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Techies, we need to get better at recognising tendencies that pave the way for fascist ideology. One example is transhumanism (part of the #TESCREAL bundle) - the belief in feasibility and desirability of radical human enhancement. Joscha Bach is a transhumanist (and "AI researcher") who conceptualises humans as software, as AI. He was given a stage at the #38c3.

I'd like to unpack some of his statements that he presents as personal takes, but they come with horrid political implications.
A 🧵

#38C3 #tescreal
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mastodon
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„The spirit is the software running on my brain.“ "You are software" "It [an LLM] just made up text that looks like your talking to a conscious AI. What is the difference? How much of us is fake?" The difference is that humans have human rights that need we need to defend, now more than in the last decades. The "conscious AI" debate wants to confer rights to "AI" - and it ignores that software is not just an extension of human existence, but shaped by a small group of humans.
You are software Cyber Animism: Spirits are computer programs Difference between living and dead systems: « self organizing, self perpetuating, adaptive, error correcting software agency: ability of a system to control the future Software explains the mind-body problem.
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Bach fetishises intelligence as measured by IQ - portraying "normal" people as whims attached to their ego. And infants look like...sorry, what is this supposed to be?! I can only guess who he means by those "enlightened" people from one of his comments: "I know a bunch of people who identify as LLMs and they think that LLMs are true intelligence and humans are the poor approximation."
graph showing a normal distribution of IQ scores, assigning low scores to "Infant: no personal self", the bump of the distribution to "my first person perspective is irreducible and ineffable" and high scores to "enlightened sage: no personal self"
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There is random metaphysical stuff, like "you dream the reality you experience", "we are anthropomophising people way too much". What is this supposed to mean?

And he mixes in stories of humans as mainly bullies and states things like "you realise that your values are instrumental to the outcomes that you want to see in the world". No, some people have real values that are not just instrumental. And they are not software, either.

Aristotle: The soul is a form (a pattern) imposed on physics. The soul is a spontaneously formed, self improving computer virus, running on Turing Machines made from organic chemistry.
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His talk is here: media.ccc.de/v/38c3-self-model… Luckily, there was another talk by @MSchnetker on longtermism, casting light on the quasi-religious beliefs about AGI that are used to legitimise inequality and attacks on human dignity: media.ccc.de/v/38c3-longtermis…

I also strongly recommend the work on #TESCREAL by dair-community.social/@timnitG… and mastodon.bida.im/@xriskology in their great paper firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/…

We need to expose and push back on these narratives!


Self Models of Loving Grace

Artificial Intelligence is not just an engineering discipline, but also the most fascinating and important philosophical project ever att...
media.ccc.de
#tescreal @Max F.J. Schnetker
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And I have just come across a @netzpolitik_feed article by the fabulous @esthermenhard with one of the authors of the TESCREAL bundle paper: netzpolitik.org/2023/longtermi… It summarises key points from the more academic paper. So: video, paper, article - whatever your preferred format is, look into this! 😀

Longtermism: „An odd and peculiar ideology“

Émile P. Torres calls one of the most influential philosophies of our time an ideology: Longtermism is the central school of thought of tech giants like Elon Musk and Skype founder Jaan Tallinn.
netzpolitik.org
@netzpolitik.org @Esther Menhard

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