@rook I am immensely proud that some years ago I made a list VD blogged of "ten SF publishing people whose chromed skulls I want as desk ornaments".
It's good to be hated by the *worst* people. And it's totes on brand for him to be filling his empty mind with AI slop.
@samvines @techtakes It's also missing the point that the original GMO crops that were being promoted were engineered by Monsanto to survive being drenched in Glyphosate, a probably-carcinogenic pesticide, to produce a monopoly in those crop plants for Monsanto. Ugly side of capitalism.
(If they'd led with golden rice, the reaction would have been different.)
It also arrived in the late stages of the BSE cull in the UK, at a time when food supply anxiety was at an all-time high.
@gerikson @techtakes Technical nit-pick: "American hard science fiction space opera like Timelike Infinity is also influential"— Timelike Infinity was written by Steven Baxter who is *very* English indeed. Best contextualized as mid-period Interzone generation hitting its imperial phase.
@Amoeba_Girl @techtakes I guess the private equity bros behind this one were reading Larry Niven's "A Gift from Earth" when they were teens (seems more likely than Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go".
@BioMan I blame Konstantin Tskiolkovskii! Although to be fair, he got it from his teacher, Nikolai Federovitch Federov, grandfather of Cosmism and one of the wellsprings of TESCREAL ... which brings us full-circle to the AI bros again.
@fullsquare Lead poisoning was *ubiquitous* in the USA until the late 1970s/early 1980s, due to tetraethyl lead in petrol. Everywhere around the world experienced a sharp drop in violent crime 15-20 years after it was phased out.
But mercury poisoning is more visibly lethal: see also Karen Wetterhahn:
@mawhrin Sadly, they exist. And there are too many of them! I guess this means we should kill people who are fine with killing up to 50% of the—
HEY WAIT
@gerikson @sneerclub Needy Amin is a great coinage, but can I suggest Idiot Amin instead? (The resemblance between Trump and Idi Amin is glaringly obvious now if you stand their rhetoric and style of government side-by-side. Only significant difference is that Trump started with more.)
@isaackuo @Landa @V0ldek @techtakes AI is so 2026, Bro, to get ahead of the game for 2027 you need to pivot to Quantum Computing, ideally on the blockchain in an orbital data centre.
Bro we all run on tank tracks these days, we're all absolutely crushing it in the workplace Bro shoes are so pre-AI, you can't grow forever all the way to upload heaven on a sole
(Pops another Special K)
@Soyweiser Last timer I looked (probably around 2001) I seem to recall Kurzweil was saying AGI and brain uploading by 2025. He's basically selling Christian evangelical premillennialism, minus the Baby Jeezus.