Sparks 👁️

What did Huxley believe would bring about this dystopia? Not a global world order or a charismatic despot: “The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.”

But we don’t always have access to a retreat center, a monastery, or a library, what we do have is this place, a base camp, a landmark for thinking beyond thought.

The metaphor of the base camp is particularly apt for this kind of contemplative scholarship. Like the mountaineer’s base camp—a place of preparation and return, of gathering resources... See more

As economic anthropologist Jason Hickel has explained,“under capitalism, ‘growth’ is not about increasing production to meet human needs. It is about increasing production in order to extract and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective.”

The result is that most people have thought jobs without being given much time to think, which is the equivalent of making a ditch-digger work without a shovel. Maybe this is why productivity growth is half of what it used to be.

That is, we’ve traded our craftsmenship for management. We now are less immersed in the exact pieces we’re putting together and more interested in the outcome of the work. To us, programming has now become a means to an end, instead of an end in itself.

I personally think that an AI needs to die.

Slow Is Smooth And Smooth Is Fast