Cosma Shalizi on Project Cybersyn. Initial notes, January 2022....This has something of a cult following among contemporary socialists, in no small part, I suspect, because of the period glamour of the photographs of the control room, and because of the aura of righteous martyrdom given the fate of Allende and his government (more)

Karl Schroeder: Retiring Geopolitics. I started Unapocalyptic with a couple of goals. Not quite manifestos, these are certainly lines in the sand. (more)

The Santiago Boys — a podcast series by Evgeny Morozov. Cybersyn is an oft-referred to hypothetical in the socialist calculation debate (more)

Why AI Can Push You to Make the Wrong Decision at Work. Chatbots help craft emails and act as customer support. Algorithms help banks decide loan eligibility and assist in reviewing job applications. AI is gaining a foothold in many workplaces, aggregating information and helping people make smarter decisions. At least that’s how AI is sold. (more)

Dan Davies: the statistical heart of the system. This is now an occasional series of pieces related to what did and didn’t go on in Allende’s Chile when Stafford Beer was involved in the big experiment in running an economy on cybernetic principles. One thing I’ve tried to emphasise so far is that CYBERSYN really, really wasn’t a “planned economy”. (more)

Nathaniel Read Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician, writer, and poker player who analyzes baseball, basketball, and elections. He is the founder of FiveThirtyEight, and held the position of editor-in-chief there, along with being a special correspondent for ABC News, until May 2023.[2] Since departing FiveThirtyEight, Silver has been publishing on his Substack blog Silver Bulletin[3] and serves as an advisor to Polymarket.[4] Silver was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time in 2009 after an election forecasting system he developed successfully predicted the outcomes in forty-nine of the fifty states in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.[5] His subsequent election forecasting systems predicted the outcome of the 2012 and 2020 presidential elections with a high degree of accuracy. His polls-only model gave Donald Trump, the ultimate winner, only a 28.6% chance of victory in the 2016 presidential election,[6] although this was higher than any other forecasting competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver

Something to Change The World (Technological Determinism, Technological Revolution) (Evolution) (to solve a Grand Challenge?) (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI ([AGI]) and and the Technological Richter Scale. The Technological Richter scale is introduced about 80% of the way through Nate Silver’s new book On the Edge. (more)

Science fiction author. http://www.craphound.com/ (more)

Matt Southey: A Brief History of Accelerationism. “Accelerationism” is a deeply confused term. As a philosophical category, it dates to 2008, and yet it has already become overloaded with conflicting meanings. Depending on the context, it refers to a capitalist ideology, a communist theory of change, and a form of white-nationalist terrorism. (more)

Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement? Forbes has learned that Guillaume Verdon, the founder of stealth AI startup Extropic and a former Google engineer, is behind the provocative Twitter account leading the “effective accelerationism” movement sweeping Silicon Valley. (more)

complete eliminination of a species (more)

Climate Change SciFi by Kim Stanley Robinson: ISBN:978-0316300131 (more)

TESCREAL is an acronym neologism, proposed and advocated by computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres, standing for transhumanism, extropianism, singularity-arianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism.[1] Gebru and Torres argue that these ideologies should be treated as an "interconnected and overlapping" group with shared origins.[1] Gebru and Torres allege this movement allows its proponents to use the threat of human extinction to justify societally expensive or detrimental projects. They consider it pervasive in social and academic circles in Silicon Valley centered around artificial intelligence (AGI).[2] As such, the acronym is sometimes used to criticize a perceived belief system associated with Big Tech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularitarianism

Jon Udell: Welcome to the Sapiezoic. The latest Long Now podcast, by David Grinspoon, takes a very long view indeed. As we transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, he thinks, we’re not just entering a new geological epoch, as shown here: (more)

The Anthropocene was a rejected proposal for a geological epoch following the Holocene... The proposal located potential stratigraphic markers to the mid-20th century.[11][10][12] This time period coincides with the start of the Great Acceleration, a post-World War II time period during which global population growth, pollution and exploitation of natural resources have all increased at a dramatic rate.[13] The Atomic Age also started around the mid-20th century, when the risks of nuclear wars, nuclear terrorism and nuclear accidents increased... In March 2024, after 15 years of deliberation, the Anthropocene Epoch proposal of the AWG was voted down by a wide margin by the SQS, owing largely to its shallow sedimentary record and extremely recent proposed start date.[16][17] The ICS and the IUGS later formally confirmed, by a near unanimous vote, the rejection of the AWG's Anthropocene Epoch proposal for inclusion in the Geologic Time Scale.[4][5][6] The IUGS statement on the rejection concluded: "Despite its rejection as a formal unit of the Geologic Time Scale, Anthropocene will nevertheless continue to be used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. It will remain an invaluable descriptor of human impact on the Earth system."... An early concept for the Anthropocene was the Noosphere by Vladimir Vernadsky, who in 1938 wrote of "scientific thought as a geological force".[18] Scientists in the Soviet Union appear to have used the term Anthropocene as early as the 1960s to refer to the Quaternary, the most recent geological period.[19] Ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer subsequently used Anthropocene with a different sense in the 1980s[20][21] and the term was widely popularised in 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen,[3][22] who regards the influence of human behavior on Earth's atmosphere in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological epoch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene

odds of human extinction (or at least really bad/deep collapse), most often because of hostile AGI

David Brin idea/patent for Disputation Arena. 2006-11-06-BrinBrownGoogleTalk (more)

In cognitive science and neuropsychology, executive functions (collectively referred to as executive function and cognitive control) are a set of cognitive processes that support goal-directed behavior, by regulating thoughts and actions through cognitive control, selecting and successfully monitoring actions that facilitate the attainment of chosen objectives. Executive functions include basic cognitive processes such as attentional control, cognitive inhibition, inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Higher-order executive functions require the simultaneous use of multiple basic executive functions and include planning and fluid intelligence (e.g., reasoning and problem-solving). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions

Genius? (more)