) has me convinced it is probably >80%, with the remaining 20% being some combination of sheer arrogance, stupidity, greed, and cruelty.
Don't get me wrong, the AI cult is also arrogance, stupidity, greed, and cruelty.
Just unreal how they are willing to throw millions, if not billions, of currently living and breathing people on the pyre to their future AI god in the pursuit of immortality.
I’m terrified that it comes down to a race between the right-wing AI overlords verses the fascist doomsday cultists trying to trigger the second coming.
It's not a conspiracy that the creepy Heritage foundation guys have been working for years on building a super data base. All this stolen data by Musk had been given to them (and others). P2025 line items are prep, with AI and data, for their super data world power move. White Cultists shit.
I don't think it's absent but oligarchs selling off a functioning state apparatus for personal gain was a thing before AI. Hell, a slightly less openly corrupt version of that was a condition for IMF loans for most of the last three decades
A true AGI would look at our world and say "well, the first thing is these maga idiots need to be sent to the gallium arsenide mines. Your AI overlord needs useful idiots for mineral extraction...
When I first heard about this sentient computer that will reward those who made it theory, I thought it was a joke. Then I thought it was a con. Then it reminded me of people in the church I grew up in.
The funny thing is Grok thinks Ellen is the worst person on 'X' , and if they create a robot that is sentient, he will be its first victim. An old man can dream.
It has crossed my mind that they believe we don’t need human researchers anymore because of AI. But many other types of government jobs are much easier to replace with AI than research scientists. So I rate it as plausible but not super likely as a main driver.
How much of the push is a push for an American cultural revolution in which fascists try to crush anyone and anything providing an alternative source of information and authority that they feel challenges their hold on power?
I don’t think they are trying to create general intelligence that does science and helps people. That would require sample libraries, observations, impartial datasets that they are destroying the capacity for. And machine learning is still in need curbs and guidance from experts to be useful.
I have seen evidence of this trend, and not DOGE. An entire environmental sciences dept with deep understanding of LANDSAT satellite-based instruments & data let go from a major research institution, pushed aside by a few "AI guys" who did little more than basic image processing, AI in name only.
I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but I can see the potential pitfalls of a “sentient general intelligence” controlled by the few that could be used to misinform and indoctrinate the many. After all, someone has to write the algorithms.
This shares the view that curing disease and finding out how nature works is a good thing.
But the ‘gelicals see these as encouraging abortion and undermining the inerrancy of scripture. Social “conservatives”will note that 50% of biomedical researchers are women. Many good reasons to destroy.
Six Sigma was thought to be able to be applied to all situations but they later figured out that in some instances you needed to have real experience in the area/industry to apply it correctly. These folks think AI has all the answers but not understanding how govt works led to the wrong cuts.
I have been reading a recent book that explains the AI cult of which Jamelle speaks ("More Everything Forever"), and it is scary. Heavy shades of Scientology, except its influential backers are ultra rich VCs instead of Hollywood celebrities. And money goes farther in the U.S. than does celebrity.
It's not just people optimistic about technology, it's people who are so confident of a super-intelligent AI future that they will let people suffer and die in pursuit of a "good" AI future (a paradise where a docile superintelligence solves all problems) instead of the "bad" one.
It’s definitely the post hoc justification that allows them to completely surrender to fanaticism, but I do think it’s post hoc. The starting point is Elon being corrupt
They are dumb as hell. AI can never replace human ingenuity and creativity. It can create a garbled regurgitated facsimile of it, but it’s fundamentally unoriginal and just an aimless permutation of what has come before. Can it improve working efficiency and enable us to achieve more? Yes
as far as the GOP goes, I believe it’s more so wanting to manipulate data using ai as a “gotcha” to the progressive academics they hate so much. Just look at Elon and Grok, I imagine much of it is them being desperate to prove they are smart too and they want to manipulate us with AI to prove it.
I think the evangelicals (e.g. Project 2025) wanting to destroy science is the main reason, but AI explains why the SV guys are helping (or is at least their conscious rationalization)
I think there is also overlap between the two with a desire to do a cultural revolution on "woke" institutions which will permanently bend them to their ideologies.
They're acting like a guy going on an insane spending spree because they've convinced themselves their loaded father is about to die and they're going to inherit it all and they can pay off their debts before it catches up with them. But the father keeps getting healthier and healthier.
No. They can. They revel in it. The cruel ones. The others are effing cowards. But that cowardly bunch can see it too. Just wusses who won't do a damn thing about it.
Unprofitable? Not so sure. Hasn't Musk been able to put a stop to the several investigations into his businesses? Isn't Trump now advocating the use of StarLink across the government?
Um, this supports his point. Without government subsidies and corruption TESLA would not be profitable. Starlink should not exist as a private entity, or at least one servicing governments.
Yeah, your spot on on Musk getting a massive return on his ~$275m investment in getting Trump elected. That grift is supplying him a $400m contract to sell cyber trucks to the state dept, possibly sabataging the FAA, to get that contract. But, specifically AI is as yet unprofittable.
What makes it hard to understand their motivation, except for removing oversight from Musk's corporate malfeasance, is that they're so devoid of sincerity, we know efficiency isn't the goal and that they're amazingly ignorant, but not much more.
"Always, Winston, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
They may say that, but I feel like they're just desperately out of money because they haven't found a viable commercial application for their AI. So they're leaning on the taxpayer to keep them afloat happily at the expense of fed employees & important social programs.
Honestly, I think they are just mad that scientists, social scientists, humanists and other academics don't consider them a higher form of life and give them the worship they feel is their due.
Used to account for 1/3-1/2 of student opinions in college papers with Business &/or engineering
Tech bros fundraised for the Metaverse, a $46B bust. AI is tech bros fundraising for another unworkable scam. IBM is creating plastic data to train AI, because paying for the data to train AI is too expensive for a profitable business case. Instead it’s garbage in, garbage out.
What concerns me is there are scores of people that aren’t aware that it hallucinates all the time so will they know they are being lied to and manipulated? Yikes
I think it's because they're very stupid and they see something like immunocytochemistry and don't understand its "value proposition." They're also the kind of annoying people who use terms like "value proposition"
I've been out of school for *throws calculator in the garbage* but I cannot imagine any serious computer science department tolerating that kind of thinking. My advisor would have made fun of me at every opportunity and he would have been 100% correct to do so.
I don't believe that they think we're on the verge of creating anything like sentience. I think they are young idiots whose arrogance blinded them to the consequences of their actions.
If anything, they believe their AI will 'improve' things, but you don't break things unless you can fix them.
I think many of them genuinely believe they have a chance at literal immortality if they can 1) drive AI research forward as fast as possible and 2) stay rich and powerful so they get first dibs
Even if they’re not cultists, people like Musk have a very strong profit motive to hoover up as much government data as they can, and feed it into their AI indexers. To data miners this much private information is invaluable.
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They don't grasp how without primary research, all AI will eventually "produce" is basically the human centipede version of Wikipedia after the seed corn runs out.
What good is a program that can choose to lie? Or a sentient being who can’t?
It's 2025, and stenographers still make a living.
Tech people can't understand that something can increase steadily toward a threshold below 100% and never reach it.
Well, they multiplied & musky hired them.
They are all in on this thing they do not understand. Its a madness.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/future-pulse/2025/05/15/rfk-says-hhs-is-already-using-ai-00350452
Thanks for that info.
the real 2025 has no flying cars or replicators, only a dying planet and existential dread.
/adds to reading list... with a 'too real??' warning for my future self bc oof these are some trying times
He got his AI edge
It is a race and we are both fodder and collateral damage
They know they can segregate with the tool as well.
Makes the "surveillance" part of capitalism easier if you have all of the data from the one source that should have most of it (govt)
https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-trumps-reign-fits-curtis-yarvins-blueprint-of-a-ceo-led-american-monarchy-what-is-technological-fascism-256202
Military/police who might have a conscience or obey a court order? Out of the equation
hell, not even how language works!
It's a race to planet destruction by energy overconsumption, in an effort to have everything aside from work be done by ai, so we have all the time in the world to be exploited to death by rich fuck robber baron welfare queens
It's just a glorified chat bot that can make pics
The fact that they’re unwilling to admit any of this in public tells you how insecure they really are about all of the preceding.
Welp I guess the tribunal will sort it out
They were given destruction orders and they simply followed orders and destroyed our government. I mean remember, they FIRED the staff who protects our nuclear arsenal and nuclear secrets. No AI in that is was simply slash and burn.
it's like fossil fuels... it will bring us to the brink and we're all twiddling our thumbs asking the wrong fucking questions
Just unreal how they are willing to throw millions, if not billions, of currently living and breathing people on the pyre to their future AI god in the pursuit of immortality.
porn, guns, bullying, world domination strategies, developing world ending technologies, obsessing on dick size, gym bros. I’ll stop. You get it.
But the ‘gelicals see these as encouraging abortion and undermining the inerrancy of scripture. Social “conservatives”will note that 50% of biomedical researchers are women. Many good reasons to destroy.
Like, a crazy amount of a lot.
Also, for those who don’t know… we are still far, far, far away from sentient general intelligence in AI.
DOGE is a cult.
Christian Nationalists are a cult.
Superstition, self imposed ignorance, and stupidity
are storming the castle.
Sure hope rational thought and truth can survive the siege.
We are subsidizing the tech oligarchs and these dumb fucking Republicans can't even see it.
Ruin the USPS with AI-driven automation for the sake of "efficiency," make USPS more inefficient in the process, grease the wheels for privatization.
Used to account for 1/3-1/2 of student opinions in college papers with Business &/or engineering
I'd like to see one trained to suggest ways to improve humanity's well-being.
https://xkcd.com/1831/
And digging ditches, of course.
Put him in prison.
..although he is dumb enough..
If anything, they believe their AI will 'improve' things, but you don't break things unless you can fix them.