Charlie Stross

@BlueMonday1984 Excuse me my friends, but have you heard the Good News about Our Lord and Saviour, Clankie Lucifer™?

@rhamph It’s worth noting at this point that there are certain types of medical research that are not only banned, medical researchers have been executed for carrying them out. It’s how we got the Nuremberg Code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg/_Code

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code

@fullsquare

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

I dunno, but AI machine god will figure it out from first principles in a nanosecond once we turn it on!

@nfultz @techtakes Neal is a great big history nerd. I do not take him for a big-time business brain.

@picklefactory The point of the “interesting billionaire to move the plot forward” is that for science fiction to engage the reader it plausibly needs a character with *agency*, i.e. the ability to drive a change in the status quo.

Having a Magic Billionaire on call allows the author to neatly sidestep the humongous amount of maneuvering it takes to put an Ordinary Joe in a position to start the plot moving. (Neal did it in Cryptonomicon and it was painful to behold: ate a third of the book.)

@gerikson I know Neal (we’ve gone drinking together) and I think he *is* right wing/conservative by disposition, but also thoughtful enough to understand nuance and shades of grey: he’s not a reflexive knee-jerk type, or willing to follow someone else’s flag.

@CinnasVerses @techtakes And don’t get me started on Roko’s Basilisk (the singularitarian remix of Calvinist Satan, complete with theological predeterminism and eternal damnation for the non-elect).

@BioMan @techtakes But singularitarians *are* fundamentalist Christians, just a heretical variety who ditched the god/jesus/bible bits but kept the rest of the eschatalogical structures intact.

@djb @dgerard It’ could be undermined by Linus’s tolerance of AI slop in the kernel, and by other upstream projects accepting LLM code, notably (to me) vim and pandoc.

The unknown original provenance of code generated by LLMs means that many open source projects may soon be in violation of their own license terms.

@Soyweiser Last timer I looked (probably around 2001) I seem to recall Kurzweil was saying AGI and brain uploading by 2025. He’s basically selling Christian evangelical premillennialism, minus the Baby Jeezus.

@rook I am immensely proud that some years ago I made a list VD blogged of “ten SF publishing people whose chromed skulls I want as desk ornaments”.

It’s good to be hated by the *worst* people. And it’s totes on brand for him to be filling his empty mind with AI slop.

@samvines @techtakes It’s also missing the point that the original GMO crops that were being promoted were engineered by Monsanto to survive being drenched in Glyphosate, a probably-carcinogenic pesticide, to produce a monopoly in those crop plants for Monsanto. Ugly side of capitalism.

(If they’d led with golden rice, the reaction would have been different.)

It also arrived in the late stages of the BSE cull in the UK, at a time when food supply anxiety was at an all-time high.

@gerikson @techtakes Technical nit-pick: “American hard science fiction space opera like Timelike Infinity is also influential”— Timelike Infinity was written by Steven Baxter who is *very* English indeed. Best contextualized as mid-period Interzone generation hitting its imperial phase.

@Amoeba_Girl @techtakes I guess the private equity bros behind this one were reading Larry Niven’s “A Gift from Earth” when they were teens (seems more likely than Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”.

@BioMan I blame Konstantin Tskiolkovskii! Although to be fair, he got it from his teacher, Nikolai Federovitch Federov, grandfather of Cosmism and one of the wellsprings of TESCREAL … which brings us full-circle to the AI bros again.

@fullsquare Lead poisoning was *ubiquitous* in the USA until the late 1970s/early 1980s, due to tetraethyl lead in petrol. Everywhere around the world experienced a sharp drop in violent crime 15-20 years after it was phased out.

But mercury poisoning is more visibly lethal: see also Karen Wetterhahn:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen/_Wetterhahn

@mawhrin Sadly, they exist. And there are too many of them! I guess this means we should kill people who are fine with killing up to 50% of the—

HEY WAIT

@gerikson @sneerclub Needy Amin is a great coinage, but can I suggest Idiot Amin instead? (The resemblance between Trump and Idi Amin is glaringly obvious now if you stand their rhetoric and style of government side-by-side. Only significant difference is that Trump started with more.)

@isaackuo @Landa @V0ldek @techtakes AI is so 2026, Bro, to get ahead of the game for 2027 you need to pivot to Quantum Computing, ideally on the blockchain in an orbital data centre.

@V0ldek @techtakes

Bro we all run on tank tracks these days, we’re all absolutely crushing it in the workplace Bro shoes are so pre-AI, you can’t grow forever all the way to upload heaven on a sole

(Pops another Special K)