@Soyweiser @sneerclub Next step in rat ideology will be: we will ask our perfectly aligned sAI to invent a time machine so we can go back and [eugenics handwave] ourselves into transcendental intelligences who will be able to create a perfectly aligned sAI! Sparkly virtual unicorns for all!(lolsob, this is all so predictable)

@scruiser There's a logical inverse to this argument which I had a go at back in 2016: if you're running a simulation, how far back SHOULD you go to get to your species' origin? All the way to the first eukaryotes? (Concept collapses into ludicrous recursive tail-chasing.)https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/cytological-utopia-and-the-rap.html

@Soyweiser What is "king of the hill"? TV/cinema or some other visual entertainment?

@gerikson @sneerclub I knew Iain and he absolutely despised Musk. (Yes, even back before 2011 Musk was on his radar.) Iain was a socialist with zero patience for capitalist exploiters.

@YourNetworkIsHaunted Your fairies gnaw on raw pancreas meat? That's hardcore!

@bencurthoys @Amoeba_Girl @Soyweiser I'm pretty sure that about 10-20 years ago Egan came out with a serious repudiation of his own ideas about achieving AI through iterated simulations of less-intelligent entities: he noted that implementing it was implicitly genocidal (by murdering all entities that didn't *quite* meet some threshold set by the experimenters, you'd inevitably kill huge numbers of sentient beings just for failing an arbitrary test).