Yes, if my net worth was increasing by $10 million an hour by owning companies that steal people's data to build machines that will steal their jobs, I too would redirect some of that to hire bodyguards

Could we draw upon ancient traditions of ritualistic fetishism to improve our toxic relationship to the digital world? I believe so, and in this piece I show you how

When tech adds to our lives it also subtracts. For example, the prophets of the Internet in the 90s told us the Web would expand our consciousness by connecting us to millions of people across the world. That consciousness, however, was stolen from other parts of our lives. An.

There’s this ongoing debate about whether AIs can be as smart as humans, but given that AIs are clearly designed to replace our brain functions & thereby slowly make us stupider through lack of brain use, the bar for surpassing human intelligence gets lower and lower over time.

I sense there’s a growing feeling among many people, that they - and the vast majority of humanity - are mere spectators to the actions of ‘Great Men’. You wake up in the morning and see what the Great Men have decided to do with your life. Even the supporters of those men seem.

VCs do not fund AIs to produce truth. They fund them to product profit. From an evolutionary perspective, then, the test of fitness applied to an AI is not whether it can tell you things that are true. It’s whether it can increase the bottom line of the corporate sector. So, the.

Censorship is about creating differences in volume between voices, and there are two primary modes of doing it. Mode 1: Turning down the volume (silencing): the most ancient forms of this are simple acts of shunning (i.e. a community not listening to some people, and excluding.

I value academia a lot, but I have a difficult relationship with it. Here’s why. Academics are specialists, and specialists often lose sight of where they stand relative to the rest of society. Imagine you’re a specialist that has reached Level 50 in a specialist topic, while the.

Technology does many things, but one thing it never does is save time. It either reduces headcount, while amplifying the productivity of the remaining workers, so that fewer people working the same amount as before output the same total amount of products as before in the same.

RT @rohangrey: The thing about crypto people is that they will loudly and arrogantly decry anyone who hasn't spent ten years obsessing over….

Old factory lords were pioneers of the original business model of capitalism, which was to accumulate concentrations of tools, machines and materials - the proverbial factory - and to get workers to operate them. This is what old Marxists would call ‘owning the Means of.

RT @jembendell: In London? Come learn about a #commons approach to currency and money, with me and Matthew Slater. In September we are offe….

Cast your vote! Why is Musk divorcing Trump. Option 1: he's been used, humiliated and then thrown out. With his DOGE a failure, he now wants to save some face by pretending to launch a principled attack on the president. Option 2: Tesla is suffering due to the association with.

People often use the term ‘Monopoly Money’ as an insult to refer to a weak currency, but Monopoly Money is actually one of the strongest global currencies there’s ever been. Consider the fact that it’s guaranteed to buy you hotels on particular places on the board at exactly the.

As a South African, one thing I’d often like to tell Europeans and Americans is this: in general, people in the Global South do not associate Israel with ‘jewishness’ as much as they associate it with White People. Israel is backed by the USA - whose elites are white people - and.

I first started encountering ‘edgelords’ when I was immersed in the crypto world from around 2011, but I soon saw them proliferating in many libertarian-tinged scenes or group Telegram chats. These were people who styled themselves as ‘contrarians’ who ‘dared’ to think.

One phrase that irritates the hell out of me is ‘taxpayer funded’, this idea that somehow a state cannot pay for things unless taxpayers give it money. This is a widespread belief, but it’s obviously ridiculous given that states issue the very money that’s being given back to.

All these AI companies training their machines on centuries of data and skills produced by humankind - and then reaping the profits of that - should donate large amounts of their shares to the public in recognition of this. Otherwise they're just parasitic.

There’s something kinda grating about the world’s imperial hegemon putting on this ‘poor me’ act, complaining about how much it does for the world, and how hard done by it is. It’s kinda grating how the world’s greatest beneficiary of goods made by other people in other countries.

Probably the greatest misconception about finance is the idea that it’s all about maths and numbers, rather than about contracts, power and politics. For example, I often come across people who talk about the ‘mathematical impossibility’ of paying back the interest on all debt.