Andrew Marantz, writing in The New Yorker, tells his readers what life looks like "Among the A.I. Doomsayers." The Marantz article tells us a bit about the "non-doomsayers," too - those who call themselves "effective accelerationists," or e/accs (pronounced "e-acks"). According to Marantz, these "e-acks, " the non-doomsayers:
Believe A.I. will usher in a utopian future—interstellar travel, the end of disease—as long as the worriers get out of the way. On social media, they troll doomsayers as “decels,” “psyops,” “basically terrorists,” or, worst of all, “regulation-loving bureaucrats.” “We must steal the fire of intelligence from the gods [and] use it to propel humanity towards the stars, a leading e/acc recently tweeted."
I didn't find the Marantz article very helpful, in terms of specifics. After reading it, I don't have a very good idea of what substantive arguments there are, both for and against Artificial Intelligence. What I do know is that some people think that continuing the development of Artificial Intelligence means that we're "doomed," and some people think the opposite. The people Marantz talks about, on both sides, seem to be decidely weird!
Despite the ambiguous nature of what Marantz has reported, I do have a definite and quite specific reaction to the Marantz article. It is my belief that any effort aimed at "propelling humanity towards the stars" is fundamentally flawed. Our human destiny (for good or ill) is right here on Planet Earth, right here in the "World God Made," as I often name it. This means, it seems to me, that instead of trying to marshal our resources to "steal the fire of intelligence from the gods," we should be focusing our efforts, instead, on how to be better friends and neighbors to those other human beings with whom we share our cities, nations, and the world.
We should be focusing our efforts, instead, on how to be better friends and neighbors to those other *species* with whom we share our cities, nations, and the world.
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