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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

It’s crazy how aligned history is right now to support the rise of an AI Monarch in the United States. We have a president with a cultish base, but he’s old and there is no real heir to his following. AI tech has been advancing rapidly and some people practically worship AI like if it’s some all knowing god. The President has also surrounded himself with tech leaders like Elon Musk who have some very radical ideas.

You don’t have to suspend much disbelief then to imagine a project that perfectly replicates Trump as an AI to replace him after his death. How this AI is actually used is unknown, probably future republican presidents use it in campaigns, interviews and even some advisory role, effectively making the AI Trump a president in perpetuity. And as future generations grow used to this idea and the AI evolves, there is a path to maybe having direct AI leadership.

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Nick's entire shtick is based on the world having been under AI leadership for a good long while before the marketing term "AI" was introduced in the 1950s. In this model, the current crop of LLMs are more of a performance breakthrough made possible by the accumulation of political-technological power; but qualitatively, we haven't progressed that far past what McLuhan described. Another more credible author who I recently discovered subscribes to a similar model is Stross.

Of course, Land presents it in an edgy 'satanist kid' way that has perennial appeal to the sort of big wigs who feel like they're not evil enough for their level of personal wealth. His text, Meltdown (http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm), from before he achieved product-market fit, is worth a glance.

(EDIT: tenses make me tense)

> Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.

Lorem ipsum as produced by the inmates of an asylum.

The important thing here is the hyphenlessness of the word technocapital. While Marc Andreessen is using techno-capital in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Land's hyphenless technocapital points to his main thesis that capitalism and AI are (teleologically) identical. [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/

...that asylum's name was Planet Earth.

"It could only occur to an Ork to pull the wool over the eyes of the person he was talking to by speaking in a sophisticated and abstruse way – humans simulated simplicity for that. When anyone spoke to them in a complicated manner, they simply stopped listening, just as no one listened to the Orkish countess in the snuff as she shuddered from the jolting blows against her pelvic bone."

AI already installed trump

trump was the last in the primaries, until the algorithms selecting content to display for maximum engagement (keeping you glued to facebook so see ads) noticed that videos of trump result in massively increased viewer engagement

billions of dollars in AI supplied and free publicity later, he's running the US

we're already there

Sounds like something straight out of Revelations. Add another thing best not to emulate after books like 1984, Brave New World etc.

Those are now playbooks on how to build the next iteration of American society.

Read "Left Beyond Quest", it's very relevant.

Fortunately, it's only been a month and his approval rating is already plummeting. I doubt him proclaiming himself "Eternal Sovereign of America" would bode well with Americans, but who knows. His true fans seem completely oblivious to the insanity of what he does.

47.9% approval, 47.2% disapproval[0]. I don't see a plummet on this aggregate and he's still got net approval.

[0]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/donald-t...

I've seen different polls, in which disapproval is slightly higher than approval, but anyways, we're still supposed to be in the honey moon period. And even your polls show a dip. We'll see.

1 month time out of 4 years is not really representative, by any statistical means. And as pointed out in the article, controlling information and removing anything which stands in between is key to success:

> Bureaucracy and the press are two entities of the “Cathedral” that, in the new vision, obstruct accelerationism. If these elements disappear (or are totally discredited), it will very likely be the turn of the universities and NGOs.

> All these institutions are considered outdated, and there will be attempts to replace or reinvent them with parallel institutions that use more Artificial Intelligence, and are run like private companies.

Yes, I can only hope this first month is the start of a lasting trend. Also, controlling the media can only do so much to mask material reality, if things get really dire really quickly.

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