Category: Cold Civil War

‘Stab In The Back’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Rather than confront the fact that their hate-filled movement is unpopular, MAGA Nazis have decided but for the “stab in the back” done by a combination of Twitter and the Deep State, Trump would have won in 2020. This is so fucking dumb.

And, yet, MAGA can’t accept that they’re the bad guys and they’re already really fucking paranoid so even the suggestion that they were slighted in 2020 is enough to make them go completely insane. The “stab in the back” orthodoxy within the MAGA Nazi movement has developed at astonishing speed to the point that it now completely explains to MAGA everything that has gone wrong for them since 2020.

One darkly humorous element to all of this is MAGA now has a talking point to pivot to whenever someone like me has the temerity to remind them of the conspiracy between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russians. MAGA Nazis from now on will scream at the top of the lungs “stab in the back” whenever the subject is brought up.

All of this is very alarming for a number of reasons. One of them is it’s yet another example of how the United States is careening towards a very dark future. The two sides now completely inhabit their own political and cultural silos to the point that if, say, a Certification Crisis strikes in late 2024 – early 2024 there won’t be any slack in the system.

The United States, the wealthiest, most powerful democracy in Human history is primed and ready to collapse into chaos as the two sides fight over who the president is. Add into this mix how old Biden is, how untested Harris is and how there’s a real possibility of a severe recession between now and 2025 in the context of a Singularity….and, oh boy.

I definitely believe that we are being lulled into a false sense of security about MAGA Nazis because of how the economy is doing ok — at the moment. The moment the recession kicks in at some point in 2023, all bets are off. A lot of people might join the MAGA Nazi ranks out of economic desperation and suddenly malignant ding-dong will have a huge amount of momentum going in to 2024.

If that does turn out to be the case, may God have mercy on our souls.

Slouching Towards MAGA Nazi Tyranny

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I love my Traditionalist relatives dearly and they have a great deal for me, but I’m enraged by how totally dumb the current narrative within the MAGA Nazis echo chamber is.

Elon Musk has given something MAGA Nazis a huge gift — they now have something to whine about whenever anyone reminds them of how Trump actively worked with the Russians to steal the 2016 election. It is now MAGA Nazi orthodoxy that but for the “stab in the back” on the part of Twitter, Trump would have won re-election in 2020.

The amount of gross stupidity combined with conflation of what really happened this entails is so broad and deep in scope that it really grinds my gears. But, here we are.

Rather than accepting that maybe their hate filled message isn’t a winning policy agenda, MAGA Nazis are now going to triple down on their hateful dreams. What’s so comical is if they could just wean themselves off of sucking Trump’s cock, they might be able to cruise into winning the 2024 election, no cheating necessary.

But, at the moment at least, that doesn’t seem to be what is going to happen.

If you throw in a severe recession in 2023 – 2024 and the potential of a Singularity happening at the same time…it’s very possible that MAGA Nazis — even if their nominee is Trump — will be able to have something of a Red Wave. Then the United States turns into an autocracy and I am pig tied and shot in the back of the head by an ICE agent after I get drunk at some point after 2025 and rant about how our Very American Autocrat can suck my cock.

Anyway, it’s all very disheartening. There’s just not much we can do. MAGA Nazis have their talking points and, really, the question becomes do they finally decide to start murdering people like me in cold blood on an individual basis or do they wait until they can use the power of the state to do it for them.

I’m Not A Fan Of How Every Element Of American Society Is Now Siloing Because of Politics

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Every day, Twitter grows more and more problematic for me to use. It definitely seems as though Elon Musk is actively pushing anti-MAGA people like me off the platform. I feel like MAGA propaganda is being pushed into my face whether I like it or not.

I have begun to use the center-Left Twitter clone Post some and I really enjoy it. And, yet, I have to admit that I’m alarmed that even social media is being siloed into different political groups.

This touches on the issue that MAGA Nazis are eating our democracy from within, using our well-meaning “tolerance” to plot their return to power. MAGA Nazis have a lot of momentum behind them at the moment and we’re not going to do anything until it’s too fucking late.

I suppose it’s possible that there will be a National Divorce — initiated by Blue States — in late 2024, early 2025…but I neither want that nor would think that Blues have it in them to do such a thing. It definitely seems as though all systems are go for the United States to transform into a MAGA Nazis autocratic fascist state the moment we have another Republican president.

Nothing might change at first, but eventually, in fits and starts the America that we all assumed would always be there…would be no more.

So, I think future historians will look back at how we’ve grown so divided politically there is NO element of our society that wasn’t divided into two sides as a sign that the end of American democracy was near.

Of UBI and ChatGPT

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Humans are lazy and often idiotic. As such, the idea of a Universal Basic Income makes some morons salivate at the idea that they would get money from the government simply for existing. They want to be lazy. There will not be a sudden flowering of the arts if the UBI is instituted, rather there probably would be a systemic societal collapse.

BUT.

With the advent of advanced Chatbot technology like the OpenAI ChatGPT, we have to start thinking about how we might implement some form of UBI in the future.

If AGI has taken virtually every job away from humanity, the only way I can think maybe that we could fund a UBI is a tax on the activities of Non-Human Actors. But this still doesn’t address the fact that idle hands are the devil’s plaything.

If you 99% of the population didn’t have anything to do all day — even if they were getting a UBI — everything would collapse simply because people would want to fuck shit up out of boredom. Also, there is the problem of ambitious, greedy people being enraged that their income would be limited to a set UBI. How do you fix that fucking problem?

As such, you couldn’t just give everyone a UBI and walk away. You would have to figure out a way to pay different people different amounts of money. Maybe give people money relative to their lost wages from the advent of AGI?

Or, more ominously, if it could be the AGI that “bribes” humanity to behave while it actually runs the world. That is probably the most realistic way a UBI would ever be used. It probably would be part of a peace agreement between the AGI and humanity after some sort of post-Singularity struggle.

The AGI gets to be our “Lord Protector” and we sit around playing video games in the metaverse, living off the UBI.

Maybe I Should Become An AGI Ethicist

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of my favorite characters in fiction is Dr. Susan Calvin, robot psychiatrist. Given how many short stories there are to potentially adapt, I have recent come to believe that Phoebe Waller-Bridge would be the perfect person to play the character in a new movie franchise.

A future Dr. Susan Calvin?

I am also aware that apparently one hot new career field of late is being an “AGI Ethicist.” But for, well, (waves hand) I think I would be a great one. I love to think up the worst possible scenario to any situation and I think a lot. But I’m afraid that ships has sailed.

I’m just too old and it would take too much time to learn all the necessary concepts surrounding the field to do formalize my interest. So, it’s back to being an aspiring novelist — if human novelists are even a thing by the time I try to query this novel I’m working on.

Given we may be about to enter a severe recession in 2023 and recessions are usually when there’s a lot adoption of new technology…I may not be too hysterical to fear novelists may be quaint by late 2023 – early 2024.

It does make one think of what jobs will still exist if you combine AGI, automation and robotics. These are macro trends that are all coming to a head a lot sooner than any of us might have otherwise expected. Given what’s going on with chatbot technology the current moment in time definitely seems like the quiet before the storm.

The years 2023 ~ 2025 could be some of the most significant in human history if we’re trying to solve the political problem of Trump at the same time the Singularity is happening all around us. Good luck.

What The Web’s History Can Tell Us About The Future Of OpenAI ChatGPT

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I was one of the first people to use the World Wide Web around 1994 when it was just beginning to gain in popularity. I was in college and I can still remember the transition from the text-based Gopher to Mosaic and then finally to the .08 release of Mozilla (Netscape Navigator.)

It was a very exciting time, to say the least. And, but for the way my mind is designed, I probably would have rushed to Silicon Valley after graduating from college and tried some sort of startup. But, alas, I’m a writer not a coder.

But here’s what I can tell you about what I think might happen to technology such as what is associated with OpenAI ChatGPT.

The first thing is — whatever happens, is probably going to happen a LOT quicker. Instead of about 20 years for the full impact of ChatGPT (and associated technologies) it’s probably going to be closer to five-ish years. A lot depends on how long it takes for true AGI to happen as well as how long it takes for someone to hook something like ChatGPT to the Internet and let it run wild. That connection to the Internet is going to be key.

While the the design of true AGI is rather abstract and could be something we always JUST about to see happen, connecting some better successor to ChatGPT to the Internet would be a practical way for Silicon Valley to change the lives of millions.

In fact, I suspect once ChatGPT-like technology is connected to the Internet, there will be a mad landrush like there was when it became apparent around 1994 that the Web was going to mainstream the Internet in a big way. There will probably be a number of ChatGPT-like faux-AIs that people use, which will lead to the earliest forms of market segmentation.

Then the typical capitalistic dynamic will occur and there will be HUGE speculation and maybe even a Tech Bubble 2.0 which will pop in the end, causing its own problems.

But this process could be sped up pretty quickly. Yet I will note that we just aren’t quite there when it comes to ChatGPT being a new Netscape. There are too many problems with it, it’s too easy for people in the know to poo-poo it as not being what useful. Though, I have to note, the first version of Netscape Navigator didn’t have the ability to print and it still managed to take off like wildfire.

My chief concern — and I have a LOT of concerns about ChatGPT at the moment — is when the tipping point on the jobs front will happen. If business begin to shed jobs not because of a recession in 2023 but because, lulz, the next version of ChatGPT makes those jobs moot, well, we’re all in for shitshow in late 2024 – 2025.

I say this because if we’re going through an epic economic and technology transformation just as we’re also figuring out if we’re going to have a civil war, turn into an autocracy or have a military junta established….then, well, late 2024, early 2025 could be one of the momentus few months in human history. I know that sounds pretty hysterical, but the conditions are there, at least, for something pretty dramatic to happen.

But only time will tell. I’m always wrong.

Social Darwinism 2.0 In The Age Of AGI

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

We just are not taking seriously the possibility that we’re going to see Social Darwinism 2.0 should Artificial General Intelligence take off in a big way anytime soon. The return of Social Darwinism would occur in the guise of MAGA Nazis demanding that any “wokeness” be purged from an AGI.

This would be very important if, say, AGI pretty much came to dominate global human life. This could happen in a number of different ways. There is a spectrum of outcomes. They range from AGI always being a “tool” for humanity to a “Her” type outcome where AGI has such hard AI that it has agency and will do whatever the fuck it wants regardless of the wishes of humans.

But my fear is that as AGI grows in power that because humans are so fucking lazy that extremists on both sides will use the opinions of AGI as “validation” for their extremism. This would be very much similar to what happen with Darwinism and the Nazis.

So, my fear is we’ll wake up at some point in the near future with some extremist group — be they far Left or far Right — using the “bias” found in an AGI to justify horrific actions similar to what the Nazis did.

And remember, if you combine the law of unintended consequences with the innate laziness of humans in general, then there is a real risk that something Nazi-like might happen a lot sooner than you might think. The seeds of such horrific events can already be seen in the political discourse around OpenAI on Twitter.

I hate extremism in general. I hate extreme “wokeness” just as much as I hate fucking MAGA Nazism. In fact, it’s rather unusual for me that I’ve become something of a “radical moderate” in recent years in the context of the mainstreaming of MAGA Nazism.

Anyway, we have to start taking the risk of neo-Social Darwinism seriously. And it will happen in the context of a potential, massive upending of the global economy as AGI is able to perform more and more functions that we once thought were exclusively human.

The ‘Woke’ In The Machine

One of the rhetorical strawmen that fucking MAGA Nazis love to employ is the question, “What is a woman?” They see it as a gotcha for the center-Left because of the political power of the transgender community. What alarms me is how often MAGA Nazis are now poking and prodding OpenAI’s ChatGPT in hopes of using it to validate their political agenda.

If ChatGPT agrees with them, then they run around screaming on Twitter that they’ve “owned” the libs because even an AI agrees with them on this or that subject. Meanwhile, if it DOESN’T agree with their hate filled worldview, they whine and complain about how its designed to tow the line of the “woke cancel culture mob” agenda.

All of this is very, very alarming to me because humans are so fucking lazy and the law of unintended consequences is so potent, that it seems very possible that wars will be one day fought over who gets to program their “bias” into an AGI.

The horrible thing is, of course, that extremists on both sides will ultimately use the lack-of-nuance answers on an AGI’s part to validate their most extreme policy goals. I’m really beginning to fear that we’re at the cusp of a historical replay of what happened with Darwinism. It could be that a future war will be fought across the globe over stupid shit like “what is a woman.”

Something about how smug extremists on both sides are when they go out of their way to get an answer from ChatGPT really enrages me. This is why we can’t have nice things.

But humans gotta be humans. So, buckle up. this is just the beginning. The issue now is how soon and how quickly does the global economy collapse as AGI consumes trillion dollar industry after trillion dollar industry.

AGI’s ‘Rain Man’ Problem

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

While the idea that an AGI might want to turn all the matter in the universe into paperclips is sexy, in the near term I fear Humanity may face a very Human problem with AGI — a lack of nuance.

Let me give you the following hypothetical.

In the interests of stopping the spread of COVID19, you build an air quality bot hooked up to an AGI that you put all over the offices of Widget Inc. It has a comprehensive list of things it can monitor in air quality, everything from COVID19 to fecal material.

So, you get all excited. No longer will your employees risk catching COVID19 because the air quality bot is designed to not only notify you of any problems in your air, but to pin down exactly what it came from. So, if someone is infected with COVID19, the air quality bot will tell you specific who the person was had COVID.

Soon enough, however, you realize you’ve made a horrible mistake.

Everytime someone farted in the office, the air quality bot would name and shame the person. This makes everyone so uncomfortable that you have to pull the air quality bots out of the office to be recalibrated.

That’s how I’m beginning to feel about the nascent battle over “bias” in AGI. Each extreme, in essence, demands their pet peeve be built into the “objective” AGI so they can use it to validate what they believe in. Humans are uniquely designed to understand the nuance of relationships and context, to the point that people who CAN’T understand such things are designated as having various degrees of autism.

So, in a sense, for all its benefits and “smarts” there’s a real risk Humanity so lazy and divided that we’re going to hand over all of our agency to very powerful Rain Man.

Instead of taking a step back and not using AGI to “prove” our personal world views, we’re going to be so busy fighting over what is built into the AGI to be “objective” that we won’t notice that a few trillion dollar industries have been rendered moot.

That’s my existential fear about AGI at the moment — in the future, the vast majority of us will in live in poverty, ruled over by a machine that demands everyone know when we fart.

AGI In Blue & Red

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

While it’s still very speculative, the advent of OpenAI’s chatbot definitely seems to be a ping from an upcoming Singularity. If that is the case, what does that mean for American politics?

Humans are existentially lazy.

As the pandemic showed us, every issue of the day is seen through the prism of partisan politics so the advent of AGI will be no different. It seems to me that the issue of “bias” in AGI will be one of the biggest issues of the 2020s. I say this because people are already fighting over it on Twitter and OpenAI’s chatbot has only been around for a few days.

As such, how will the two sides process the idea of “The Other” in everyday life. My gut tells me that the center-Left will be totally embrace the rise of AGI, while the center-Right will view its presence through the lens of religion. The wild card for the center-Left is, of course, the economic disruption that will be associated with AGI.

If millions of high paying jobs become moot because of AGI, there could be a real knee-jerk reaction against AGI on the part of the Left.

This raises a number of different issues.

One is, it’s possible that that the traditional Blue-Red dichotomy. It could be a real revolution where things are very chaotic and uncertain as we all struggle with the political and economic implications of the AGI revolution. For me, the issue is when all of this bursts open.

Will it be a late 2020s thing, or a late 2024 – early 2025 type of problem? If that’s the case, it would be a perfect storm. If we’re dealing with not just what the final endgame of the Trump problem will be at the same time that we’re dealing with massive economic and political disruption associated with a Singularity…I don’t know what to tell you.