02 / September 15

Shoggoth with a Smiley Face

“Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
— John Keats

Topics

Zairja, Llull, Leibniz, Lovelace, Lovecraft’s Shoggoth; inevitable/evitable, lock in, path dependency; AI, Negative Capability, and the Black Box; Technocracy Inc., the Hollerith Tabulator, IBM; Claude Shannon’s information theory; The Californian Ideology; Basilisks; First to Second Order Cybernetics; Antimemetics, the SCP Foundation; internet balkanization, Cozyweb v. Dark Forest

Readings

qntm

There is no Antimemetics Division

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Nadia Asparouhova

Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading

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Scott Benzel

Notes on Thinking Machine Imaginaries: Llull, Leibniz, and Lovelace to ‘Shoggoth with a Smiley Face’

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Additional Reading

Andreessen Horowitz, The Techno-Optimist ManifestoAndreessen, redacted by Grosser, Techno-Optimist Manifesto (redacted by Grosser)Michael Bazzell, from Extreme Privacy: What It Takes to Disappear

Lab

Introduction to Colab/Python, Hugging Face, GitHub, et al