#BruceSterling

*How come all these dead guys are dead? They all had standards of some kind, they didn't grant permission for that

*Well, if he's Victor Frankenstein and the Emperor Napoleon, it's naive to assume that you would be allowed to merely subscribe and pay him off *Best case scenario: you're the brother-in-law *Eventually your son by the sister is the mayor of Tallahassee, Florida www.flickr.com/photos/bruce...

*That's true, that troubled and kinky L'Interdit girl is indeed performed by Rooney Mara. But let "Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant but troubled computer hacker," land herself a lucrative perfume account, okay

*No matter how kinky dystopias might seem to the user-base, I'm pretty sure that utopias are even worse, if you'd like to keep your head on your shoulders medium.com/@bruces/utop...

"I'm searching for a long-term, pleasant, joyously supportive marriage where the Forbidden Lover and I eventually congratulate one another about our many great-grandchildren"

*Three, four years ago I would have been laughingly skeptical "Sure, cheap AI slop uber alles, but it's gonna have seven fingers and it can't count to five" "A pity it's not any better" *It got lots better. Not by human standards, but better by standards that are very hard to describe

*They're demanding $2T, will they get it, I dunno *Every industrial enterprise that ISN'T slop is visibly moribund, the oligarchy has leeched it all to near-death

*Well, if the "abundance of AI rapidly transforms every sector of the economy," then that "cauldron of boiling frogs" is rapidly transformed into a "Kettle of Planetary Slop" *Slop coast to coast, north to south. Every time-zone, every scale. Every demographic. Slop from a spoon-to-a-city

*Planetary mayhem arrives at the breakfast table *Imagine being a "conservative" and trying to gaslight your "tradwife" about these stark kitchen realities *The contrails did it. Lesbians, Jews, somebody made the milk taste different

*Whatever happens to musicians will happen to laid-off games journalists *Why is a society so saturated by computation so bored about its loud and shiny computer-games, there has to be some deeper cultural significance in this *Every games journalist should pivot to culture-critic

*Even if they end up as the Super Intelligent Super Conducting Super Collider, in some abandoned tangle of dewberry vines in Waxahatchie, that is hard to beat for gutsy ambition *Very Manifest Destiny. A robber baron's railroad, a Colt revolver and a Bowie knife, spit on the dice and roll 'em

*This must be the boldest public statement that I've ever read in my life. Your scheme is bigger than the Industrial Revolution plus the Internet, and it's happening right now, and you need 2 trillion!? *It's like Victor Frankenstein crowns himself as Napoleon

*Well, I can imagine an AI chess-engine that is *tuned* for fun *There are a lot of AI engines that are tuned to mimic the "styles" of human chess players *You would think there would be a market for a chess machine that doesn't remorselessly win, but always plays in the most-playful way

*It will "hallucinate" and make that up, of course *Hallucination being the "crazy magical thinking ability" that is baked into LLMs themselves, from their get-go

*Okay, but what is it like to *describe* a branch selection that is against board states *Because the human chess critics on YouTube, analysing ongoing AI games, never say anything remotely like that

*You'd better hope that Karl himself doesn't go to Milan, and bring you back that particular gift because he has that in mind for you and your romance *If that's the case, red flags should shoot off in all directions and you should retreat into a romantasy novel

*No, you don't logically think-it-through in that Teutonic fashion, it's an instant, grab-the-product act of solidarity "Yes, this is the inner me here, yes, I'm forbidden and also brazenly-available while also being chained up in huge bleeding-heart rubies" *That awareness is worth the 80 euros

*You're Gretchen-from-Bremen, you're in Milan buying lingerie to take home *You contemplate the Interdit bottle *Do you engineer it, do you think: "I need to douse myself in this 'elixir' so I can be more 'forbidden' and play hard-to-get with Karl, my on-again, off-again, situationship guy"

*Also her new brand-extension is an "elixir" now, like a youth-extension elixir for the fading libidos of an aging demographic *And it's *provocative,* that is my point here. The dystopian element makes it impulse-purchase sexy

*A few meters away, the always uptight, wary-and-suffering "L'Interdit" perfume girl has been reduced to jewelled bondage *Not just forbidden, as she customarily is, but chained-up for it

*I don't think it's "ironic" that Demi Moore plays a horribly suffering beauty-victim in the movie "The Substance" and then retails a substance off the shelves at Sephora *On the contrary, this deliberately plays to a self-destructive element of masochism in the beauty racket as an industry

*It's become very common for humans to play chess along with an AI slider-bar estimating who is "ahead" *How would the AI itself become an AI chess critic, and verbally EXPLAIN to humans how it "knows" who is "ahead"

*An AI visual slop-engine will fulfill its prompt, but parts of the image that aren't prioritized will often decay into chaotic rubbish *But an AI chess engine always seems entirely engaged with every piece on the entire board. It's not choosy *Is that so, or does it just look that way to humans

*There are also a lot of fairy-chess variants where they're assigned absurd situations, like 15 knights vs 15 bishops, and they go about the process with their customary solemnity *Clearly chess-fans do enjoy these spectacles, but what's the nature of the appeal, exactly *Heath-Robinsonesque

*I also watch those chess videos, and they have many of the basic problems that art-critics have with AI artworks in general *The games are strangely dispassionate and drama-free. Nobody blunders. Nobody sets traps. *They strip away everything to win with the certainty of a one-pawn advantage

*I blame science fiction dystopias for Demi Moore starring as a blood-gushing body-horror monster, while still managing to sell anti-aging cosmeceuticals #TheSubstance

*Reverse-engineering, or, how to use AI to disrupt the tech biz in ways it hates and fears *While that activity is still, briefly, legal *"Black October" indeed youtu.be/YtBrjCXQUkg?...

*Hold on, Vivian Wilson is Elon's trans child and also that's a dead Tesla robot *Don't all rush to the Desigual all at once

*AI replacing art critics *What if they do a much better job, tho hyperallergic.com/dear-art-wor...

*Tough break for that robot in the Barcelona airport. #Desigual *Also ominous that it's become genuinely fashionable to want to destroy them

*A sabotage scheme that complex and ingenious must have required several math degrees

*Well, I'm back in Turin. And here in my own neighbourhood, this brazen, shocking violation-of-the-norm *Is this a pre-revolutionary situation?! The very roots-of-society are stricken

*It seems a little late in the day to assume that they'll just peaceably receive their giant $2T crown of Saudi wealth-funds *Given contemporary geopolitics, I'd expect a situation more like relentless cyberwar zero-day attacks with the full-force of AI-assistance, plus drone-bombed data centers

*Their "fulcrums of thinking levers" are not hard to see, okay? They're not metaphors, they're literally the size of small towns #DataCenters

"We'll build the AI and then the AI will tell us how to make it profitable" *I get the logic in this, but what happens when the AI makes everybody else in the world *un-profitable* *Planet of Math Professors

*Well, people made fun of Anthropic's Constitution, but it's actually written *for the sake of the AI as a participant* *What about *everybody else's* Constitution under those bizarre singularitarian circumstances www.anthropic.com/news/claude-...

*What does "formal verification of agriculture" look like *Once you've got those $2T Mars-sized machines set up, they've got to endlessly learn stuff to pay for their juice and their maintenance

*Clearly it's beyond mere any mere "revolution" or "conquering empire" and is and better understood as some real-world singularity *But how do the lights stay on? How does it work? *Is everybody governed by "Anthropic's Constitution"? Is there a flag to salute

*What happens if they get away with it, in this "post-hyperscalar" world where AIs are bigger than national GNPs *Do they conquer all other forms of human endeavour the way they've just conquered mathematics *I guess that's on the agenda, but how does present-day society ever move into that state

*It's not like they never WARNED everybody, repeatedly, that it was getting more and more dangerous *Also, they've got serious uses for the 2 trillion, like, constructing giant humming databanks all over the landscape that are the size and shape of Mars colonies

*The problem there is not finding the boldness to shake down the whole planet, it's gonna be the rival protection-racket gangs *I should have figured this out quite a while ago. I feel naive now *I enjoy the sense of naivete, actually, it's rejuvenating

*Improving generative programming until it can detect every tiny human error in decades of human labor *And then holding the entire software industry hostage to "protect" them from threats that you created *Of course that racket is "worth 2 trillion," if you can get away with it

*I'm quite the fan of this long-running series

"The enshittifying reality of platform realism" #slop #memes #ethnonational #Europe www.eurozine.com/the-national...

*I blame science fiction dystopias

*It's rather dreadful to single them out by name before attempting to assassinate them #AI #datacenters #bombing #Chervonenkis #Galushkin #Lyapunov

*It's as if the Grammar Police had invented a Newspeak with an accurate, fully-provable grammar, and if everybody in the world didn't promptly learn to write that way, they would all be attacked and robbed by the new Grammar Criminals www.anthropic.com/research/for...

*So, what's the right term for a billion-dollar monster gene-spliced war-dog *A "replicanine," maybe. A "canoid"