Follow-up on the heels of Karen Hao's new book Empire of AI.
Yeah, but then there's this current crap:
THE WARLORDS WHO SACKED ROME did not intend to doom western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.
Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical…
Adam Serwer in The Atlantic.
…The book burnings of the past had physical limitations; after all, only the books themselves could be destroyed. The Trumpist attack on knowledge, by contrast, threatens not just accumulated knowledge, but also the ability to collect such knowledge in the future. Any pursuit of forbidden ideas, after all, might foster political opposition. Better for Americans to be as gullible and easily manipulated as the people who buy brain pills from right-wing podcasts, use ivermectin to treat COVID, or believe that vaccines are “weapons of mass destruction.” This purge will dramatically impair the ability to solve problems, prevent disease, design policy, inform the public, and make technological advancements. Like the catastrophic loss of knowledge in Western Europe that followed the fall of Rome, it is a self-inflicted calamity. All that matters to Trumpists is that they can reign unchallenged over the ruins.
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| Frank Bruni |
...To live in fiction, commit to it. That’s the moral not merely of Trump and Jan. 6 but of Trump, period. Yesteryear’s hand-wringing about whether to label his individual falsehoods “lies” and those periodic tallies of his misstatements now seem quaint; they don’t do justice to the scope and audacity of what he’s up to. Nor does the occasional current chatter about “propaganda.” Trump is engaged in a multifront, multipronged attack on any and every version of events that impedes his goals and impugns his glory. It makes the spin control of presidents past look like child’s play.
Politicians routinely don masks, twist facts and peddle fables — President Joe Biden’s pretense of undiminished vigor and acuity is a recent and egregious example of that. But Trump’s machinations and manipulations go beyond discrete feints and specific ruses. They’re in an unscrupulous league of their own......If history is written by the victors, the present is fabricated by those who throw themselves most ruthlessly and shamelessly into the storytelling. Trump and his principal abettors are just about peerless in that regard. Rather than own up to the administration’s error in consigning Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to a gulag in El Salvador, Trump falsely and stubbornly insists that Abrego Garcia has the name of the gang MS-13 tattooed on his hand. He showcases accusations of domestic violence in Abrego Garcia’s past. He and his aides rework the details so that Trump is without blame or blemish.
Just as they’ve done with Jan. 6. That day is a searing indictment of Trump — so he inverts it. Babbitt is reborn as an innocent. The hellions around her are a heavenly choir. That song they’re now singing? It’s an elegy for honesty.
QUICK TANGENTIAL DIVERSION
This elite higher ed dustup is insane.
NEW
Technologists currently wield a level of political influence that was recently considered unthinkable. While Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashes public services, Jeff Bezos takes celebrities to space on Blue Origin and the CEOs of AI companies speak openly of radically transforming society. As a result, there has never been a better moment to understand the ideas that animate these leaders’ particular vision of the future.
In his new book, More Everything Forever, the science journalist Adam Becker offers a deep dive into the worldview of techno-utopians such as Musk—one that’s underpinned by promises of AI dominance, space colonization, boundless economic growth, and eventually, immortality. Becker’s premise is bracing: Tech oligarchs’ wildest visions of tomorrow amount to a modern secular theology that is both mesmerizing and, in his view, deeply misguided. The author’s central concern is that these grand ambitions are not benign eccentricities, but ideologies with real-world consequences…
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| I totally love the dated USB cable in the art. |
Check this out:
Astrophysicist and science journalist Adam Becker has his eye on the dreams of Silicon Valley’s billionaire elite—and he’s unimpressed. He says Silicon Valley’s “heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions”—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—pervert public discourse and distract us from real social problems.
He argues that tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us, and that the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.
In More Everything Forever, Becker investigates what he calls wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but Becker says the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.
Adam Becker says that powerful and sinister ideas are alive in Silicon Valley. Now he comes to the heart of the global tech world to challenge us to see how these visions of the future are foolish and dangerous.
'eh?
More shortly...
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