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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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More Everything Forever

08 Nov 2025 - 08 Dec 2025
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    • Have to admit I skimmed this rather fast since I'm pretty familiar with this scene already. But it looks like a great introduction for normies.
    • My new book, More Everything Forever, is about the terrible plans that tech billionaires have for the future and why they don’t work. Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—are about oligarchic power, not preparing for the future. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by fantastical technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs. These are wildly implausible and profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass.
      • – from author's site

    • Minireview

      • Decent summary of stuff I mostly already know, so I didn't get a ton out of it. I'm mostly on the author's side in being skeptical of all this stuff, but he falls a little bit too much into the smug-critic role and I had a negative reaction to that.
      • It also overlaps with all the TESCREAL critics. There's a footnote where he acknowledges this. Again, not a criticism, but somewhat old news.

    • Notes & Quotes

      • p26 The apocalyptic vision of AI Risk is the obverse of the AI utopian visions, and equally specious
      • p42 Reference to IJ Good's book The Scientist Speculates: An Anthology of Partly-Baked Ideas which looks fantastic.
      • p53 Charlie Stross: "The Singularity is the turd in the punchbowl of near-future SF."
      • p96 orthogonality thesis, he notices it is bogus. Melanie Mitchell as a critic, real intelligence doesn't work that way
      • Ceglowski, who was borin in Poland, says that the idea that a superintelligent being would inevitably want to improve itself is "unabashedly American" p111
      • p132 Sexism of MIT Extropians
      • p193 The Repugnant Conclusion, Parfit
      • p197 "The whole project of utilitarianism smacks of a kind of ethical Taylorism: confusing metrics with the reality they imperfectly capture" Nice.
      • p249 "Those vibes—vibes of fascism, authoritarianism, and colonialism—are fundamentally about creating a fantasty of control, the ultimate drug offered by the ideology of technological salvation"
      • p256 ref to God, Human, Animal, Machine
      • p267 Levandowski (Waymo founder) founded a religious organization dedicated to "the realization, accdeptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence"
      • p268 engineer's disease, yeah. "The belief that expertise in one field (usually in STEM) makes you an expert on everytghing else too."
      • p270 Some interesting notes on the simulation hypothesis, he is dubious, says it is denial of nature, attempt to reduce the mystery of reality to the known structure of a computation.
      • p287 Kim Stanley Robinson says billionaires should not exist.