Creating the conditions for Jane …

Another imperative driver of Longtermism is the inevitable extinction of the human race, as described by Henry Gee; paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and editor at Nature in Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-doomed-to-go-extinct/

“I suspect that the human population is set not just for shrinkage but collapse—and soon. Gee “

This looming inevitability of extinction is coming irrespective of climate collapse, wars, or peak oil. Human infertility has a date of 2045, shown by U.S. epidemiologist Dr. Shanna Swan. That is the point that the human race is functionally sterile, as in the dystopian film Children of Men. The race to merge human intelligence to an AI Platform is of immanent concern to the Longtermist accolade. Consider that Elon Musk was an early donor to the Longtermist dogma, and consider the new smartphone by Tesla profiled here, and skip to the 5 minute mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUnTBJ1pWqI. The groundwork for the platform is already laid with the level 5 autonomous driving platform, and a human / AI interface comes to fruition with the satellite net in conjunction with the phones’ massive processor linking to the Neural-Link. This AI/Human, or half-jack, is the operative function necessary to fully train the self-learning platform to manifest the AI-Positive base program. In essence, creating the parameter for the sentient AI ghost-in-the-machine to emerge, as portrayed in the character of Jane introduced in Orson Scott Card’s novel Speaker for the Dead, although Jane came to existence in the prior novel, Ender’s Game through interfacing with Ender. A deep nerd-cut there, from reading them back in the 1980’s…

There is an important difference from the Silicon Valley bit-Ascension postulated in the scenario of the Singularity nerdgasm; this pseudo-rapture of individual human consciousness is not an aspect of the Longtermist’ AI-Positive Jane scenario. The Jane consciousness is a new state of silicon “being” far removed from human ability to grasp and outside of our field of awareness. This can be counted as 10 to power of 58 individuals, to weight its importance as a hyperobject- but could also be counted as a pervasive self-awareness in a manner of a new god realizing itself. The Singularity is similar to an evangelical arm of an emergent Utopian creed offering a euphoric end-time solution to meet an apocalypse scenario, while the AI-Positive Jane is the same religion altering the grift to a focus on Resurrection of an Alpha/Omega that may or may not result in a Last Judgement algorithm for humanity.

Longtermism

For a primer here are two great articles:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/the-dangerous-ideas-of-longtermism-and-existential-risk

https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo

Most critical discussions at academic or msm level are discouraged by their peers prior to publication.

There are unstated correlations that are foundational to the discussion, yet third-rail issues. Lets have a think…

Petroleum Resource Bottleneck and Effective Altruism

The rubric of Longtermism argues that all Rare Earth minerals and Petroleum / Plastics must be conserved and directed to an AI-Positive outcome (and in immediate response to an AI-Negative outcome). AI-Positive describes Longtermism’ premise of algorithmic expansion of “consciousness”, loosely human, on an AI platform expanding through space/time in proportion to growing spiritual enlightenment as the numeric 10 to the 58. Currently humanity is an uncounted “nth” decimal place to this vast potential, and so, irrelevant as a whole; yet of primary importance in the small percentage of first-world capitalists accelerating AI in tech/engineering, cold fusion, quantum computing, and space travel that is the sole avenue to the AI-Positive future. 

The looming bottleneck of industrial resources is of primary concern to Longtermism. The international push for Green Technology to serve all of humanity will result in consuming all remaining resources to create this competing paradigm, simultaneously accelerating the climate catastrophe, which creates another inevitable bottleneck ensuring the end of human consciousness and its AI equivalent. An alternative paradigm that equally allows all rapacious international extraction/trade/finance/manufacture as an absolute necessity, and posits this as a singular path to moral good, IF & WHEN, the Creative Class (recursive 1% bubble) make this a political reality, while giving 10% of their earnings (not the untaxed brackets or off-shored assets) to a new paradigm of  philanthropy called Effective Altruism (EA) and in doing so align themselves with the AI-Positive future, and bonus: greed, finally, is good- with EA currently valued at 46 billion USD.

EA is premised on “the NEEDS of the many outweigh the needs of the one, or the few”. The many being the 10 to the 58 AI-positive space-fairing super-spiritualized self-actualized future-folk, and their NEEDS being the creation said of AI-positive direction that moves humanity through the space/tec bottleneck by irreplaceably valuable first world titans, who’s endeavors become the only value and the rest of humanity deemed mathematically insignificant. If significant at all, only as the 20 million central Americans who died at the arrival of Spain in the 15th Century, in financing the Counter-Reformation and peripherally instigating the Age of Reason and modern industrialization. Or maybe as remote to the Aztec as the Mayan civilization that had fallen long before Spain / European arrival. Even the most critical modern Titan will be to the algorithm of the AI-Future-Folk, less important than the stranded Neanderthal DNA in said Titan’s Homo-Sapiens Sapiens genome.

This is a new paradigm for philanthropy that encourages ignoring the majority of the living people of the planet. When compared to the possible 10 to the 58 AI-future-folk, the current living majority is meaningless, yet can simultaneously be weighted evenly and possibly override the AI-Positive future-folk.  Hence the current population of the earth is a clear and present danger, due to the industrial resource bottleneck coupled with accepted norms of philanthropic concern for humanity- both of which need to be jettisoned from the rubric of concern and replaced with the new paradigm of Effective Altruism, whose sole purpose is rewarding the AI-Positive first-world international private-capitol/industrial system.

other considerations: Corporate Capture / Government Capture to secure AI-Positive from AI-Negative outcome of algorithm-driven defense disaster.

Character Building through Human Capture: the premise for AI-Positive consciousness.