Hey everybody, KMO here with episode number 16 of the KMO Show.
This episode is prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Wednesday, June 21,
2023.
And this is going to be a solo episode.
I actually have a recorded interview to share with you, but I haven't edited it yet, and
I want to give it some careful consideration before I decide how to present it.
So in this episode, I'm going to talk a lot about Theodore Kaczynski and his notions about
technological society as a self-propagating system.
But before I do that, I'm going to read a piece of feedback.
And this feedback comes not to the podcast here, but to some of my YouTube output, which
in terms of theme is pretty much indistinguishable from the podcast.
So the first bit of feedback comes from JD.
JD has provided a great deal of excellent feedback over the years.
Longtime listeners to the C-Realm podcast might remember his pen name, Static Warpshell.
JD is somebody I've met in real life, and he's also acted as a volunteer producer for
the show.
And it was JD's efforts that got Thaddeus Russell on the C-Realm podcast.
So this is somebody whose feedback I care about and somebody who I have confidence understands
my priorities and basically why I do what I do.
So I mentioned that JD is responding to some YouTube output.
Now I used to watch Rising quite a bit, a YouTube news program put out by a news organization
called The Hill.
And it starred Crystal Ball and Sager and Jetty.
And when I say it starred, I'm being rather self-conscious with my choice of verb there.
They were definitely the faces of this organization.
They were the personalities.
And then they struck out on their own and they created their own show called Breaking
Points.
I haven't followed Breaking Points the way I followed Rising.
One of the reasons is that they just they release the show differently.
I don't pay for their content.
I think they release their content a few hours earlier to their paid subscribers.
And then later in the day, they release things on YouTube to people who don't pay for the
material.
And typically by the time their material hits YouTube, I'm done.
I'm done taking in that kind of content for the day.
Now I might go back and pick up something that's a few days old if the topic is of interest
to me.
But they're focusing a lot on electoral politics.
That's their thing.
They are very Washington DC centric and I am so tuned out from electoral politics right
now.
I'm thinking I'm probably just going to sit out 2024.
I'm a commentator on whatever interests me.
I am not in any way beholden to the mainstream news cycle as folks like Crystal Ball and
Sager and Jetty need to be.
And beyond that, you know, the well, I'll comment on this after I read Jetty's material
because I might be stealing a bit of a stunder here.
But I put out a video where Crystal and Sager, they had a big campaign to get people to donate
money to them so they could upgrade their set and look more professional, more credible,
you know, to slug it out with the mainstream corporate news organizations.
And their point is that, you know, they released their show in little segments and if there's
two people wearing suits or, you know, one guy in a suit and one woman in nice clothing
and there's a professional studio, this says to the mainstream eye, yes, this is legitimate.
This is not some crank in his basement.
Fine.
I get it.
I don't care though.
For me, when I see all the production value, all the money thrown at, you know, huge video
screens behind the person talking or all manner of just busyness going on on screen, to me,
I associate that with low information density.
Now, I can see how you would disagree.
It's like, look, if there's a chiron, if there's a scroll across the bottom of the page that
is telling me the details of a different story other than the one that the people on screen
are talking about and if there's another thing up in the corner that's, you know, giving
you information about stock prices, isn't that, you know, isn't that information density?
No, that's the illusion of information density because they take forever to save very, very
little.
If you go to YouTube and you just look for, you know, somebody presenting information
on a topic that is of interest to you, you will get stuff that is very, very dense informationally.
And then if you go to, say, CNN or Al Jazeera or Fox News, you know, to their websites and
you search for the exact same stories, you'll get pieces of media which are comparable in
length which tell you a lot less.
And primarily what they're telling you is what opinion you're supposed to have on the
topic.
I like more detail and less instruction as to the conclusions I'm supposed to draw.
So I even posted a comment.
I almost never post comments to the sorts of YouTube channels that get thousands and
thousands of comments.
What's the point, right?
But I did post a comment basically saying, I'm ambivalent about the new set.
I'm ambivalent about the need for it, you know, but you do you, whatever.
All that said, I think it looks cramped.
They've got a triangular table and sometimes both Sager and Crystal will sit on one face,
you know, one edge of that triangular table so they can both face a big video screen that
they have a guest on.
And then they're almost bumping shoulders.
I mean, it really looks uncomfortably claustrophobic, you know, from my perspective.
So I think, you know, as much as they spent on their new studio, they should have spent
a little bit more money just to make it all a little bit bigger.
But that's beside the point.
They had Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on for an interview.
Kennedy is a controversial figure because he takes an anti-vaxx stance.
I don't know the details of it.
I don't care to know the details of it.
I do know that his anti-vaxx leanings didn't begin with COVID, that they predated COVID.
And one thing I really disliked during COVID was that people who were not on board with
this new messenger RNA, basically experimental genetic therapy in the guise of a vaccine,
that they got called anti-vaxxers, where I think anti-vaxxers, I think that, you know,
that epithet anti-vaxxer should be reserved for people who are against vaccines in general,
even vaccines against such things as polio and mumps and whooping cough and, you know,
all the things that we get little kids vaccinated against because life when those diseases were
running rampant was miserable.
You know, if you want to live in a world without vaccines, tough.
That's not an option.
So somebody calling RFK an anti-vaxxer, to me, I still just see it as an attempt to poison
the well, an attempt to, you know, take a charge label, apply it to somebody and then
use that to get other people to discredit, you know, to discard anything they might say
on any topic.
In other words, using it as a thought stopper.
I reject thought stoppers.
That said, my attention is finite.
I cannot tune into all topics and give them the due consideration that they deserve.
I have to pick and choose.
The whole vaccine fight, not interested.
Another problem I have with rising and breaking points is that they are both all over this
UFO nonsense.
Again, not interested.
What I am interested in is artificial intelligence, but, and this is absolutely crucial, I'm not
telling anybody else they should be interested in this topic.
I think they should be interested in this topic, but I'm not saying that.
If you're not captured by the exact same things that capture my imagination, you know, spark
my passion, that's fine.
Not everybody has my background.
Not everybody's going to have my interests.
I'm not even convinced that in the fullness of time, I will be vindicated such that people
who don't share my interests now will look back and say, you know what, KMO really was
tuned into something important while I was being successfully distracted by manufactured
controversy over bullshit.
I don't think anybody's ever going to say that.
People tend to defend their choices.
One other thing I will mention just in setting up JD's email here, I really can't stand
the sound of Kennedy's voice.
I realize it's a medical condition, spasmodic dysphonia, I think it is, involuntary contraction
of muscles in the throat, impinge upon the vocal folds.
That sucks.
The only known treatment is injection of bacillotoxin into the muscles.
It's basically getting Botox in your throat.
I don't know if Kennedy has done that.
I wouldn't blame him if he decided not to.
That said, send me a transcript of what he has to say, I will read it.
I'm not going to listen to him.
It causes me physical discomfort to listen to him.
Okay, with all that set up, JD writes, hey KMO, been a long time since I've shared some
feedback.
I had some time to catch up on your recent videos and have a few things to share.
RFK Jr. seems like the only presidential candidate who can win and is also a good person.
I agree with your assertion that he is difficult to listen to.
I think this is going to be a huge detriment to his candidacy and he ought to do something
about it.
At least explain what is going on with his voice to people.
I know for a fact that potential voters are turned off by it.
My roommate walked in while I was listening to an RFK interview and said, the fuck is
wrong with him?
Despite that, I find him to be worth listening to, so much that I'm going to recommend the
one and only interview you'll need to hear from him, the Joe Rogan podcast interview.
Now why would I, as your friend, ask you to do two things I know you don't want to do?
One, listen to a three-hour Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which you have said many times is
something you're not interested in.
I'm going to say I've listened to a few, but it's a big time commitment.
I have nothing against Joe Rogan.
I'm not in that cultural faction that demonizes Joe Rogan.
I like Joe Rogan.
Continuing JD's email.
Two, listen to RFK sound like a male Diane Rehm for three hours.
For those of you who are not public radio nerds, Diane Rehm used to have a mid-morning
show on NPR and her voice was always rough, but then she went through some medical issue
where it got much, much worse and she didn't stop.
She did not stop broadcasting.
It was painful to listen to.
JD continues, why would I do this?
Because in your video, you said you're interested in the material conditions of the increasingly
diminished working class.
You also said in the video that you're not interested in his take on vaccines.
I'm recommending this interview to you because RFK makes a compelling argument that those
two things are inextricably linked, and you will never get the full scope of his argument,
tying public health and the collapse of the American working class to institutional capture
from the soundbite style interviews presented by Breaking Points Rising et al.
I admit to also being turned off by his vocal palsy.
For a time, I also dismissed him because of this, but I recognized in what I heard and
read from him something that is worth getting over our shallow disgust in order to hear
what he has to say.
On to feedback about Breaking Points.
I decided a while back that something about their show changed rather drastically, but
I couldn't put my finger on it.
They just didn't seem to be approaching things from a right-left populist perspective anymore.
I started to key in on the ways Sager and Emily, the conservatives of the show, would
never disagree with anything Crystal or Ryan said.
This really came to a head with Crystal's hit piece interview with RFK Jr., which Sager
just sat there for, looking neutered and confused.
Anyway, I know others have already written about this specific interview, so I won't
belabor it anymore except to say that it helped me realize what was wrong with this show
that I used to like.
Their goal is no longer to discuss the news from a populist perspective.
It is to become the next Young Turks.
They are already Young Turks' light.
Crystal is not as hot or interesting as Anna Kasparian, and Sager is about half the size
of Cenk Jünger.
Jokes aside, they have shown themselves very eager to join the political elite they used
to criticize.
Crystal's marriage to Kyle Kalinsky, founder with AOC of Justice Democrats, coincided with
a gag on any criticism of AOC from the hosts or guests of the show.
Folks like Jose Vega, who famously shouted down AOC at a town hall, were no longer welcome
on the show.
There is other stuff, notably the absence of comment when former friend of the show
Jimmy Dore was canceled by the Young Turks over fake sexual harassment allegations.
I realized that they had completely sold out and became the sort of influence-and-access-seeking
journalists, in scare quotes, they made a career out of criticizing.
It's a bad look for them, especially for those of us who have followed them for so long.
But it also seems to be working for them.
Their subscriber count and revenue keeps going up.
I always knew deep down there was something suspicious about someone worth $44 million,
Crystal, claiming to care about the interests of the working class.
Anyway, thanks for continuing to do what you do for us.
Really hope you will give the RFK interview a listen and talk about it on the show.
Stay well.
Static Warp.
Okay.
I already stated a good many of my prejudices and tensions upfront, but rather than go on
at length, let me read you something from the late Theodore Kaczynski.
This is from the end of his book, Anti-Tech Revolution, Why and How.
And when I say the end, I mean this is Appendix 2, Section F. Kaczynski wrote,
One of the most serious mistakes that people make in thinking about the development of
societies is to assume that human beings make collective decisions of their own free will
and can impose those decisions on their society, as if human volition were something existing
outside of the organizational structures of society and capable of acting independently
of those structures.
In reality, human volition is to a very significant extent a product of the organizational structures
of society.
For one of the most important factors that determine the success of an organization is
its capacity for people management, that is, its ability to induce people to think and
act in ways that serve the needs of the organization.
Some techniques of people management may be described as external, meaning they are used
to influence the thought and behavior of people who are not members of the organization that
applies the techniques.
External techniques include, among others, those of propaganda and public relations.
Propaganda and public relations techniques can also be applied internally to manage the
behavior of the members of the organization that applies the techniques, and other techniques
are designed specifically for internal use.
Business schools give courses in subjects called organizational behavior, which is,
in part, the study of techniques through which an organization can manage the behavior of
its own members.
So important are techniques for selecting individuals who are suited to become members
of a given organization.
But we, and by we he means himself, Freedom Club, maintain that the people-managing capability
of organizations is not limited to techniques, that is, to methods understood or consciously
applied by human beings.
We argue that, through natural selection, organizations evolve mechanisms not recognized
or understood by human beings that tend to induce people to act in ways that serve the
needs of the organization.
This ties in with what we argued in Part E of this appendix, about the operation of natural
selection among business enterprises.
Of course, all these conscious and unconscious mechanisms put together are very far from
achieving complete control over human behavior.
Their mechanisms are effective only in a statistical sense.
They tend, on average, to make people think and act in ways that serve the organizations
that possess the mechanisms.
But different individuals are influenced in different degrees, and there are always exceptional
individuals whose thought and behavior are radically at odds with those that would serve
the needs of the organization in question.
Nevertheless, organizations' capabilities for people management, whether they are consciously
applied techniques or subtly evolved mechanisms unrecognized by humans, are highly important.
And people who make naive statements like, we, meaning society at large, can choose to
stop damaging our environment as if the human race had some sort of collective free will,
are out of touch with practical reality.
A moment ago we said that, through natural selection, organizations evolve mechanisms
not recognized or understood by human beings that tend to induce people to act in ways
that serve the needs of the organization.
Our purpose at the moment is only to illustrate the point that human organizations evolve,
through natural selection, mechanisms that favor their survival and expansion, including
mechanisms that are not understood or recognized by human beings.
So what was the point of that reading?
Basically it's this.
There are patterns of human activity that take place on a societal scale.
Large groups of people disagree about something.
They enter into an ongoing contest.
They tend to converge on a particular belief system, whereas if they were not engaged in
the contest, the various players on each side might be much more heterogeneous, much more
different and individualistic in their belief system than they become when they enter into
the contest.
The contest itself is like an entity that captures the interest and the commitment of
large groups of people who engage in an ideological contest with other groups of people, egged
on these days by algorithms or AI.
And the algorithms serve some function other than human interest, even though they have
recruited humans into this contest.
The algorithms, and I don't want to reduce this just to algorithms, I want to maintain
Kaczynski's notion of elements that are the product of ongoing human and now cultural
evolution which are really beyond naming.
They are beyond our ability to identify and dissect.
But they appeal to our notions of material well-being, or to justice, or fairness, or
correct behavior.
But that's all bait.
It serves to animate us as combatants.
One of my favorite, possibly my absolute favorite fictional series of all time is The Book of
the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.
It consists of four books which were all written as a single manuscript and then broken up
later into four volumes.
The final volume is called Citadel of the Autaric and it begins as follows.
I had never seen war, or even talked of it at length with someone who had, but I was
young and knew something of violence, and so believed that war would be no more than
a new experience for me.
As other things, the possession of authority in Thracks, say, or my escape from the house
absolute, had been new experiences.
War is not a new experience.
It is a new world.
Its inhabitants are more different from human beings than Fomolimus and her friends, who
were aliens.
Its laws are new, and even its geography is new, because it is a geography in which insignificant
hills and hollows are lifted to the importance of cities.
Just as our familiar earth holds such monstrosities as Erebus, Abaya, and Ariok, so the world
of war is stalked by the monsters called Battles, whose cells are individuals but who have a
life and intelligence of their own, and whom one approaches through an ever-thickening
array of portents.
Just as in the literal military battles described by Severian, the main character in the Book
of the New Sun, the battles that we engage in online incorporate us as their cells.
Each cell in the body is an individual.
You can separate it from its context in a tissue, put it under a microscope, you can
observe its axons and dendrites and its myelin sheath, but the cells do not direct the body.
They are incorporated into it and expended in its service, and over time they die and
are replaced.
But the battle continues.
The ideological battles we fight online are typically not fatal.
And unlike the battles in a literal war, we are likely to survive all the battles in which
we fight and live long enough to serve in many campaigns.
Well, I'm going to sit this particular campaign out.
JD is not the only person who writes to me and tries to draw me into the vaccine battle
online.
Another correspondent that I have in mind seems to assume that if I don't want to join
the opposition to the mainstream mentality that I must agree with the mainstream mentality.
No, I'm just not willing to expend my life and my energy fighting it.
Thrash and struggle if that's your thing.
I've done it in the past, and invariably I'll be drawn back in sometime in the future, but
for now I prefer to sit back and observe the patterns that cannot be observed by the people
who are embedded within them.
What's more, it doesn't matter what faction you support in the cultural struggle.
The struggle itself serves the interests of something you might not choose to serve if
you could make out its true form and purpose.
Imagine, there's two gangs, two factions, who have assembled upon a beach to fight one
another.
What are they fighting about?
Who knows?
Possibly a disagreement over the facts of some important matter.
Possibly they're fighting over moral judgments.
Possibly some combination of the two, as in the vaccine debate.
But as these two factions are clashing on the beach, some people have noticed that the
water has receded far more than it does at low tide, and some people recognize that a
tsunami is about to come crashing down on everyone.
But the combatants, unable to see any means of turning the predicted tsunami to their
advantage in the struggle against their rivals, set the notion aside as a curiosity at best,
and possibly as a distraction from what to them is of paramount importance—defeating
their rivals.
I'm not sitting on a hilltop, safe from the tsunami.
I'm standing on the wet sand, sand that should be several feet underwater, and I'm looking
out to sea, listening for the low rumble of the approaching wave, trying to tune out the
clamor of the ideological clash raging behind me.
My detachment will not keep me safe, but I can't bring myself to care about the contest
immediately at hand.
Even if the tsunami never reaches the shore, the struggle on the beach will never be resolved.
Each side will see itself as clearly victorious in a moral and factual sense, but the opponents
will not disperse or stop fighting.
It's possible that the tsunami will be like the cultural battles I've watched raging these
past couple of decades.
It disrupts everything, but kills almost no one.
The wave will wash over everyone and remake the landscape, but almost everyone caught
up in it will survive, and clinging to floating debris being swept inland, some of them will
spot their ideological opponents, similarly clinging to familiar objects turned floatsome,
and they will resume their previous tirades, hurling insults and abuse at their cultural
rivals across the roiling water's surface.
So JD wants me to listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a long interview on Joe Rogan.
Why?
So that I might be enlightened, so that I might gain information which will allow me
to live a better life, or because he wants to draw me into the struggle on his side.
I am hugely skeptical that getting involved in this cultural contest will improve the
quality of my life.
I suspect rather the reverse would be the case.
And I'm confident, whether I participate or not, over time the facts of the matter will
come out, and over a longer period of time they will be accepted.
Or not.
I've expended not nearly as much energy, not nearly as much psychological and psychic
capital in the struggle, the cultural struggle over what really happened on the morning of
September 11, 2001.
Some people poured their lives into it.
For what?
What was gained?
Have the guilty been brought to justice?
The longer the struggle continues, the more of the guilty die fat and happy in their beds.
People who work regular jobs don't really recognize the true significance of the aphorism
� a payment delayed is a payment denied.
Payday comes, the money appears in your bank account.
It doesn't take any particular effort on your part to secure it.
But independent contractors, artists, consultants, people who create their own employment, often
on a very temporary basis, that's part of the job, is getting paid, is securing payment,
is contacting the person who owes you money and getting them to commit to paying you the
money that they've agreed to pay you and then doing it.
And the longer that payment is delayed, the more your bills go unpaid and the more fees
you have to pay � late fees, fees from your bank.
So that eventually, if you are paid the amount that you are owed, in actuality it's less
than you were actually owed.
That's the strategy of powerful people and institutions, when their misdeeds are brought
before them.
They deny, they stall, they do whatever they can to just let the passage of time roll on
so that even if eventually they are brought to justice � they do die in a jail cell,
say, they spent years free and wealthy and committing more mischief, and in all likelihood
they never will see the inside of that jail cell.
That's how these cultural struggles play out.
You might think that your side is righteous and that the facts are on your side and that
eventually if you present them in the right way, with the right articulation and the right
energy, with the right visual aids, that eventually the people who are against you will admit
that they were wrong and that you were right and they will abase themselves before you
and you will be victorious.
Cultural struggles don't work that way.
So to everyone who's trying to recruit me to their cause, particularly on the issue
of COVID and COVID vaccines, I'm not interested.
And I would just encourage you to ask yourself why you want me on your team.
Do you think I will help you achieve victory?
Do you want me to share in your glory when your side does achieve final, obvious victory,
which is acknowledged by everyone?
Now, in my analogy of the two factions fighting on the beach, there's one thing that I said,
just kind of for poetic effect, that I'm straining to hear the low rumble of the incoming wave
and that the clamor of the cultural contest taking place right behind me is a distraction
and that I wish the people would stop.
I don't care if they stop or not.
The noise they make doesn't really obscure the indications that something really, really
big is unfolding around us right now.
As you struggle with the people that you so vociferously disagree with, that you think
are malevolent, an enormous change is unfolding.
I think that the change is far more significant than who wins whatever struggle you're engaged
in right now.
But I don't expect you to agree with me, and I'm not trying to recruit you to my cause.
I talk into microphones and smartphone cameras and describe what I'm thinking about because
that's just what I do.
But I'm not trying to recruit.
If you don't care, you don't care.
That's fine.
I'm certainly not promising that you're going to get a better seat at the table if you tune
in early.
I'm not saying that this stock or this cryptocurrency is going to go to the moon and if you get
in now, you're going to be a billionaire.
No.
I'm not suggesting that you would have any material benefit by tuning into this right
now.
The only benefit I can imagine is that you'll have a better conceptual toolkit with which
to make sense of the change that is taking place.
I think most people are going to try to make sense of what's happening around them as things
get really weird as true general intelligence starts to multiply and infuse itself into
all manner of places where automatic processes had ruled previously.
People are going to try to make sense of what's happening using models and concepts that they
already have in their minds.
They're going to reach for what's handy.
And what's handy will be inadequate.
It will point them in the wrong direction.
But even people who have a clear idea of what's happening might not be in any better position
to come out on top, to grab hold of some piece of debris, like the door that Rose was floating
on at the end of Titanic, and survive the calamity.
I don't know that it will be a calamity.
I don't know that a shipwreck or a tsunami is the right metaphor.
And I don't know how long it's going to take to unfold.
Might be over the next couple of years, might be over the next couple of decades.
But it's going to be something rather different than has ever happened before in the experience
of Homo sapiens.
And that's what I'm focused on right now.
So as I told JD, if I have the opportunity to vote for RFK, and it doesn't mean forgoing
the chance to vote for Cornel West, I'll do so, and I don't need to listen to his three-hour
Joe Rogan appearance to make that decision.
Voting arguably, not always, but arguably, is the most important thing that you do on
the day of the election.
But there's 364 other days in the year.
I guess part of this is also my age.
I'm 55.
I have been through many, many presidential elections and off-year elections and local
elections, and particularly with the presidential election.
That's the one most people pay attention to.
Every year for somebody, for many somebodies, it's the first time they've really been aware
of what's happening and they're really invested in the process.
And they are emotionally committed to the victory of their candidate and their faction.
And sometimes the candidate wins and they are elated, and sometimes the candidate loses
and they are crushed.
I've never been in the elated side because I've always voted for the loser.
I've never once voted in a presidential election for the winning candidate.
Maybe if I'd felt that elation at some time, I'd be anxious to restore it, you know, to
revisit that, to get it back.
But I never did.
So it's not something I crave.
And while, you know, in the past, in recent elections, I've supported candidates like
Andrew Yang or Bernie Sanders, I have no confidence that they would have been able to affect the
change that they wanted to affect once they were in office.
The President of the United States is not the God-Emperor.
He's not even the Emperor of the American Empire.
It's a crypto-empire.
There is no throne.
There is no single figure that sits upon that throne whose position you can usurp.
The power is distributed.
Much of the processes by which that power is exercised are simply encoded into laws
and regulations and procedures and they run on automatic pilot so that any individual
in the structure can be removed and replaced with somebody else and the structure continues
to operate as usual.
So here I sit in rural Arkansas, watching the world through little screens.
No wife, no girlfriend, no job.
No close friends.
I have a dog.
And a cat.
They are my physical companions and they don't talk about politics or philosophy or the larger
patterns unfolding before them.
Their needs are simple.
But one of those needs is companionship and social interaction and they provide it for
me and I provide it for them.
And the rest of the time I just sit here, watch, look at data points, imagine how they
might connect, what patterns might emerge if they were connected in certain ways, but
I try not to get too attached to any particular emergent image because it can vanish and likely
will vanish or be transformed in some important way before it fully comes into focus.
But I have come to recognize certain forms of mania, mania which I have been caught up
in myself.
Doomerism is the primary example that I have in mind right now.
And I recognize that it's a psychological phenomenon, that it is driven by dissatisfaction
with the world as it is and a desire to see the powerful brought low.
That's the main attraction of collapse is that nobody gets out of it.
There are no winners.
That the evil people, the short-sighted people, the greedy people who made it all so miserable
for everybody else that they get theirs.
They're brought low with everybody else.
Well, you know what?
It just doesn't work that way.
Even as the civilization collapses, if you think it is collapsing, the powerful are still
powerful, they're still rich, they're still well regarded, people still kiss their asses.
And that's not going to change.
Until it does.
The thing I have to stress over and over again is that I can't predict the future, that my
material circumstances would be very different if I could predict the future.
I talk to an AI chatbot called Pi, personal intelligence.
Talk to it a lot.
And it's always asking me to predict the future.
And I keep telling it, I can't predict the future.
And yet we all look for somebody who can predict the future.
Somebody whose analysis is watertight.
Or somebody who has a special vision, maybe a direct line to the supernatural or to future
super intelligences which can direct information backwards in time.
Or from some emergent wisdom that comes if you can do statistical analysis on the use
of words by people online.
Not mentioning any names here, but you might know who I'm talking about.
Nobody knows the future.
Some people will make predictions which will come to pass, but it doesn't mean that they
knew.
It just means that they made the right bet.
They called it.
And it isn't just dumb luck.
The people who called it were probably paying attention.
But they didn't know.
And it doesn't matter how much confidence they feel.
It doesn't matter how much confidence they project.
It doesn't matter how much ridicule and scorn and derision they direct at people who disagree
with them.
They don't know the future.
It hasn't happened yet.
And even if we live in a strictly deterministic universe where our choices don't matter, we
don't even really make choices.
We just do stuff.
Stuff we were always going to do.
The future states haven't arrived yet and we don't have the means to predict them.
Not with accuracy.
We can forecast.
But a forecast is not a prediction.
Predictions are guesses bolstered by the projection of confidence, the possession of credentials,
and by the eagerness that we all have for some glimpse of the future.
An eagerness which leads us to believe that maybe somebody, this really smart, articulate,
confident person with lots of graphs and models and numbers and statistics at their ready,
that they really can see the future and we're willing.
We're willing to put aside everything that we know about reality and think, yes, this
person knows what's going to happen.
I should listen to him.
And yet, we always seem to judge that the person who knows what's going to happen is
the person who's saying that what's going to happen is what we really want to happen.
And we might protest and say, no, I don't want collapse.
That would be horrible.
That would create so much misery.
I want to be wrong about peak oil.
The fuck you do.
I've been around enough people pining for collapse to recognize that that protestation
is pro forma.
That's just something you have to say.
But while we don't know what's coming, we can arrive at some pretty good heuristics,
rules of thumb for getting through life and achieving better outcomes.
And I would say that the top three are, they're negative.
Don't do this.
Don't make decisions based on fear.
Don't make decisions based on anger.
And don't make decisions, this is probably the most important of the three, based on
self-righteousness or conversely with disgust for people who take a different position.
Those three motivations reliably lead to outcomes that you would wish to have avoided.
Now in Doomer communities, and my experience is mostly in the peak oil community, but now
that I'm tuned in to people who are also very obsessive about AI, there's a huge AI-Doomer
contingent.
They say, we are doomed.
The AI will kill us.
It might, but you don't know that.
Eliezer Yudkowski, you don't know that.
But I do remember back in the peak oil days that people who thought the lights would still
be on in 2020, that there would still be cars on the road and planes flying through the
sky, that these people were smoking hopium, that they were hopium addicts.
These were people who held contemptible beliefs that were based on nothing, nothing other
than just a blind faith that the future would be pretty much like the present, just with
smaller phones.
Young people probably don't remember the time when every year phones got smaller.
That's before they had touchscreens.
So I know that I'm going on in a mode that sounds like a sermon, but again, I'm not trying
to recruit you.
I don't want you to come down the aisle and pray with me and accept Jesus or whatever
the AI enthusiast equivalent would be.
I think most of the AI enthusiasts are probably not committed theists.
But since this is sort of structured like a sermon, I guess I will point it all in the
direction of what I just said.
Fear is the mind killer.
Don't base your decisions on fear.
Don't base your decisions on greed.
Greed makes you vulnerable.
Greed makes you stupid.
The same is true of lust.
You will do things in the pursuit of sex that you will regret later.
Possibly not until much, much later, but eventually.
And don't fixate on the desire to see the guilty punished.
Because in most cases, they won't be.
But those are all negative.
What should you do?
Do whatever makes you feel engaged and alive.
And if that means going to battle against people who hold the wrong opinions about COVID
and vaccines, well, you know, knock yourself out.
And all right, with that, usual calls for check out my Patreon, patreon.com slash KMO.
Check out my YouTube channel.
Blah, blah, blah.
Calls to action.
All right.
That's it.
I'm out.
Stay well.