31–40 of 69 posts
I just don't get it. How do you go from writing the kinds of future visions he has to staring at the singularity practically hitting you in the face and calling it "the world's money-losingest technology"? Is it because he isn't actually using the technology for work on a day-to-day basis like a lot of us?
Ideological capture is an often socially enforced prison
Whenever I read Cory Doctorow, I feel like someone took the complement of Paul Graham's writing and posted it. I personally find both of them vapid and annoying. Edit: the article that the author is commenting on is IMO much better than the linked commentary. There's not much to it https://crookedtimber.org/2026/06/15/one-big-grift/
I just don't get it. How do you go from writing the kinds of future visions he has to staring at the singularity practically hitting you in the face and calling it "the world's money-losingest technology"? Is it because he isn't actually using the technology for work on a day-to-day basis like a lot of us?
> singularity I just cant get over this term, do you honestly believe in this? I use AI daily and while it is super useful I see too many limitations for it to “recursively improve and cause an intelligence explosion”. 1. Clearly, the people selling AI with this idea benefit greatly with this promise of infinite upside. Can you can trust them? 2. Singularity essentially requires to handwave away a lot of baked-in iss…
> something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and not because it does useful things This has been the definition of finance for hundreds of years. I don't know why it comes across here like this is a new phenomenon.
I just don't get it. How do you go from writing the kinds of future visions he has to staring at the singularity practically hitting you in the face and calling it "the world's money-losingest technology"? Is it because he isn't actually using the technology for work on a day-to-day basis like a lot of us?
> singularity I just cant get over this term, do you honestly believe in this? I use AI daily and while it is super useful I see too many limitations for it to “recursively improve and cause an intelligence explosion”. 1. Clearly, the people selling AI with this idea benefit greatly with this promise of infinite upside. Can you can trust them? 2. Singularity essentially requires to handwave away a lot of baked-in iss…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> singularity I just cant get over this term, do you honestly believe in this? I use AI daily and while it is super useful I see too many limitations for it to “recursively improve and cause an intelligence explosion”. 1. Clearly, the people selling AI with this idea benefit greatly with this promise of infinite upside. Can you can trust them? 2. Singularity essentially requires to handwave away a lot of baked-in iss…
I do. Just based on personal experience of using these tools for the last several years and how they’ve progressed.
Counter argument: does anything else work this way? E.g. Moores law had an end too right? I would argue that the core tech breakthrough (Transformer-based LLM) has been improved, but no fundamental further innovation seems to have been made. The current architecture fundamentally hallucinates, even Fabel even on trivial problems. I.e. as number tokens increase error likelihood goes to infinity. How then, can this scale recursively to infinity?
> something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and not because it does useful things This has been the definition of finance for hundreds of years. I don't know why it comes across here like this is a new phenomenon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> singularity I just cant get over this term, do you honestly believe in this? I use AI daily and while it is super useful I see too many limitations for it to “recursively improve and cause an intelligence explosion”. 1. Clearly, the people selling AI with this idea benefit greatly with this promise of infinite upside. Can you can trust them? 2. Singularity essentially requires to handwave away a lot of baked-in iss…
I believe that AI is a singularity. Just like a Black hole, no information can escape and you're slowly (by subjective experience) dragged in and spaghettified.
I think having a technical argument is important, as we live in a time with lots of hype merchants who stand to benefit from record breaking IPOs. Propaganda can affect us all, how do you know you aren’t being sold to?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> singularity I just cant get over this term, do you honestly believe in this? I use AI daily and while it is super useful I see too many limitations for it to “recursively improve and cause an intelligence explosion”. 1. Clearly, the people selling AI with this idea benefit greatly with this promise of infinite upside. Can you can trust them? 2. Singularity essentially requires to handwave away a lot of baked-in iss…
I do. Just based on personal experience of using these tools for the last several years and how they’ve progressed.
> That's the logic of the whole market today. AI – the world's money-losingest technology – attracts investment at the expense of everything else. I expect Cory to have skepticism about technology that can be exploited for dystopian purposes, but calling AI "the world's money-losingest technology" is out of touch. If AI can support/replace some intellectual work, it'll be revolutionary, and that's what the investment…