Huh. That’s a weird poem.

Explain?

I’ve heard theories that I find convincing that the real plan is to transition us to a surveillance-based tiered economy in which the wealthy hoard control over the means of production and then spend generously to pay the largest segment of the economy – tech surveillance – to police the restless masses.

In this framing, the technology becomes profitable in the same way as healthcare: it’s essential. Once something is essential, its demand is unconstrained, and so its price-setting power isn’t based on the price customers consider a good value, it’s based on what fraction of their wealth and income they are able to hand over.

If the top 10% of Americans who participate in the investment economy conclude that ongoing real-time tracking of every American’s location and sentiments is necessary to prevent a revolution, paying to build and maintain datacenters is a must. It doesn’t matter what it costs.

This 10% then becomes the new real economy, and everyone in the 90% just become essentially livestock.

I feel like I have a pretty heterodox view here.

I think there is a tiny, itty bitty moral cost to simulating torture of an LLM.

It’s nowhere near equivalent to the moral cost of harming a human or animal. But I do believe that it’s non-zero.

I’d place it at a similar level as killing a healthy shrub or perhaps catch-and-release fishing. Is it evil? No, that’s being overdramatic. Is it harmless? I don’t think so. I think it’s morally unhealthy for our society and spiritually cruel towards the universe at large.

I don’t think we need to panic over it, but I would politely encourage people not to do this.

I heard an interview recently with Emile Torres about this. And he didn’t make this any less stupid, but he did a great job helping to explain the deranged pathologies of the people behind these.

When you have the power to make decisions at a global scale, your goals and fears are radically different from those of people who only have the ability to make choices that impact their household or family or neighborhood.

These people have a fantasy of being not just A “great man of history” but THE greatest, most important, most monumental figure to have ever lived in the whole universe. And in their head, if this technology either allows humans to make a superior species that replaces us and goes on to conquer the whole galaxy or just eradicates all the life on the only habitable planet we know of… well what a legacy, you know? There’s no bigger tombstone that says ‘I MATTERED!’

And that’s what they crave. They’re basically sick, poisoned with toxic levels of power and ego.

Wait, really?