Comment by Sharlin
4 hours ago
There is a fairly specific definition of what a cult is, and just being publicly worried about an existential risk isn’t that.
4 hours ago
There is a fairly specific definition of what a cult is, and just being publicly worried about an existential risk isn’t that.
Would you at least concede that the Zizian offshoot was a cult? They murdered multiple people!
Rationalism has spawned many offshoot cults which are genuine and in some cases dangerous cults, but rationalism and Effective Altruism are not themselves cults.
Most people among both ideologies have long believed in the arrival of a machine demigod of sorts, but I kind of am skeptical of the notion that there are any tech people who have not always held similar beliefs in the long run. Like, all the people reading this: you think in a thousand years from now humans are going to be doing most labor? Obviously far, far, far smarter machines will have unimaginably changed things by then, and/or we'll all be gone.
The difference is most people in tech have historically thought it's maybe a century or three away, while the rationalists think it's a decade or two away (and also thought it would be 2020s - 2040s even decades prior to now).
> I kind of am skeptical of the notion that there are any tech people who have not always held similar beliefs
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your totally-not-in-an-insular cult members.
A thousand years is a long time, and the world will be so different that it's hard to make any concrete predictions. But yes, if I had to wager, I'd bet that what humans conceive of as "labor" in 3026 will still be whatever difficult or annoying bits are done by humans.
In 1026 nearly all labor was agricultural labor. If you told a Roman peasant that magical self-driving contraptions could sow and reap the fields, he might wonder what could possibly be left for humans to do in such a world. And yet, here we are, and I still have to update JIRA tickets.
For my myself, I expect AI to prove a more transformative technology than Docker but less transformative than the sewing machine.
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If you all believe in the same prophecy and hang out at the same orgies together, I'm willing to call that a "cult", at least in the colloquial sense.