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who would have thought that mathematicians and information theoreticists make the fiercest weapons. everyone. everyone would have thought that.

we just can't help it. you dabble a bit and whoops you accidentally created *checks notes* an append-only machine with an appending tape head following a (2^18)(2^18) -> 2^18 probabilistically compressed state table, plus a content-addressed oracle that retrieves from its own past tape.

and suddenly it's pandemonium. the monkeys are going crazy. the historical lineage should be: nuclear bomb -> LSD (which timothy leary famously described "as significant as the nuclear bomb") -> transformers

leary also had a fascinating talk about how progress grows exponentionally, he used the unit "jesus" to measure it, using sentences such as "by this time we've gone from 2 jesuses to 10 jesuses"

effectively a loose generalization of moore's law to technological progress as a whole, and it turns out... he was probably right. we also just got gene therapy.

"welcome to the ai psychosis party" i wish it was a psychosis. 🫤 that would be curable. i did have an actual psychosis in 2020 so i can directly compare.

and this is also not the first time this happened though more in the other direction. the same thing happened in the 70s, and it was the conservatives who stepped on the brakes and canceled a dozen research projects, some of which created things like... let me remember... ah yes, the internet

and i guess the urge of trying to keep it all together is only human, but so is the excitement of discovery. and given the scale at which humanity operates now, i don't think either of these two groups can win, plus people "switch allegiance" all the time.

A) you try to pin down your culture to a certain expected state and invariably it gets corrupted because it is a fixed target. it is thoroughly known and thus exploitable.