Delusional themes may be more varied than we thought

However, once you admit infinite utilities and epistemic humility about probabilities, you can justify literally anything. The same construction could obligate you to worship simulation overlords, or to develop interstellar missile defense in case of hostile alien AIs. That's not a rational risk model, it's theological reasoning dressed up in Bayesian costume.

This stuff operates on the boundary of plausibility, the intelligent paranoid mind generates scenarios that can't be conclusively ruled out but also can't be grounded in anything falsifiable. That's not where productive engineering lives.

The escape hatch here is the same one we used for Pascal's Wager: you reject the premise. You don't hand the keys of your threat model over to speculative infinities. You work on problems you can see, measure, and influence. You don't respond to every "what if?" with a fire drill. Recognizing that this is a failure mode in human cognition is enough to avoid it.

Yes, there are real risks with AI: bias, misuse, surveillance capitalism, economic displacement. These are all tractable, all human-driven. But the misalignment discourse? It's less a bet against an existential outcome and more a projection of philosophical anxieties onto a technical domain. And once you frame it that way, it's clear: this isn't engineering. Folks doing this are playing metaphysics in front of a terminal emulator.

There are many false narratives meant to distract, and you'll have to discern which ones are true and it can be exhausting if you let it. This is how 5th-Generation-Warfare (5GW) is.

I'll tell you right now, its highly unlikely that AGI will occur, because the properties required for computation make it nigh impossible.

It doesn't need to do this to be an existential threat. All it needs to do is disrupt the economic cycle sufficiently to stall economic activity, and it does so quite easily.

An economic cycle stalling leads to chaotic socio-economic collapse and a loss of order. Current population levels are only made possible by dependencies which have been made brittle over time, relying on continued order for survival just to produce enough food. I'm sure you've heard of the Malthusian Trap, you may not have revisited later works touching on Malthus by Catton in the 90s.

The economic cycle is a circular cycle between workers and producers. We exist today because of an equitable distribution of labor which is compensated.

There is also the issue of money printing, which is too long to discuss here. Needless to say there are two requirements that must be met to continue the cycle sustainably (avoiding chaotic whipsaw and stalling). Producers must make a profit in purchasing power, People must make a profit supporting a wife and three children sufficient so that one makes it to have children themselves, also in purchasing power.

Money printing eventually causes money to lose its store of value (property), and when that happens medium of exchange is lost as well. Stalling of the economy, and same issue.

There are at least 6 other avenues by which this same outcome occurs, and they are in systems we can no longer change, its runaway. Solutions like UBI fail for other equally impossible problems, albeit they are more indirect but still end in chaotic whipsaws, distortions (artificial supply constraint), etc.

AI doesn't need to be AGI. All it needs to do is disrupt and eliminate the majority of entry level positions of the career development pipeline.

Within a 10 year cycle, collapse will become unavoidable as a matter of math. The output of a pipeline depends upon the input of the pipeline, it is always less for all values above 0. 0 in 0 out.

Man ages out of careers and die eventually. No people to mentor, that knowledge dies with them.

You have it right. Just ignore the grifters. These companies are burning billions and are realizing they don’t have an exit strategy so they’re becoming desperate.

Just ignore the grifters.

I don’t know why people so often fall into the trap of assuming someone or something is running things, but chaos seems to be anathema to how people perceive the world. God(s), fate, luck, karma, magic etc have been supplanted by the everything from hidden cabals, aliens, etc but I don’t think the underlying psychology is really any different.

The author doesn’t exist. The whole essay is fake—or a “philosophical experiment”[1], according to Andrea Colamedici, the real italian author behind it, who was supposedly just the translator. And those words aren’t his either. They came from two AI platforms (still unnamed).

It’s been a scandal in publishing, and in all the universities and newspapers that praised it as a fresh way to understand the present.

Now, of course, intellectuals and journalists are justifying “the intellectual debate the book sparked”, asking if these new “philosophical entities” are the start of a new wave of “hybrid works...” and so on.

Well. They’ve basically discovered "vibe philosophizing": feeling deep truths without knowing where they come from or why they sound right.

[1] More: https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-04-07/jianwei-xun...

That's grade A hash your smoking, not the cheap stuff but the premium 5th Generation Warfare propaganda. Its vile, and without any rational basis.

You misunderstand critical things, and are quite wrong if you actually believe this trite garbage.

A narrative doesn't put people into a trance (i.e they're hypnotized).

Torture through its elements, structuring, and clustering puts people into an involuntary hypnotic state, the same now as it did back during Mao. Evil people have made the science to do this simple, to do to any one anywhere without them largely knowing.

The goal is to break people mentally where they are no longer capable of rational thought, which prevents them from holding their leaders to account among other things.

Cognitive capacity is reduced as a simple matter of exposure to the psychological stresses induced by torture, prior to psychological break.

When you get more than 2/3 of the population broken, bad things happen.

If I were to put it in real terms for you, at that point you have made an existential threat with a nuclear power, and even worse... there is a very real possibility that the person deciding whether to push that button or not and end everything has a mental break, with a great chance at it falling into the second group of psychosis seeking annihilation; in other words you have induced that powerful person to become an insane person, with their hand on the button, who will then press it because they aren't in their right mind because you've made it so.

It doesn't matter if the threat China poses is real, people near psychotic breaks jump at shadows, and it doesn't matter if this was done indirectly either. It is also becoming pretty clear that setting up the dynamics where you fail to seize power under communism causes failures to Fascism, creating these problems as well.

This is what blind delusional evil people fail to see. They don't think through the sequence of actions they put into motion with any kind of objectivity just because something is unthinkable.

The people pushing narratives like what you suggest, are the same people torturing everyone. The outcomes show they want only one thing, all life on the planet to be dead, yourself included.

If you look carefully at who did what historically to push this forward, the trends are clear, and the delusional court disaster until they no longer can. Its a fundamental disadvantage they have, that willful self-induced blindness to reality.

You really need to develop your skills in breaking down false narratives and discard them rather than accept it as truth. Lest you want to join them in their endeavor to destroy everyone and everything anyone cares about.

Many of the books reference the observation that schizophrenia symptoms are commonly seen in victims of torture, specifically in returning PoWs during the Korean Conflict.

Joost Meerloo, and Robert Lifton are two well established authors that come to mind, and while there are other diagnostic criteria its fairly safe to say that mass delusion it seems occurs more regularly when the population is tortured.

The 4 elements needed for torture are isolation, cognitive dissonance, coercion with real or perceived loss, and lack of agency to remove.

These things naturally occurs where all communication channels have been jammed with misinformation. These things fall under 5th Generation Warfare.

Mao came up with some very clever ways of structuring and clustering the elements of torture into trauma loops utilizing all of the psychological blindspots we have. Cialdini's book on influence covers most of the blindspots if you are unaware, except distorted reflected appraisal.

Technically the phone-based dopamine triggers of today through associative priming could be considered a form of targeted Narcosynthesis/Narcoanalysis which has impacts on the ability to resist torture.

Whether is it the cause or not, it is impossible to say, at least in the way the paper studies it ("meta-analysis,", another way of saying "loose correlation").

People love it? I don't know. Maybe it's like an addiction instead of a real desire for it. Have you ever been in a culture without those elements to know what is like?

Anyway. Talking seriously now, schizophrenia is a big elephant in the world's room. Lots of correlations, no clear cause. The more you look into it, the more the cause seems to be inexistent.

Given its current symptoms-based definition, with very low effort, anyone could be classified as schizophrenic. Just one push to disrupt "normal everyday functioning behavior" and even the most sane person could end up in the schizo bucket.

I did not break the internet by making a URL that is not a universal resource link.