This is troubling--not that it's "AI critics" but that it's #TESCREAL cultists paying for coverage of AI at major outlets, e.g., Bloomberg, Time, The Verge, LA Times.
AI critics funded AI coverage at top newsrooms https://www.semafor.com/article/12/07/2025/ai-critics-funded-ai-coverage-at-top-newsrooms
Psychedelics and immortality: Nature went to a health summit starring RFK and JD Vance
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03790-2?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Latest science news @latest-science-news-NatureNewsteam
"Academic researchers or clinicians were not among the speakers at the sessions." I would love to know what nasty psychedelic drugs make politicians so unimaginative that they indulge in a death cult and make you wish they had a brain implant.
If you look for a #sciFi plot for a #disaster novel ... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03790-2
🧠 Investors’ ‘dumb transhumanist ideas’ setting back neurotech progress, say experts / The Guardian
「 These technologies have considerable near-term potential to treat a variety of neurological issues – from ALS to Parkinson’s to paralysis. The problem is, their investors don’t always appear to have curing disease as an end goal 」
billionaire tech bros in charge:
"How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next"
#authoritarianism #tescreal
#globalFascism #usPol https://triangletoot.party/@aburtch/115500496273921072
💰 The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is pivoting from public education to make the rich immortal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/technology/zuckerberg-chan-initiative-biohub.html
billionaire tech bros in charge:
"How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next"
#authoritarianism #tescreal
#globalFascism #usPol https://triangletoot.party/@aburtch/115500496273921072
@alienghic @cmconseils @mekkaokereke This is a US-centric view, where this can be true because the US only have two big political forces, so people are less likely to change their side than in countries with 4+ big political forces.
From what I see (Belgium, France), it’s true that poeple lean right with age, but also with time in general: full fascism is sold everywhere because it’s the easiest swallowable trap/BS in an evercomplex world.
So it’s not about people from the left dying sooner.
@meduz In France and in Germany, we have a big problem with more and more very young voters of far-right politicians. I think that the times of generational questions are over. And when I see the #TESCREAL silicon valley bros behind their old puppet Trump, I freeze. Fascism is a problem of the whole society. And they try to polarize generations against one another.
I can't really believe it, but I've gotten an email saying that my #talk on #fascism for the #39C3 got accepted!
So, “All Sorted by Machines of Loving Grace? "AI", Cybernetics, and Fascism and how to Intervene” will be happening at the #ccc #congress in #Hamburg
I am so excited! Well switching in between feeling excited and feeling the pressure 😉
Looking forward to the discussion with you guys!
#tech #fascism #techbros #antifascism #socialmovements #ai #cybernetics #tescreal #resistance
I can't really believe it, but I've gotten an email saying that my #talk on #fascism for the #39C3 got accepted!
So, “All Sorted by Machines of Loving Grace? "AI", Cybernetics, and Fascism and how to Intervene” will be happening at the #ccc #congress in #Hamburg
I am so excited! Well switching in between feeling excited and feeling the pressure 😉
Looking forward to the discussion with you guys!
#tech #fascism #techbros #antifascism #socialmovements #ai #cybernetics #tescreal #resistance
We keep seeing startups who want to replace something valuable (therapy, counseling, tutoring, artistic expression) with some tech bullshit under the banner of democratization. But why do we need to invest so much in bad tech that doesn't work instead of just giving people access to what they need?
This is a sign for how fucking atrophied our mental muscles are. How limited our space for thinking about how things should be.
You want to democratize "going to therapy"? Make it "free" as in paid by socialized healthcare. You want to democratize "making art"? Give people money and free time to express themselves.
None of these things are meaningfully addressed through tech. It's always about the political struggle to give people what they need and deserve.
@tante We must say it clear and loud: #AI and #LLM are NOT therapy nor art. It's #AISlop, dangerous on several levels.
The bosses of AI corporations have an ideology connected to eugenics, why should they be interested in saving people? Artists and ill are under the first groups fascists want to destroy.
We're all going to be paying AI's Godzilla-sized power bills https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/13/ai_power_bills/ via @theregister & @sjvn
#AI needs far more power than utility companies have to sell to them, which means we're stuck with the bill for building new power plants and grids.
@sjvn @theregister "… the training phase of a state-of-the-art AI model requires repeated adjustment of billions to trillions of parameters. That process alone requires thousands of GPUs running simultaneously for weeks or months at a time. Adding insult to injury, each of those special AI chips draws far more juice than your run-of-the-mill CPU."
😡
¿Qué hay detrás de la carrera por alcanzar la AGI? Un paquete de ideologías agrupadas en el acrónimo TESCREAL (transhumanismo, Extropianismo, singularitarismo, cosmismo, Racionalismo, Altruismo Efectivo y largoplacismo). Ideas de una secta a la que se le está dando el control del mundo.
Paper original de los autores @timnitGebru y Émile P. Torres: https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636
Traducción al español disponible en nuestra web: https://arteesetica.org/el-paquete-tescreal/
The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence
¿Qué hay detrás de la carrera por alcanzar la AGI? Un paquete de ideologías agrupadas en el acrónimo TESCREAL (transhumanismo, Extropianismo, singularitarismo, cosmismo, Racionalismo, Altruismo Efectivo y largoplacismo). Ideas de una secta a la que se le está dando el control del mundo.
Paper original de los autores @timnitGebru y Émile P. Torres: https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636
Traducción al español disponible en nuestra web: https://arteesetica.org/el-paquete-tescreal/
The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence
This is just kinda fucking sad:
I left Instagram years before because my posts about biodiversity had been shadowblocked. I never missed it since then.
Just explained to my wife who Peter Thiel is, why I don't use Paypal any more, and what #TESCREAL means.
She asked if I was falling prey to disinformation campaigns.
Which, I suppose, is fair. For anyone outside the #tech bubble, this must all sound like wild technobabble and Huxley / Orwell / @pluralistic ravings.
We have to tell this story in a way that people for whom the internet might as well be magic can understand.
That's not going to be easy.
The left gets a new publication https://www.semafor.com/article/08/17/2025/with-the-argument-the-left-gets-a-new-publication
Worrying signs: Yglesias and taking money from AI #TESCREAL Open Philanthropy.
At last, we're starting to see coverage of much of AI culture as the heathen cult it is. I wish, though, they'd build on the fuller work @xriskology & @timnitGebru re #TESCREAL (Google it).
Gift link:
The Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/technology/rationalists-ai-lighthaven.html?unlocked_article_code=1.b08.wV6R.lvP03LV1B9p0&smid=tw-share
When the "AI" (LLM) ship of fools sinks, we the people will have to pay up for the mess, 2008 style.
So, all the journos, professors, scientists, researchers, visionaires, "godfather" s, investors and CEOs and founders who sang in the chorus must be sunk with the ship.
Not because they should have known better, but because they obviously knew and chose to betray their duty and follow the con money.
They have forever lost any right to be looked up to or listened to.
@tante @davidgerard
Note: AI is a legittimate research field; "AI" is the marketing name for slop extruders and #TESCREAL propaganda.
No, Guardian. FLI is #TESCREAL (Google it). Don't quote their definition of "safety" as if it were meaningful.
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the current battle over the future of (pseudo) AI is the cotton gin.
I live in a country where industrial progress is always considered a positive. It’s such a fundamental concept to the American exceptionalism claim that we are taught never to question it, let alone realize that it’s propaganda.
One such myth, taught early in grade school, is the story of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Here was a classic example of a labor-saving device that made millions of lives better. No more overworked people hand cleaning the cotton (slaves, though that was only mentioned much later, if at all). Better clothes and bedding for the world. Capitalism at its best.
But that’s only half the story of this great industrial time saver. Where did those cotton cleaners go? And what was the impact of speeding up the process?
Now that the cleaning bottleneck was gone, the focus was on picking cotton as fast as possible. Those cotton cleaners likely, and millions of other slaves definitely, were sent to the fields to pick cotton. There was an unprecedented explosion in the slave trade. Industrial time management and optimization methods were applied to human beings using elaborate rule-based systems written up in books. How hard to punish to get optimal productivity. How long their lifespans needed to be to get the lost production per dollar. Those techniques, practiced on the backs and lives of slaves, became the basis of how to run the industrial mills in the North. They are the ancestors of the techniques that your manager uses now to improve productivity.
Millions of people were sold into slavery and worked to death because of the cotton gin. The advance it provided did not, in fact save labor overall. Nor did it make life better overall. It made a very small set of people much much richer; especially the investors around the world who funded the banks who funded the slave purchases. It made a larger set of consumers more comfortable at the cost of the lives of those poorer. Over a hundred years later this model is still the basis for our society.
Modern “AI” is a cotton gin. It makes a lot of painstaking things much easier and available to everyone. Writing, reading, drawing, summarizing, reviewing medical cases, hiring, firing, tracking productivity, driving, identifying people in a lineup…they all can now be done automatically. Put aside whether it’s actually capable of doing any of those things well; the investors don’t care if their products are good, they only care if they can make more money off of them. So long as they work enough to sell, the errors, and the human cost of those errors, are irrelevant. And like the cotton gin, AI has other side effects. When those jobs are gone, are the new jobs better? Or are we all working that much harder, with even more negative consequences to our life if we fall off the treadmill? One more fear to keep us “productive”.
The Luddites learned this lesson the hard way, and history demonizes them for it; because history isn’t written by the losers.
They’ve wrapped “AI” with a shiny ribbon to make it fun and appealing to the masses. How could something so fun to play with be dangerous? But like the story we are told about the cotton gin, the true costs are hidden.