Comment by randmeerkat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randmeerkat | Hacker News Reader

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> In fact, I think the current LLM rampage of sorts acted as a flood to fill the drought of incremental innovation that would have otherwise occurred.

We’ve been running on the remnants of research from the 50s - 70s for awhile now. Businesses have slow rolled the tech as long as they could, but the truth is, we’re at the end of the research that’s been accomplished. Given that and the exodus of researchers to go do things like optimize ads, I think the tech landscape will be fairly flat for the foreseeable future. Humans sailed for thousands of years before the steamship was realized. Our level of advancement over the past 100 years has been impressive, and there’s a lot we can do with it, if we don’t wipe ourselves out, but I expect this to be humanity’s current limit for the foreseeable future. I believe the next big breakthrough that is needed to realize a technical breakthrough is a societal one. We need to value education, research, and stop fighting with one another over every single thing that exists. Whatever form of society that looks like, will be when humanity finally breaks free of its limits.

>...if we don’t wipe ourselves out, but I expect this to be humanity’s current limit for the foreseeable future. I believe the next big breakthrough that is needed to realize a technical breakthrough is a societal one. We need to value education, research, and stop fighting with one another over every single thing that exists. Whatever form of society that looks like, will be when humanity finally breaks free of its limits.

What mechanism is capable of driving such a societal paradigm shift? It seems so abundantly obvious to so many rational, intelligent, informed people that one is desperately needed, yet it's seemingly impossible to imagine how we could possibly achieve it before the current global system of systems undergoes a full or partial collapse? The acceleration toward cascading failure leaves little time even to figure out how to slow everything down, constrain the powers that be, and begin to repair, let alone time enough to actually make it happen. From what I've observed, the Cassandras warning of the clear dangers of our trajectory have mostly resigned themselves to hoping they survive whatever cataclysm first befalls us and rebuild afterward. This seems ill-advised when the accelerationist elites hope for the same thing and are planning and preparing far more insidiously.

I feel like we're living in an era of mass derealization. As consensus reality crumbles into post-truth, we collectively disregard the sheer unfathomable risk we are taking by, on a planetary and historical level, moving fast and breaking things in prod with no version control. There is no planet B.

> What mechanism is capable of driving such a societal paradigm shift?

I don’t know, if we had experienced it, we wouldn’t be in this conundrum…

In the past, it was belief. Belief in there being more to this world.

In the future, it will be the same. Cultures cycle.

Our magic bullet this time around is AI. The possibility for it to create a unifying belief system that's like an infinite venn diagram of all the best parts of past, present, and future religions - and people are free to pick and choose.

Point is people need their spirits back

It's religion. It's time for a fresh iteration.

We are ready to leave behind the fantasy gods and turn our worship toward the very real molecule that defines us and everything alive around us, and to the unbroken cord of being that links each of us so improbably to the first creature in the primordial ooze.

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