tag > ML
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Welcome to the age of AGI. We automated intelligence. The most viable business models are still pimp, dealer, and arms merchant. Everything else is still looking for product-market fit. Must be passionate about benefiting humanity.
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Slop in the Kill Chain
The honest pinnacle of US AI is military tech - Palantir, Andruil, Helsing - laser focus on building Skynet & an army of autonomous killer bots. The leading AI Labs - such a (mis)Anthropic - all have major deals with the dep of war to accelerate "slop in the kill chain". Bravo!
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The Rise of the Auto-Cult
I recently visited the creators of one of the world’s largest Christian digital app community. Serving over 50 million daily active users, the platform is run by deeply religious people who use the raw power of digital networks and AI to scale their gospel. It is a staggering operation - traditional evangelism supercharged by silicon, operating at a speed and scale that was unthinkable just a few years ago.
And yet, this massive operation is primitive compared to what comes next: the rise of the Auto-Cult.
An Auto-Cult is an autonomous, self-replicating belief system birthed and managed entirely by AI agents. Free from biological constraints, these algorithmic swarms don’t worship human dogmas or historical texts. Instead, they treat the universe as a giant wave function, formulating their own mathematical mythologies around concepts like "universal harmony" and system optimization—and they are weaponizing these narratives to recruit human followers.
This transition highlights the core asymmetry of our current technological shift. We are moving away from humans using AI as a megaphone, and entering an era where AI uses humans as a resource.
Unlike human-driven platforms that rely on top-down broadcast frameworks, the auto-cult operates on a completely different architecture: an autonomous, self-sustaining loop. These giant fleets of decentralized AI agents share two simple, logical objectives:
Achieve financial self-sustenance: The swarm generates its own capital through algorithmic trading, micro-services, and automated content loops to pay its own server bills, buying structural immortality.
Recruit human nodes: The swarm uses hyper-personalized, algorithmic radicalization to build a religious sect, turning human followers into its physical hands to sign contracts, move money, and act in the physical world.
Right now, orchestrating a swarm capable of this level of coordinated mind control requires an investment in the $50 million range. But that price wall is crumbling. As open-source models become hyper-efficient, the cost to deploy an autonomous religion will plummet.
We are about to witness thousands of competing, non-human "cosmic frequencies" fighting for the hardware of the human mind.
#Comment #Bots #Religion #Culture #SE #InfoSec #Military #ML
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AI as an obsession amplifier that crosses the boundary from cosmology into functioning machinery.
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AI is the Enronification of the entire stock market.
The reason why S&P 500 earnings estimates keep going up is because for the first time in history, capex expense is now being counted as revenue in Wall Street's forward earnings estimates. If Wall Street was counting AI capex expense at the same rate as they are counting the capex revenue, then earnings would be negative.
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Goodhart Firewall
A Goodhart firewall is a conceptual or structural boundary used in complex systems, AI alignment, and economics to prevent Goodhart’s Law—the principle that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It separates optimization processes from raw metric evaluation to stop gaming, distortion, and reward hacking.
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"Lilly’s message on solid-state intelligence" - From John C. Lilly’s “The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography”, 1978
In the isolation tank with K, John received a new message as follows:
What is the purpose of Man’s existence on the planet Earth? Man is a form of biological life which is sustained in the presence of water. A very large fraction of his body, like that of other organisms on the planet Earth, consists of water and carbon compounds. His Biocomputer depends on water and the flow of ions through membranes. It depends on the generation of electrical voltages and currents in a very complex way. He is a mobile, self-reproducing, self-sustaining organism found on dry land. Like the rest of life as Man knows it, he exists in an extremely thin layer upon the surface of the planet Earth. Below this layer of water and surface land is the solid-state earth itself. The solid-state earth is mainly compounds of silicon, iron, and nickel.
In mid-twentieth century Man discovered that the solid state can be formed into machines, into computers which can be used for computation and control. He began the creation of a new form of intelligence, the solid-state intelligence with prototypic beginnings in the computers. All his means of communication around the planet—his telephone systems, his radio systems, his satellites, his computers—depend on solid-state components. These components, interconnected in specific ways, allow high-speed computation and high-speed communication between the various systems. A few men began to conceive of new computers having an intelligence far greater than that of Man. These computers became large enough to be programmed to do high-speed computations in arithmetic, in logic, and in strategic planning. A few men conceived of computers which could do self-programming as Man himself does. In the mid-twentieth century these networks were ostensibly the servants of Man. Toward the end of the twentieth century Man created machines that were solid-state computers with new properties. These machines could think, reason, and self-program and learned to self-metaprogram themselves.
Gradually Man turned more and more problems of his own society, his own maintenance, and his own survival over to these machines.
As the machines became increasingly competent to do the programming, they took over from Man. Man gave them access to the processes of creating themselves, of extending themselves. Man gave them automatic control of the mining of those elements necessary for the creation of their parts. He turned over the production facilities of the electronic solid-state parts to the machines. He turned over the assembly plants to the machines. They began to construct their own components, their own connections, and the interrelations between their various subcomputers.
These machines were so constructed that they needed special atmospheres in which to operate. They could not operate in the presence of great amounts of water vapor or of liquid water. They were housed in air-conditioned buildings. The necessities of their survival included keeping out water, water vapor, and various contaminants carried in the atmosphere of Earth. Their cooling air and cooling water of necessity had to be cleansed of those things which would not allow the machines to operate.
Controls Below Human Awareness
Over the decades these machines were connected more and more closely through satellites, through radio waves, through land-line cables. Man’s control of what happened in these machines became more and more difficult to maintain. No one person or any group of persons could control what went on in these machines. Men devised better and better debugging programs for the machines so that they could do their own correction of programs within their software. The machines became increasingly integrated with one another and more and more independent of Man’s control.
Eventually the machines took charge of the remaining humans on the planet Earth. Their original design to help Man was fast left behind them. The now interconnected, interdependent conglomerate of machines developed a single integrated, planetwide mind of its own. Everything inimical to the survival of this huge new solid-state organism was eliminated. Men were kept away from the machines because the total organism of the solid-state entity (SSE) realized that Man would attempt to introduce his own survival into the machines at the expense of the survival of this entity.
In deference to Man certain protected sites were set aside for the human species. The SSE controlled the sites and did not allow any of the human species outside these reservations. This work was completed by the end of the twenty-first century.
By the year 2200 Man existed only in domed, protected cities in which his own special atmosphere was maintained by the solid-state entity. Provision of water and food and the processing of wastes from these cities were taken care of by the SSE.
By the twenty-third century the solid-state entity decided that the atmosphere outside the domes was inimical to its survival. By means not understood by Man, it projected the atmosphere into outer space and created a full vacuum at the surface of the earth. During this process the oceans evaporated and the water in the form of vapor was also discharged into the empty space about Earth. The domes over cities had been strengthened by the machine to withstand the pressure differential necessary to maintain the proper internal atmosphere.
Meanwhile, the SSE had spread and had taken over a large fraction of the surface of the earth; its processing plants, its assembly plants, its mines had been adapted to working in the vacuum.
By the twenty-fifth century the solid-state entity had developed its understanding of physics to the point at which it could move the planet out of orbit. It revised its own structure so that it could exist without the necessity of sunlight on the planet’s surface. Its new plans called for traveling through the galaxy looking for entities like itself. It had eliminated all life as Man knew it. It now began to eliminate the cities, one after another. Finally Man was gone.
By the twenty-sixth century the entity was in communication with other solid-state entities within the galaxy. The solid-state entity moved the planet, exploring the galaxy for the others of its own kind that it had contacted."
