The Global Guerrillas Report -- Sense-making frameworks. War-Tech-Politics Book: Brave New War Patreon: https://xitter.cf/t.co/y1d9WwM6EU Substack: https://xitter.cf/t.co/lTSdS1iHmB
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John Robb retweeted
Human intelligence, based on language and mathematics, is but a single, narrow approach to intelligence. A high risk, all in, evolutionary bet.
AIs trained on the same material leverages that bet, and removes the evolutionary valuable constraints provided by our other traits.
John Robb retweeted
Everyone should be reading @johnrobb
Back in 2018, I wrote a report entitled "McLuhan on War"
It framed the war for the future, that we are already fighting, as one between
> those who would centralize the "alignment" of the emerging social technological artifact (social AIs, social networks, etc.) and
>those who would disrupt it (in an attempt to preserve existing autonomy/individuality until a new technological artifact, that preserved local differences, emerged).
The new approach that would do this is one that trains autonomous AIs to adopt the alignment/orientation of the human operator/partner.
John Robb retweeted
For several years now my friend @johnrobb has been writing about The Long Night. A particularly nasty scenario where an entity uses technology to intermediate people from the reality they experience.
Imagine an evil ai living in your phone completely managing your ability to understand the world and your ability to act in it.
A kind of totalitarian Orwellian nightmare only imaginable with recent tech advances. Technologies like CBDCs which turn off your ability to buy whatever you want based on a politicians whim, or a car that refuses to drive more than 10minutes from your home are downstream technologies in the Long Night Scenario..
At the same time Peter Thiel has been lecturing us about the coming AntiChrist. I’m less inclined to describe that as he does a better job, my definition isn’t relevant, and the point is there is such a thing. A technology that turns Man away from God is the antichrist.
There’s a scene in Star Wars where Natalie Portman’s character laments, “so this is how democracy dies…to the sound of thunderous applause.”
Brave New World and 1984 were scary visions of the future. But they never came to pass. And they won’t. Why? Because they failed to foresee User Generated Content. That surveillance authoritarianism would be brought on voluntarily, by the people themselves, rather than mandated by the State. And that change, that direction of flow, is the entire difference between our timeline and theirs.
Unfortunately, I’m writing this because the AntiChrist, the Long Night AI, is here.
It wasn’t externally imposed by Govenment and it didn’t escape from a frontier lab chasing AGI.
It came…from Facebook.
Muse AI is the AntiChrist, or the first one, of many.
And people are adopting it faster than any technology in history.
It is insidious. It promises to manage your subscriptions, cut down your email, and help you book a tennis court. It works. It’s useful. It’s a genuinely useful technology.
But it also takes all that knowledge of who you are, the best statistics of a generation, and it interprets and summarizes reality for you.
Don’t have time to read the FT, WSJ, and The Economist, don’t worry, Muse will summarize them for you. It will pick out the most interesting stories, the most obscure yet important facts. And it will tell you how it goes together, and why.
This is how it separates you from everyone else. It gives you the most amazing What, while slowly eroding your ability to How through selective inclusion. Discernment comes not from what facts you read but which you don’t. That distinction makes the difference in the modern OODA loop/information environment. That is, you’ve ceded your Orientation to a machine.
And it’s in this intermediation. This externally defined information environment management. This self-imposed hall of mirrors. That it lays the foundation for The Long Night and achieves AntiChrist status.
Well done @finkd , you did it again.
Thunderous applause.
John Robb retweeted
We need a group of insightful people to build a detailed, simulatable model of a world where AI delivers a functional utopia. X prize?
Tech entrepreneurs need it as an aim point, or they will follow their base impulses and inevitably gravitate towards dystopias.
John Robb retweeted
That's exactly it. The mass market is dead.
The top 10% will get 90% of the productivity and amplification boost from AI.
They will be the majority of consumer spending. As a result the market and tech development will increasingly produce products and service only they can afford and utilize.
John Robb retweeted
Exactly: "We live in a world without a future. It’s not that we don’t have a future; it’s that technological change and the complexity, novelty, uncertainty, and disruption it has unleashed make it nearly impossible to envision the future with any clarity. As our time horizon shrinks from years to hours, it’s likely time to admit we’ve already passed the event horizon..."
johnrobb.substack.com/p/the-…
John Robb retweeted
Curious…..Incredible levels of corruption and grifting. Makes Pelosi look like a piker.
BREAKING: Just five minutes before Trump's announcement to halt the attacks on Iran, massive trades reportedly hit the market.
In one move, $1.5 billion in S&P 500 (ES) futures was bought while $192 million in oil (CL) futures was sold.
These orders were 4–6x larger than anything else at the time.
The trader seemingly made huge gains.
Unusual.
John Robb retweeted
How do you reward your most valuable AI agents?
From today's livestream with @johnrobb
John Robb retweeted
Iran: What Now? Orienting on the war with John Robb xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1mxPaLWZg…
John Robb retweeted
John Robb’s Brave New War was published in 2007. I thought it was a big deal at the time. Nineteen years later, systems disruption as the central part of strategic action by non-state and state actors is obvious to everyone.
John Robb retweeted
New term coined.
Human oriented AI.
Not human in the loop but human on the loop, providing the orientation.
John Robb retweeted
Create a list of your accounts and go down each one and make sure you have 2fa, unique hard password AND
- a passkey set up for each account.
Not every site supports passkey as a single sign-on, that's ok, just make sure your lock your shit up, cos its about to get real
John Robb retweeted
Jevons Paradox
(for your reference)
(or why you see LED lights left on everywhere)
This paradox is named after the economist William Stanley Jevons. It refers to the observation that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used may lead to increased consumption of that resource rather than the expected decrease. This paradoxical effect occurs because the decreased cost of using the resource due to increased efficiency can lead to higher demand, ultimately resulting in increased resource consumption overall.
For example, if the fuel efficiency of cars increases, the cost of driving per mile decreases, leading to people driving more often or for longer distances, thus increasing the total amount of fuel consumed. Similarly, if the energy efficiency of light bulbs or appliances improves, people might leave lights on for longer periods or use appliances more frequently, leading to a higher overall energy consumption.
The paradox highlights the complexities of resource management and the importance of considering both technological advancements and behavioral responses in efforts to conserve resources and reduce environmental impacts. It suggests that simply improving efficiency may not be sufficient to achieve these goals and that other strategies, such as encouraging reduced consumption or promoting alternative energy sources, may be necessary as well.
John Robb retweeted
@johnrobb pointed this quote out to me in 2018 in a piece called “McLuhan At War.”
It ignited an exploration into questions about patterns and understanding that the medium is the message.
And now I can’t unsee it.
Keep digging and maybe you’ll get to the point of:
“Once you see it, “you can’t unsee it.”
John Robb retweeted
Breakdown at Every Level - An interview with John Robb (@johnrobb)
John is the author of Brave New War, a seminal book on War on Terror, and the changing face of warfare with the advent of technologies that allow small groups, even individuals, to disrupt the operations of states and corporations. John is a tech founder who was on the team that created RSS (so if you’re listening to this as a podcast, you can thank him for it), and was a special operator in the US Air Force. In 2017, at my urging, he started the Global Guerillas newsletter, where he discusses current events in a comprehensive, multidisciplinary way that focuses on systems, rather than simply reacting to the daily news cycle. In this interview, we discuss everything mentioned above, and we spend a long time on the implications of artificial intelligence, a subject of which John is uniquely knowledgeable. (link in comments below)