Optimism is a Form of Cognitive Bias

Pessimism gets you uninvited from the parties, but it doesn't cause cognitive dissonance.

I am going to change the tune for a moment, and venture out outside of the Targeted Issues.

I’d like to take a braoder perspective, and reflect upon the main issue of our times: Technocracy and Totalitarian Enslavement of Humanity. If you are not familiar with the topic, I highly recommend writings and interviews of David Hughes.

Of course, there are people who don’t recognize this as a problem. But among those who do, there are two camps: Optimists and Pessimists.

The optimists make the following claims:

1. You can never control humans entirely

2. Control of humans is too complex of an issue

3. There is something special about humans that their spirit can never be conquered

4. Being a pessimist is in poor taste because it takes away the hope

Let’s address each argument separately:

1. Absolute control is impossible:

   1. We should avoid making absolute claims. Nothing is ever absolute.

   2. If we agree that some form of control is possible, then it’s just a degree of control that makes it indistinguishable from being “absolute”.

   3. We might be talking about different forms of control. If you are in the “Sasha Latypova’s Camp” and think that control looks like robotized humans, you are missing a big chunk of the picture. You don’t have to force an action, you can make people choose to make the action by manipulating all thee things that go into making that choice. This also applies to thoughts.

2. The complexity argument

   1. Always a good one. We’ve come a long way, and the computational power of today is nothing like the computational power of yesteryears.

   2. Whatever you think of the human brain and its emerging phenomena, the amount of substrate that goes into this miracle is finite. So this becomes an engineering problem that either has already been overcome or will be overcome in the near future.

3. The “special case” argument

   1. I am most warm to this argument. What can I say, I am a tribalist at heart, and want my team to win. But I also have to be cognizant of the fact that human form of intelligence is just one of the forms.

   2. We have to be honest that for certain tasks, we already conceded that our processing power is inferior to AI.

   3. The competition between humans has been shifted to the competition between the machines. This is a fact, not a conjecture.

   4. What makes humans humans at some point might become a hinderance. It’s an evolutionary process, and we wouldn’t be the first species to lose.

4. And finally, the “de mauvais goût” argument.

   1. Agree!

   2. This might surprise you, but I consider myself an optimist, but my optimism is based on something different. We are in the war for technocracy, with technology being at the heart of this war. So to win over technology, you need better technology.

   3. What I am seeing today is that the overwhelming majority of efforts to combat this real threat to humanity is nowhere near the technological sophistication of the threat. We like easy solutions, we want our food to be the cure, so we like dietary supplements. But the results are marginal at best.

   4. What complicates things even further, is that we still don’t know the actual level of sophistication of various technologies (and their combinations) we are fighting against. We only have rumors and speculations. The actual level of technological advancement is shrouded in the secrecy of national security.

Thank you for indulging me and allowing me to write The “Pessimist” Manifesto.