Here’s the Elon interview talking about hijacking the limbic system:
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“Our” autonomy is key. Heritage Americans can come together and solve these problems. A population that is majority minority cannot. Non-whites have to go home. I exclude blacks from this, but the rest have to go home, legal, or not. Otherwise, it will not work. No matter what. This has to be a heritage American country. It is ball game.
Still on my list to digest this Signal Hour episode, but meanwhile this seems as good a place as any to call out my mistake in stating Chris was misguided about LLM’s current Recursive Self Improvement(RSI) and related risks. A recent paper shows that, sure enough, it’s in the works if not live now in top LLMs, per this Grok bibliography.
Precisely what does “free” even mean?
Precisely what does “will” even mean?
What is anyone discussing this topic even talking about?
I defined what I mean by “free will” - ability for an agent to act contrary to a model of the agent. I have no idea what others mean, and I suspect mostly they don’t either.
A couple of weeks ago I withdrew $2,000 cash from a local credit union. I was prepared to joke about a spending spree if they asked what I was going to do with that much cash, but was surprised when the teller asked " Is anyone pressing you to withdraw this cash?" Seeing the startled look on my face, she added “We wouldn’t want something bad to happen to you.” I debated asking her what she would do if someone answered yes, but said, no. I didn’t tell her of my plans to buy a beater farm truck. 
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Team A promotes “global village” thinking with lots of government interference ie international socialism.
Team B appeals to its base by rejecting the globalist aspect and promoting pro-America emotional appeals, but doesn’t push too hard against the government controls… so they are pushing a nationalist version of the same socialism.
Either way socialism wins.
I hold out hope that some folks in team B really do care about freedom but have an uphill battle. On the margin they MAY achieve some gains but the tide is clearly toward socialism.
Socialism doesn’t work so eventually it will collapse. What happens after that is debatable.
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That includes everything that people like Trump and Musk do, of course.
So the competence of the observer diminishes free will? What does that mean regarding the ever more ubiquitous surveillance state?
That depends on how and why you value free will. But yes, if you have a superintelligent surveillance state that can predict your every move, that’s concerning. I don’t know that it’s worth caring unless that same state nudges you - which, of course, it will. The less “free will” you have, the more subtle the nudge can be to keep you corralled. That’s what I would call a loss of agency, which is what I actually care about, but that’s a side-effect of loss of free will.
We’ve already seen that the majority of the populace don’t have sufficient free will to escape the nudges of the state. I told my wife that I think we’ll lose our own agency by 2027, so we’d better have our waiting state in progress by then.
All of our systems collapse eventually. I see “socialism” as taking from the “bad” people and giving to the “good” people. We’re already 50% there with bureaucracy and welfare anyway. The fundamental problems are:
- Damage to the reward for productivity (and the proportionality moral foundation)
- Corruption to the redistribution rewards function (for system-determined good vs bad) - it’s basically the highest RoI imaginable and/or creates a political market.
#1 is particularly disruptive, as per the monkeys with grapes experiment. But even if you overcome it with some form of mental/informational disruption, the lack of incentive is a killer. Even if you overcome that, it all comes down because the unproductive will grow and the productive will shrink.
I think all of this analysis applies to the system we have. Socialism has already won; team B is just arguing for the populace having a larger share.
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Ah, I find this best argument why robots and automation cannot “fix” our society. Intuitively something feels wrong, it is that unproductivity in society, and tech cant fix it as it is human and policy problem. Ageold thing.
There is some merit to socialism that wealth (USD based) is extremely centralzied have huge variety of downstream effects allover. However socialism tends to keep these structures, working with elite, but taking even more from small business owners and middle class folks.
We call them “champaigne socialists” here, they are so enamoured by riches and higher lifestyle(eg DC or silicon valley vs some rural lifestyle) they turn 180 with ideology and good cause. AOC is one example.
I understood Japan went through this development, albeit not with socialism, but similar outcomes (office work stagnated in productivity while manufacturing kept improving) and yet in the end financial dumbery brought everything down. Although they never went full socialism as japan is pretty tough place for average joe or jane, so they gotta work, benefits would be so low.
UK is fightting with this. They said 1/4 of adults are on benefits. London elite is extremely bloated (Tony Blair has some institute, fully on taxpayer money, where he can employ bunch of people). Socialism raises taxlevel so high only bankers with super high income feel sense to work. And taxlevel raises is offered always as solution to pay even higher public spending.
Argentina way is possibly constructive reset. Money looses value. It treats most people pretty equal. Other ways seem to either keep old elite or bring new exactly same kind elite (communism) while nothing changes really.
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