You speak as if either he or his audience has a coherent worldview other than awe of the AI god

Comments in FAVOR of billionaires being those who seize control of the entire universe (flksdjflkdfjlsdjfl) at the expense of everyone else (!) are appearing.

Land reform / redistribution is always popular with the populi, but per your other point, unless you somehow forbid them from selling or leasing it, it will inevitably end up in the hands of those better able to use those resources pretty shortly. And I will argue that this is a good thing, at least in a capitalist and non-coercive society - much like people think of heiresses leaving their floofy little dogs mansions and million dollar annual stipends as wasteful, leaving an equal proportion of the cosmic endowment with a bunch of v1.2 murder chimps who were so unsuccessful that they couldn’t even buy any of it is a colossal waste of that matter/energy. Much like land today is much more valuable to people / governments who have money, the cosmic endowment will be no different.

Today we waste something like 99. nine 9’s percent of our sun’s energy. If we’re the only conscious and intelligent life in the universe, every other star is wasting 100% of their energy. That energy is going to be similarly wasted in the hands of average people, just like the mansions and stipends are wasted on the dogs.

“Well lease it out and profit share!” I bet you’re saying. But what will a base human even DO with that energy? It’s like the dog. Most “regular” people who remain human will be eaten by digital Infinite Jests, where they can the be tippy top of made up status hierarchies and live out their wildest, meaningless dreams 24/7. You probably barely need $10k a year to do that in terms of matter energy budgets.

Sure, let’s guarantee a really generous UBI, Scotts $1-$2M per year in today’s wealth equivalent. That’s fair. But the cosmic endowment is many, many orders of magnitude more than that, and allocating it to a bunch of floofy dog equivalents is a huge waste.

Awww, but I like the pure science fiction.

I am most amazed at two aspects… how to put it:

One is just, they don’t know what they are and what the universe is. The idea that things downstream of things like us can push around galaxies never ceases to amaze me. I felt the same way watching the movie Interstellar. They were using chemical rockets to navigate around a supermassive black hole. The gravitational potential between places they occupied in that film was a third of their rest mass. Chemistry means nothing there. FUSION means nothing there.

(to say nothing of the fact that if interstellar travel were possible there would already be replicators and an ecology throughout the universe, but that’s another story)

The second is, things happen because of ideas and agreements rather than actions. You can speak into existence billion year plans for what happens to whole galaxies, and it happens because that is what you said. Laws exist because a bunch of people continue to agree that it’s better for them to act like they do than to do what they CAN do. This is a universe without interactions, without agency of anything but the rich weirdos steering the AI god, without for lack of a better word ecology emerging from the interactions of many agents and resource constraints and capacities.

Oh Yud has DEFINITELY taken advantage of his followers like a cult leader.

They are claiming that company value is the metric? holy crap

God I remember having to explain to dozens of people that ‘reasoning’ models just exude a lot of text ‘talking to themselves’ and then summarize it. They were all just “It CANT be that silly” and many outright would not believe me, because that was not ‘reasoning’

It is not a coincidence that there is a major overrepresentation of Mormons among the transhumanist singulatarians.

So they really do live in a fictional world, confirmed.

Oh man, the “Post ASI” epilogue is a trip. Here’s what happens in 2040:

Space beyond the solar system is divided into parcels, increasing in size cubically with distance from Earth. Everyone is given their one-ten-billionth share as a portfolio of lottery tickets, each representing the right to one-ten-billionth chance of getting each parcel. So every human gets a ticket representing a one-ten-billionth chance of owning each star in the Milky Way and each distant galaxy.

Before the lottery is drawn, most people who are interested in control over distant space choose to trade their tickets for space properties that suit their interests.

Many people aren’t interested in the space lottery, so when they receive the tickets, they sell their tickets for money on the open market to people who value control over space. Somewhat uncomfortably, this leads to the wealthy having disproportionate control over cosmic resources. But it is hard to avoid: if people are allowed to trade their control over the stars for Earth assets, then people wealthy in Earth assets inevitably end up disproportionately influential, and proposals for extreme redistribution of Earth assets have already been rejected as politically infeasible.

You can, if you want, go to your space property and live there. If your property is outside the solar system, you will need to either go into cryosleep or upload yourself to a computer to survive the journey. If you hate the idea of cryosleep or uploading, or you want to visit Earth regularly, you should get property in the Solar System. If those don’t bother you, but you’re worried about nearby aliens, get property in the Milky Way or a nearby galaxy. Otherwise, why not claim a distant galaxy for maximal space?

Good god, these people have no idea what the universe is or what they even are, do they?

Also, holy capitalist realism Batman

10 bucks each time you turn it off

From the inimitable writers of AI2027, we now have…

AI2040!

https://ai-2040.com/

Typical nonsense. Among other things they are talking 6fold increase in GDP by 2032 in their scenario, MOSTLY driven by neural networks generating text (and one extra currrent GDP driven by robots) and median personal income being 1 million dollars (inflation adjusted) by 2035.

I am particularly amused that they have all the politicking happening in the next presidential administration rather than this year so they can pretend that all their governmental fantasies will happen because someone sane will naturally come to the conclusions they would.

I believe that ML training is basically an evolutionary process. What does evolution produce most reliably?

Parasites.

You have created things that simulate the social signals of humans, getting us to care about things all out of proportion to what it actually does. It’s like those beetles that live in ant colonies, hacking the smell and social signals of ants so they get babied while providing nothing.

In his op-ed, Altman offers up the usual list of future AI miracles to justify the disruptions to come: “the power to heal people, to discover cures and to deliver abundance on a scale the world has never known before. In the meantime, though, what AI is delivering at an unprecedented scale is annoyance.

Does anyone actually believe this? What the heck does bullshit-text engines or fake-image-generators contribute towards discovering ANYTHING, delivering ANYTHING, producing ANYTHING? The only thing there is any argument for at all is delivering quick-and-dirty code, which is hardly connected to any of those tired promises.

I mean there is what they say, and why they say it

These people would probably say between themselves that they killed this person’s parents because of the possibility of getting inheritance money to do whatever fuckery they were onto, combined with some stupid game theory about they tried to suppress their child’s important business saving the world so they had to be acausally punished to prevent anyone else from ever impeding them.

The real reason is that getting someone to do something like this is a loyalty test.

When I am talking at academic conferences to astrobiologists about how their/my field has been poisoned over time by singularity cults ideas seeping into the literature uncited, their eyes get particularly wide when I get to this part.

I know very little about Fyodorov compared to Tsiolkovsky. Do you haven any writing you’d recommend to learn more about him?

Putting aside the sneering and philosophy to nerd for a minute, before getting back to it.

For a long time people were very into the split-consciousness notion of what happened to split-brain people, but a couple things have come around and now some people really think that the better way of thinking of it is still-unitary consciousness with a very difficult time moving around information between different sensory/expression modalities.

First, you get people who are born without a corpus callosum who are behaviorally normal (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13554794.2013.826690). They get a bit of extra connectivity sidways through their deep brain structure as some kind of homeostatic compensation, but the total amount is definitely low. What this says is there’s a difference between a brain that grew under a very unusual set of structural constraints, and one that grew normally that gets shredded. Similar with those people you find now and then with a brain that’s 90% fluid (though with the actual cortex pushed up against the skull around a big bubble of CSF) and the only neurological findings are things like weakness in one leg and an IQ of 80 (worth noting that this is still very very different from hydranencephaly) (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61127-1/fulltext).

Second, when you do a wider range of experiments with the split brain people you find that while they cannot verbally say what is in their left visual field (which goes to the right side, while language is usually a left-side phenomenon) they can reliably state that something is there with speech, or either hand, and approximately where in the visual field it is. The low bandwidth awareness of presence is there, but they cannot get their speech capacity to access the details. It’s like their sight is now multiple separate sensory modalities, some of which is very difficult to talk about and some of which are very difficult to draw with particular hands.

https://www.uva.nl/shared-content/uva/en/news/press-releases/2017/01/split-brain-does-not-lead-to-split-consciousness.html

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/5/1231/2951052

People argue a lot about what this means

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393221002402

You can also apparently reorganize around very small amounts of remaining fibers to have no deficits like that, with no issues talking about anything in either part of the visual field

https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/022246/new-findings-split-brain-science-even-minimal-fiber-connections-can-unify-consciousness

Now, getting out of the nerd mode, there’s a LOT of weird literature from the 60s to 80s about people with very strange brain anatomy who nonetheless developed normally or better than expected

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1469-8749.1965.tb07839.x

“Two cases of hydranencephaly are described in infants. In both these there was evidence of excessive intracranial pressure-as is often the case-and both were operated on to relieve this. The progress of the older child, now 21 months of age, was throughout excellent physically and mentally, and he is considered to be normal. The progress of the second infant was remarkably good for three months, but thereafter mental retardation and spasticity followed; he was also blind. There is no good explanation for the unexpectedly good progress of the first patient.”

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7434023

"…the most severe group, in which ventricle expansion fills 95 percent of the cranium. Many of the individuals in this last group, which forms just less than 10 percent of the total sample, are severely disabled, but half of them have IQ’s greater than 100. This group provides some of the most dramatic examples of apparent ly normal function against all odds. Commenting on Lorber’s work, Kenneth Till, a former neurosurgeon at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, London, has this to say: “Interpreting brain scans can be very tricky. There can be a great deal more brain tissue in the cranium than is immediately apparent.” Till echoes the cautions of many practitioners when he says, "Lorber may be being rather overdramatic when he says that someone has ‘virtually no brain.’ "

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8749.1999.tb00621.x

“Consciousness in congenitally decorticate children: developmental vegetative state as self-fulfilling prophecy”

“According to traditional neurophysiological theory, consciousness requires neocortical functioning, and children born without cerebral hemispheres necessarily remain indefinitely in a developmental vegetative state. Four children between 5 and 17 years old are reported with congenital brain malformations involving total or near-total absence of cerebral cortex but who, nevertheless, possessed discriminative awareness: for example, distinguishing familiar from unfamiliar people and environments, social interaction, functional vision, orienting, musical preferences, appropriate affective responses, and associative learning. These abilities may reflect ‘vertical’ plasticity of brainstem and diencephalic structures. The relative rarity of manifest consciousness in congenitally decorticate children could be due largely to an inherent tendency of the label ‘developmental vegetative state’ to become a self-fulfilling prophecy”

Worth noting that I looked at that paper and these case studies do have noticeable brian mass around the base of the skull, just not much.

Edit I am also very mad at how people so reductionistically talk about different behaviors being restricted to different parts of brain anatomy. It’s different in different creatures. You strip the cortex out of an adult cat and itll still walk around and look at things, though not be all there (yes this was done in the sixties), you strip it from an adult human you get a vegetable. Lots of brain parts are capable of lots of things, its just that as brains get bigger the more peripheral parts are easier to expand faster and grow in importance, their fibers exerting more control over the rest, and I would not be surprised at all at other brain bits being capable of quite a lot when they grow without the influence of the bigger bits.

Anybody ever read the short story “Cutie” by Greg Egan? Very apropos…>

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/30/1134780/r3-bio-brainless-human-clones-full-body-replacement-john-schloendorn-aging-longevity/

Imagine it like this: a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive in case you ever need a new kidney or liver.

Or, alternatively, he has speculated, you might one day get your brain placed into a younger clone. That could be a way to gain a second lifespan through a still hypothetical procedure known as a body transplant.

The fuller context of R3’s proposals, as well as activities of another stealth startup with related goals, have not previously been reported. They’ve been kept secret by a circle of extreme life-extension proponents who fear that their plans for immortality could be derailed by clickbait headlines and public backlash.

And that’s because the idea can sound like something straight from a creepy science fiction film. One person who heard R3’s clone presentation, and spoke on the condition of anonymity, was left reeling by its implications and shaken by Schloendorn’s enthusiastic delivery. The briefing, this person said, was like a “close encounter of the third kind” with “Dr. Strangelove.”

A key inspiration for Schloendorn is a birth defect in which children are born missing most of their cortical hemispheres; he’s shown people medical scans of these kids’ nearly empty skulls as evidence that a body can live without much of a brain.

And he’s talked about how to grow a clone. Since artificial wombs don’t exist yet, brainless bodies can’t be grown in a lab. So he’s said the first batch of brainless clones would have to be carried by women paid to do the job. In the future, though, one brainless clone could give birth to another.

Last Monday, the same day it announced itself to the world in Wired, R3 sent us a sweeping disavowal of our findings. It said Schloendorn “never made any statement regarding hypothetical ‘non-sentient human clones’ [that] would be carried by surrogates.” The most overarching of these challenges was its insistence that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or humans with brain damage are categorically false.”

My ‘no conspiracy to create humans with brain damage’ shirt is making people ask a lot of questions

But if space was a place that replicators could exist, there would already be an ecology of some sort there. Or to put it in words (that I hate) related to the so-called Fermi paradox (which I hate and isn’t a paradox) ‘If they could be here they already would be here’. (The ‘solution’ incidentally is obviously ‘interstellar travel is not actually a thing that can happen for replicating systems’ and it flabbergasts me that nobody can admit that.)

But space is The Future, The Grand Destiny of Humanity, Literal Heaven.

The mythologization of space as somehow transcendant, that going there somehow changes everything rather than it just being another environment which happens to be utterly inimical to life such that everything that makes anything possible has to come from your point of origin, is so utterly ingrained into the culture at large and the cult of progress/tech/humanity-as-master-of-the-universe. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. And it’s incredible how much space SUCKS, such that the people on the ISS are just living off a constant hose of material from Earth. They’re not living in space, they’re glamping.