Artificial Intelligence News & Discussion

[shijing]

The economic/political drive toward globalization and the technological strides toward artificial intelligence appear to be two prongs of a larger pincer movement; the latter is gaining increasing attention, yet is generally overshadowed by the former in most alternative media. This topic is very broad in scope, and there’s a lot that can be included. For example:

• The Smartgrid, Internet of Things (IoT), and the Cloud; 5g and surveillance technology, automated infrastructure like drones, driverless vehicles and Smart Cities
• Transhumanist programs and biological extensions/implantables including smartphones and other devices, chips (both external and internal), the infrastructure with which they interface like the internet (including harvestable social media platforms), appliances, smart meters, stores and financial institutions, virtual reality, brain emulation, nanotechnology, genetic editing and gender neutralization
• Research/development/application institutions like DARPA, Google and Amazon working on new computational platforms (biological, quantum)
• Social engineering programs including political (globalization and all it entails), economic (Universal Basic Income, digital currency and blockchain technology), and educational (Common Core and cubicle-vectored learning)

Some thoughts:

• It appears that Earth’s environment is increasingly being engineered to favor technological infrastructure over natural, biological organisms and processes. This may be another example of certain people feeling driven to do things even though they don’t understand exactly why – they are participating in the construction of what amounts to a factory farm that serves higher-density agendas, and they may not be aware that they could ultimately lose control of this situation in a way that is irrecoverable.
• All of this is essentially an attempt to ‘pull Heaven down to Earth’ – to induce artificial control over natural processes (including incarnation), goals (experience-driven learning), and circumscribe the scope of reality to the purely materialistic. AI and transhumanism are being promoted as augmentations of the human experience when in reality they will culminate in a severe constriction of same.
• From an esoteric perspective, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could be described as having an intellectual center, no emotional center, and only a rudimentary moving center depending on how it is embodied. Perhaps these adhere to the template of 6D STS, described by the Cs as thought forms/reflections which are not unified entities and exist only to balance their STO counterparts. The creation of these STS thought forms would perhaps be achieved most readily by the subtraction of some crucial element of the STO model upon which they are otherwise modeled. Psychopaths, of course, also fit this template.
• Predictive programming which portrays the end goal of this reality (and which is becoming more realistic as progress advances) includes the well-known Matrix trilogy, Battlestar Galactica, and the Star Trek Borg. This would be a truly dark reality, as the human classroom would have been permanently converted into a mere food source. While it may not be obvious how or why purely human-driven dystopian scenarios would require a cosmic cleansing of the Earth and a reset of the program (there have been a number of horrific periods involving much human suffering in recorded human history), it is easier to see how a cosmic intervention like a cometary bombardment may be necessary to preempt a world in which AI has gained a decisive strategic advantage over humanity. In this kind of world, free will would be abridged absolutely, and the main function of the learning environment nullified for all intents and purposes. A particular threshold in the development of AI may, at least in part, explain why 2014 was declared by the Cs to be ‘year 0’ and a point of no return.

There are several books on or related to these topics – I’ve only read a few, but recommend the following:

Technocracy Rising

Superintelligence

One TV series which I feel treats the topic in a thoughtful way (particularly in later seasons) is Person of Interest

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http://truthstreammedia.com

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https://www.corbettreport.com

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https://www.technocracy.news

Ark Midnight & Level9News: DNA Computers - The Coming Merger of Man & Machine
https://www.level9news.com

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https://www.davidicke.com

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http://thecrowhouse.com

Of course, there are also people who say essentially that AI is no big deal and there’s really nothing to worry about:

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This really only scratches the surface of this enormous topic -- thoughts, comments and additional information are welcome.

 

[Azur]

Two good books that delve into these issues. They have fluff but so much more if you can see.

_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep

_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky (This entry does a HUGE disservice to it's content).

The second has an arc about bringing up a civilization to a level that they, the users, can use them for their own needs.

Both books are fiction, lots of other things going on.

A same, complex message in both.

 

[Neil]

It appears that Earth’s environment is increasingly being engineered to favor technological infrastructure over natural, biological organisms and processes. This may be another example of certain people feeling driven to do things even though they don’t understand exactly why – they are participating in the construction of what amounts to a factory farm that serves higher-density agendas, and they may not be aware that they could ultimately lose control of this situation in a way that is irrecoverable.

I threw this idea out in the hyperdimensional politics thread. The reason transhumanists are so driven to accomplish their agenda is because it is pleasing to the gods, so to speak. Their gods (Lizzies et al) want to turn humanity into something akin to Greys with perhaps a broader spectrum of functionality. That is what is at the root of the alien hybrid breeding program; creation of the perfect AI slave race.

All of this is essentially an attempt to ‘pull Heaven down to Earth’ – to induce artificial control over natural processes (including incarnation), goals (experience-driven learning), and circumscribe the scope of reality to the purely materialistic. AI and transhumanism are being promoted as augmentations of the human experience when in reality they will culminate in a severe constriction of same.

Join the Orion Empire! We will give you all of these incredible abilities and technologies! Oh wait, we forgot to tell you that you will have absolutely no freedom to make your own decisions, oops...

Predictive programming which portrays the end goal of this reality (and which is becoming more realistic as progress advances) includes the well-known Matrix trilogy, Battlestar Galactica, and the Star Trek Borg. This would be a truly dark reality, as the human classroom would have been permanently converted into a mere food source. While it may not be obvious how or why purely human-driven dystopian scenarios would require a cosmic cleansing of the Earth and a reset of the program (there have been a number of horrific periods involving much human suffering in recorded human history), it is easier to see how a cosmic intervention like a cometary bombardment may be necessary to preempt a world in which AI has gained a decisive strategic advantage over humanity. In this kind of world, free will would be abridged absolutely, and the main function of the learning environment nullified for all intents and purposes. A particular threshold in the development of AI may, at least in part, explain why 2014 was declared by the Cs to be ‘year 0’ and a point of no return.

There are a lot of interesting ideas here. A question I have been pondering is what if humanity chooses the Borg the reality? There is no law that says you can't give your freewill away to another being or collective. This is what 4D STS is really after, a soul that is also a robot. Freewill is freewill, if it chooses to be abridged, I think it provides 4D STS with a loophole. There seems to be a lot of hope pinned on the cometary bombardment offering a "reset," as the Cassiopaeans predicted, but who makes that decision? Humanity? 6D Overseers? "Natural Laws?" Is there enough "humanity" left that is opposed to that future, but also powerless, such that the only way their will can be heard is via indirectly manifesting a deluge of fire? These ideas also relate to a session you attended.

(Chu) I have a question. Linked to the beginning of the session... Starting with dinosaurs, if humans can bring so many disasters to themselves like the Roman civilization, how come there were cometary impacts in the past? So, my theory is there's gotta be something else. Either these things are gonna happen no matter what and people get crazy and start acting in all these weird ways because they sense that something is coming, or/and possibly combined with...
A: You are an experiment! It was necessary for evolutionary progress to proceed, so the dinosaurs had to go!
Q: (Pierre) That's what you wrote in your book. You wrote the dinosaurs were swept away because evolutionarily speaking, they didn't go the right way. Then there is a natural reaction that favors the "right" evolution...
(L) And it's still a natural reaction. We're not that much different from the dinosaurs.
(Chu) So we're bringing it onto ourselves because...
(L) We're part of the living system, and...
(Perceval) But it's not natural in the sense that... Because the first four words are, "You are an experiment!" So, did someone wipe the dinosaurs away so that they could seed the planet with monkeys that could turn into humans?
A: Partly, yes.
Q: (Perceval) They helped it along.
(L) Yeah.
(Chu) So because we're failing, it attracts the event, either bigger event or whatever... That wouldn't happen if the experiment was going right, basically?
A: It would be much ameliorated.
Q: (Perceval) I think the important point is that we're an experiment, so it's not just about the living system. There's some element of being tweaked with, and there being some kind of hyperdimensional influence on human evolution in a negative way.

A question that has lingered in my mind since this session occurred is, if the cosmos favors the "right evolution" then how did these 4D STS empires come to be? Take the Reptoids for example, how did their planet transition form 3D STS to 4D STS without getting destroyed by comets? My supposition is that the difference is in how humanity approaches the transition. Lizzies were really dedicated to STS. Humanity is neither dedicated to STS nor STO, but exists in the "sinkhole of indifference" as Ra puts it. The "right evolution" requires one to be able to choose a path. Refusal eventually causes things to run down into a total stagnation which chips away at the dynamism of the cosmos. The cyclic catastrophes then become a mechanism for keeping things moving. If you ended up with a planet ruled with indifferent AIs that serve neither polarity, it stands to reason that some hyperdimensional "debuggers" would come along sooner or later and make some tweaks so that this corner of the universe would be capable of transmitting meaningful information again.

I think 4D STS is directing the development of AI to serve their polarity. They already know about the comets, so I think that's going to be more of an inconvenience rather than a major setback for them. However, I think they are also subject to certain laws regarding the taking of humanity's freewill, if it goes beyond certain bounds they may be sanctioned by a higher density and face a cosmic catastrophe of their own.

 

[shijing]

I threw this idea out in the hyperdimensional politics thread. The reason transhumanists are so driven to accomplish their agenda is because it is pleasing to the gods, so to speak. Their gods (Lizzies et al) want to turn humanity into something akin to Greys with perhaps a broader spectrum of functionality. That is what is at the root of the alien hybrid breeding program; creation of the perfect AI slave race.

I’ve also wondered if autism has anything to do with that – low-functioning autistics might not be particularly useful, but high-functioning ones might. It would be interesting to know whether the autism explosion is completely accidental or at least partly designed.

There are a lot of interesting ideas here. A question I have been pondering is what if humanity chooses the Borg the reality? There is no law that says you can't give your freewill away to another being or collective. This is what 4D STS is really after, a soul that is also a robot. Freewill is freewill, if it chooses to be abridged, I think it provides 4D STS with a loophole. There seems to be a lot of hope pinned on the cometary bombardment offering a "reset," as the Cassiopaeans predicted, but who makes that decision? Humanity? 6D Overseers? "Natural Laws?" Is there enough "humanity" left that is opposed to that future, but also powerless, such that the only way their will can be heard is via indirectly manifesting a deluge of fire?

A question that has lingered in my mind since this session occurred is, if the cosmos favors the "right evolution" then how did these 4D STS empires come to be? Take the Reptoids for example, how did their planet transition form 3D STS to 4D STS without getting destroyed by comets? My supposition is that the difference is in how humanity approaches the transition. Lizzies were really dedicated to STS. Humanity is neither dedicated to STS nor STO, but exists in the "sinkhole of indifference" as Ra puts it. The "right evolution" requires one to be able to choose a path. Refusal eventually causes things to run down into a total stagnation which chips away at the dynamism of the cosmos. The cyclic catastrophes then become a mechanism for keeping things moving. If you ended up with a planet ruled with indifferent AIs that serve neither polarity, it stands to reason that some hyperdimensional "debuggers" would come along sooner or later and make some tweaks so that this corner of the universe would be capable of transmitting meaningful information again.

I think 4D STS is directing the development of AI to serve their polarity. They already know about the comets, so I think that's going to be more of an inconvenience rather than a major setback for them. However, I think they are also subject to certain laws regarding the taking of humanity's freewill, if it goes beyond certain bounds they may be sanctioned by a higher density and face a cosmic catastrophe of their own.

I don’t really know how the whole cometary mechanism works – how conscious a phenomenon it is versus being more like an autonomic cosmic immune response. There may be some reason to believe that it targets stagnation in the living/conscious system more specifically than it does STS polarity, although they might be indirectly related if the latter tends to increase the former. I don’t think there’s anything about polarizing as STS per se that would invite destruction, since active free will is utilized (and necessary) to do so, which seems to be crucial to the Universe’s desire to learn about itself through its individualized conscious constituents (among whom we are counted). If any 3D group which chooses to polarize as STS were targeted for destruction, then it would never advance to the next density, and if the Universe is divided roughly equally between the polarities then this couldn’t be the case.

Otherwise, what you conjecture is on the right track to the best of my understanding – as far as the Universe is concerned, graduation along either polarity fulfills the goal of learning and progress. In 3D, we seem to have two main purposes – to learn, and to choose which polarity with which to align. Graduating to 4D STS conforms to ‘the rules’, even if it’s not what we ourselves would choose – what appears to go against the rules is depriving beings of enough free will that they lack the context and ultimate ability to make that choice.

Below are some session excerpts which bear on this topic. This one is relevant to the DJ Welsh interview linked to above:

October 16, 1994

Q: (L) “And all the inhabitants of the earth will fall down in admiration... everyone whose name has not been recorded from the foundation of the world in the Book of Life of the Lamb that was slain in sacrifice from the foundation of the world...” What are “those whose names are recorded in the Book of Life"... what is the Book of Life?
A: Supercomputer.

Q: (L) The Book of Life of the Lamb... everyone whose name has not been recorded... it is saying that the people who are going to worship the Beast are names that have not been recorded... does that mean that there is a supercomputer recording the names of those who do not worship the beast?
A: Yes.

Q: (L) And who has this supercomputer?
A: Beast. All names will be recorded as being either obedient or disobedient.

This has been mentioned a couple of times on the forum recently:

November 19, 1994

Q: (T) Was it necessary for them to have power gathering stations on Mars and the Moon. Did this increase their power?
A: Not necessary but it is not necessary for you to have a million dollars either. Get the correlation? Atlanteans were power hungry the way your society is money hungry.

Q: (T) Was the accumulation of this power what brought about their downfall?
A: Yes.

Q: (T) Did they lose control of this power?
A: It overpowered them the same way your computers will overpower you.

Q: (V) Is it similar to them gaining a life and intelligence of their own?
A: Yes.

Q: (L) You mean these crystalline structures came to life, so to speak?
A: Yes.

Q: (L) And then what did they do?
A: Destroyed Atlantis.

September 9, 1995

Q: (L) Well, if the Grays are cybergenetic probes of the Lizard Beings, and, in effect soulless, does this mean that some of the Lizard beings are also STO?
A: Well, first, no being that is given intelligence to think on its own is, in fact, completely soul-less. It does have some soul imprint. Or what could be loosely referred to as soul imprint. This may be a collection of psychic energies that are available in the general vicinity. And this is stretching somewhat so that you can understand the basic ideas, even though in reality it is all far more complex than that. But, in any case, there is really no such thing as being completely soulless, whether it be a natural intelligence or an artificially constructed intelligence. And, one of the very most interesting things about that from your perspective, is that your technology on 3rd density, which we might add, has been aided somewhat by interactions with those that you might refer to as “aliens,” is now reaching a level whereby the artificially created intelligences can, in fact, begin to develop, or attract some soul imprint energy. If you follow what we are saying. For example: your computers, which are now on the verge of reaching the level whereby they can think by themselves, will begin to develop faint soul imprint.

August 15, 1998

Q: (L) Oh jeez. So, these are a bunch of aliens hanging out in ‘motels’ waiting for their house to be built. That does not sound good.
A: Many of you have recently become “bedazzled” by the “information superhighway,” and its accompanying computer hardware. Gee, we wonder why?

Q: (L) Well, you told us to network. We have been networking like crazy, digging up information, reading and comparing. Yes, there is a ton of garbage out there, but if we don’t ask, how will we know?
A: Point was: who is manipulating thee? Not so much you specifically, but the others? So many kids and kids-at-heart are thunderstruck by techno-sensory toys. Those cellular phones, those pagers and the Christmas toy computers... They are like, so cool!

Q: (L) So what are you implying about these techno toys?
A: Ponder.

Q: (L) Give me a clue. A word, something to point me in the right direction.
A: Fuzzy jello-brained kids.

Q: (L) Are you saying that pagers and cell phones, and techno toys that kids get for Christmas can have effects on them that turn their brains to jello?
A: In a figurative sense. All this technology represents a Brave New World. Like Huxley said: Woe is to those who have been led to eat their brains for lunch.

Q: (L) My kids have pagers. Are pagers, in particular...
A: What do you think comprises the signal content?

Q: (L) I don’t know. What does comprise the signal content?
A: Microwaves.

Q: (L) What do these microwaves do to the individual?
A: Contour brain cell structure.

April 15, 2000

Q: (J) Sharing information is something I have been involved with for many years...
A: But this process is expanding naturally anyway due to the exponential growth in your technology. And this, by the way, is an integral component in the eventual transition to 4th density. Not because of the technology, but the explosion of the knowledge base it is/will facilitate.

This is interesting in the context of what Max Igan discusses regarding scrying mirrors in the video above:

March 21, 2015

Q: (L) Well, let me ask... Is it possible that this rash of Black-Eyed Children and other strange entity-related phenomena is a side effect or a result of having so much technology around?
A: Now you have opened a real can of worms!

Q: (L) So, basically by having so much technology, microwaves, and all that kind of stuff, we're basically feeding entities in other realms and enabling them to enter ours?
A: Pretty much! Fun for materialists galore!

Q: (L) In other words, people who believe only in technology are in for a big surprise?
A: Yes

Q: (L) Well, that's interesting. (Joe) Is it because those kinds of microwaves and other kinds of waves transcend, or are perceived in other dimensions?
A: Yes

 

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

The idea of cosmic disasters being a result of stagnation and entropy seems to be reflected in a lot of the transcripts. In general, STS is associated with entropy - the opposite of creativity and progress. We know that the ultimate fate of all STS, if they persist, is a black hole - total destruction and starting over. So it seems even determined STS are not free from disaster. It seems STS is perhaps a brute force method and requires dodging constant bullets. As knowledge and technology advances, it is used to serve a false premise - that of self being above all else and deserving of all energy at any cost to others. You can’t win that staring contest because your foundation is faulty, no matter how driven and otherwise aware you become. So it does seem to me that destruction is highly correlated to lies, illusions, and the stagnation/entropy inherent in them. But it does seem that determination and free will choice at least buys you some time so to speak. If we don’t choose, we die now. If we choose, but the foundation is STS which is based on a fundamental lie, the universe allows us to take it as far as it can be taken, just postponing the disaster. We still serve a purpose, in other words.

The C’s talked about stagnation and obsession being blocks to progress in several ways. They mentioned that any successful businessman intuitively knows that to increase “income” one must increase their output. Even STS needs to spend energy towards the goal of more energy. You need output to increase input. The difference is STS does this to maximize the input, and STO tolerated the input which helps maximize the output. Yin yang. Without output, which is what confusion and stagnation is, you die.

The Bible said if 2 or more come together toward the same goal (collinear), the universe will assist and you can “move mountains”. The C’s also said that you just have to put energy towards something, and keep doing it, and opportunities open up. God helps those who help themselves (not necessarily an STS idea if STO helps itself by doing STO things etc).

So in a very personal sense as well as a collective sense, lack of moving in a direction seems to invite trouble. The universe abhors a vacuum. And in this case a vacuum isn’t STS (in a different sense, it is), but a lack of work aka energy towards a goal. And maybe the 2 meanings of vacuum combine anyway, since ultimate STS might just get so lazy it stops doing even the minimum output as it “automates” the input. It can’t tolerate even a little effort.

Spending energy towards a goal requires knowledge of what choices there are to even have a goal and move towards it. And knowledge requires paying attention to objective reality right and left, even for STS to whatever degree they can without stopping being STS.

And if you don’t pay attention, which allows you to become aware of the choices and then make them and move towards them, you become exactly what you give to life - nothing, a dream in the past. Hence, destruction. And STS can forestall this by still “giving” and paying attention to a point. If humans don’t do it at all, because all they have are lies which means no real choice or movement is possible, we die now rather than later.

Anyway, just some thoughts.

 

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

I should add that without input you die as well. STO balances input and output of energy, STS progressively minimizes the output. Knowledge is needed for viable output - and lies get in the way.

Laura once said (paraphrasing) that in her opinion the more automated technolgy becomes the more entropic it is (I’ll have to find the quote, correct me if I got it wrong please). And it does make sense to me - the more powerful AI becomes, the more automation there is, the less opportunity for us to do things and apply knowledge and grow and learn. It just does everything for us, and we have no more purpose. The extreme is the movie WALL-E. The entire planet is automated and we just sit in a chair slurping a drink with Facebook wired into our faces as we consume meaningless trivia for no reason at all. We become lazy and useless - no more knowledge or application of knowledge needed, no conscious output and expression of free will or creativity. Just total and utter stagnation.

So while it’s a “tempting” idea to not have to work for a living and just be supported by an AI nanny that wipes your butt and holds your spoon and you just order free stuff on amazon all day, which is also fully automated, is this really “the dream” existence?

People give humans too much credit sometimes. The assumption is that A.I. will do the boring and painful stuff and we can focus on learning and creativity and all that. But without some necessity to kick us in the ass, how many people will voluntarily put in effort and work on themselves and grow etc? And how many will sit in a chair with a slurpee, facebook, and video games forever if they didn’t have to do anytbing their i’s didn’t feel like doing?

It seems like the whole point of incarnating is to get away from the blissful “floating around in space with not a care in the world” state and succumb to hunger, pain, loss, and other kinds of hardship which forces our otherwise lazy entitled brat selves to do something useful for our souls. The soul didn’t come here to technologically recreate a blissful state free from all pain and need and work. For that we could’ve stayed in 5D and cruised through the “long wave cycle” as the C’s call it. Sure it works, just give it a few billion years!

Most people are just not self-motivated enough to progress without some suffering, and I think our souls know this and chose this for that reason. Maybe 6D is very much beyond the need for this, but it seems like it’s a bad idea to assume that humans are there too. So an automated “utopia” is really a dystopia, and we are like kids who think we would be happy just eating candy all day. In reality we’d die from diabetes and malnutrition. And if lessons are nutrition, then they’re the broccoli the kids dont want to eat unless a parent (the universe) takes the candy away.

 

[luc]

SAO, thanks for these excellent elaborations!

I should add that without input you die as well. STO balances input and output of energy, STS progressively minimizes the output. Knowledge is needed for viable output - and lies get in the way.

There is even a biological analogy to that: all life forms, from plants to humans, need to balance their input/output of energy, nutrients and so on. If they don't take enough or give too much, they starve/implode. If they take too much/give too little, they die of saturation/explode. There needs to be a balance. And then there is the free will decisions about what exactly we should give and take, to whom, and in which environment...

People give humans too much credit sometimes. The assumption is that A.I. will do the boring and painful stuff and we can focus on learning and creativity and all that. But without some necessity to kick us in the ass, how many people will voluntarily put in effort and work on themselves and grow etc? And how many will sit in a chair with a slurpee, facebook, and video games forever if they didn’t have to do anytbing their i’s didn’t feel like doing?

And this is the reason why I'm so skeptical about all that "basic income" shtick. It might sound like a reasonable idea on the surface, but I think the arguments for something like that (i.e. "no existential threat so that we can all be creative") are merely rationalizations. Behind it lurks a deeply STS idea: to eliminate all threats, all constraints, all duty and responsibility. It's nothing but the desire to play video games all day long, and just do some work if you are in the right mood or if it's "fun".

 

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

I think the inverse is also true to a degree - if there’s too much suffering and people have to spend countless hours being miserable just to survive, then there’s little energy or room left for “higher pursuits” as well. So either extreme is bad for growth - too many problems or too few problems. We seem to be switching gears from overworked and underpaid cogs in a wealth generation machine to A.I. nanny state. It’s like no one wants humans to be in that healthy balanced place!

When the “wrong stuff” doesn’t work, we reach a spiritual bankruptcy, and from rock bottom can begin the quest for truth after all else has failed us. If you take that possibility of failure away, then the very few who currently are seeking truth wouldn’t even exist to begin with. And I think conversely, if you keep someone at constant failure and misery, witn only a few seconds of air before they’re submerged again, they don’t have time to look at the birds either!

I think circumventing the purpose of this 3D school is a pretty good reason for the universe to demolish it. Who needs this planet when it’s no longer a school?

 

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

You cannot have endless progress without destruction. That would be thinking like cancer. Infinite possibilities are possible, yet when a choice is made, other possibilities collapse or are destroyed. On an AI level, as an example, your "Simple Machines" forum has been replaced by XenForo forum. The interesting dichotomy seems to be that y'all always talk about serving "others" and the vampires are always talking about creating their "immortal other" and great work which very well could be a website or another form of an energy body. EMF is an energy body and can be very destructive and vampiric and artificial. Did your Simple Machines forum croak due to entropy? I noticed you guest count was in the hundreds instead of the 300s it usually was. I always thought that Laura's prolific writing was much like the old tedious Cobalt programming which is also associated with Algol programming and lizard aliens. They made a self help program that entirely computer generated response. Reminds me a whole lot of your forum since there didn't seem to be much heart in much of what was done. Lies are lies are lies and not telling the whole story is yet another form of a lie.

Please correct me if I misunderstood what you're saying, but it sounds like you find this forum entropic and Laura's writings boring and lacking heart? If so, why are you here?

 

[Laura]

Yup, SAO, you sure waxed brilliant above! Impressive arguments.

 

[EmeraldHope]

Please correct me if I misunderstood what you're saying, but it sounds like you find this forum entropic and Laura's writings boring and lacking heart? If so, why are you here?

I've always been here. I enjoyed Laura's writing when I read them, however, in retrospect, I wasted about ten years reading material that never got to the point. So, yes, in that sense, it was entropic. I find that the forum, much like machines, is too hung up on mechanical reasoning. That's not to say there are not many good ideas and I was introduced to clues than panned out elsewhere. I don't find too much all good or all bad or all black or all white or all sts or all sto. There are mechanical hard cores, apple cores, human hearts, nuclear cores, "hearts of all kinds". I found a lot of Laura's writings to have heart and the forum to be rather copy paste heartless, or perhaps "hard core" automated which was not surprising on a simple machines forum.

 

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

What point were you looking for? Here’s the one I found: “here’s a blueprint for the state and nature of the world and what’s been happening in history and today and why it’s happening. And here’s the most effective means of growing, connecting, and becoming conscious and better versions of ourselves we have discovered so far. It gives our life’s meaning and purpose and something to strive for!”.

I gotta say I’m pretty damn happy with that point. I didn’t think it was hard to miss! Remember that time you put on rose colored glasses and got involved with a toxic individual and how the forum worked together to help you see it, showed you your thinking errors, etc? Isn’t that an example of the network serving its purpose, serving the aforementioned “point” when you asked?

You also just described a group of people with different interests and backgrounds coming together for a common purpose like it’s a bad thing! Why is it bad that people have different things to contribute and come from different walks of life?

I guess the question remains, what point did you expect?

 

[monotonic]

I find that the forum, much like machines, is too hung up on mechanical reasoning.

Would providing a reasoned argument for your points be too mechanical?

 

[Ca.]

50 years of 2001: A Space Odyssey – how Kubrick's sci-fi 'changed the very form of cinema'
Snips: Mon 2 Apr 2018
Wally Pfister, director, Transcendence; cinematographer, Inception

When I met Christopher Nolan in 1998, I was really chuffed to find Kubrick was one of the things we had in common. I rewatched 2001 around the time we did Inception, and there are some similarities in the sets and the style. That last room where Pete Postlethwaite is dying is definitely reminiscent of the end of 2001 – there’s a little homage there. And 2001 was a huge influence on Transcendence – I was attracted to the script because of the parallels: AI, becoming a godlike being. And the question of whether this AI is good or evil, coming to the conclusion that it’s only as good as the person who inputted it.

Claire Denis, director, High Life

I saw 2001 on a giant screen in Paris, and I was blown away. You knew it took place in space, but I didn’t expect that kind of strange reflection on humanity. I wasn’t sure I understood this mysterious philosophising, the black monolith, all that. But I accepted all of it. It’s not possible to imitate a single thing from 2001 – it’s taboo, private territory. For one thing, to do the special effects you have to film models in a sort of choreography; modern special effects are very beautiful, but they don’t give the same physical impression. And space films are no longer voyages into the unknown – science has advanced a lot since then. My own thinking had to prevail when making my forthcoming science-fiction film High Life: it would be stupid to use 2001 as a departure point. They’re completely different: asking me about them is like asking whether I’d like to eat a sandwich or go on a trip to Australia.

Jan Harlan, producer, The Shining; A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick [who worked together on the film]

shared the same spirit: agnostic, curious, very intelligent and in awe of the endlessness of the universe. If a film managed to build on what 2001 did, it’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence – it predicted the end of humanity.

Stanley [Kubrick, Harlan’s brother-in-law] was convinced that we have no chance to survive in the long run, the way we behave – whether we exist for another 50 or 500 years doesn’t matter, it’s a short moment either way on the large scale of time. It is a dead serious message wrapped in a sweetener where robots survive their former masters. Does that mean HAL wins in the end? No, it’s a very different story merely born out of the same spirit.

Douglas Trumbull, visual effects supervisor, 2001
I was excited working on it every day. With the space race happening at the same time, I felt like we were working on something really important. I don’t think it directly affected the moon landings, which happened the following year, but I meet scientists, engineers and astrophysicists almost every week who say they went into their line of work because they watched the film when they were young.

It has profoundly affected that community to believe that certain things were going to be real and possible and spectacular. Especially regarding the possibility of contact with intelligent civilisations.

John Gaeta, visual effects supervisor, The Matrix
I could dot-connect where I am today back to being a young man watching 2001.[/QUOTE]

Kubrick allowed Douglas Trumbull to explore and envision things by any means necessary. And that led to startling breakthroughs and a level of immersion we haven’t seen before. The Wachowskis [Lana and Lilly, sibling directors of The Matrix] acted very much for me like Kubrick acted with him. They told me to find the form that allows a concept to resonate, which led to Bullet Time. And now I’m at Magic Leap, working on augmented reality.

HAL is really the first mass understanding that artificial intelligence could exist. The people building those interfaces use films like 2001 as guides and influences. The film is completely contemporary in its idea that AI could destroy us. We’re within five years of that moment now. Not necessarily in the exact context of that story, but in the context of AI overruling us on something important. The next step is what Spike Jonze was talking about in Her. 2001 was basically off by 20 years.

Andrew Niccol, director, Gattaca

The opening sequence of 2001 is the most immersive experience in cinema: completely spare of dialogue. I was sucked into the world as if I was in a black hole. I was watching 3D before there was 3D. It changed not only science fiction but also the very form of cinema. I love the grandeur, but I also love the attention to detail, like how the letters in the name HAL are only one removed in the alphabet from IBM.

Peter Suschitzky, cinematographer, The Empire Strikes Back; Mars Attacks!

Everyone in the London film-making community was tremendously excited by it. It was the first thing we talked about. I was amazed at its visual splendour. Most of the space shots mystified me and still do. And I don’t mind staying mystified. It’s more miraculous if you don’t know how it was done. But I was nonplussed by the hallucinogenic ending. I still feel he was trying to pull the wool over our eyes – he didn’t know how to end the film.

David Braben, developer, Elite (videogame)

In the later versions of Elite, we put in the tribute of having The Blue Danube when you used the docking computer – quite a bleepy version! As a child, I loved hard science-fiction, which is grounded in reality. 2001 was very rich because science wasn’t completely forgotten. Like the scene with Keir Dullea walking on the curved floor – the idea that things rotating produced gravity. And the shuttle in turn rotating to dock with the space station. I liked the way it showed those things in a matter-of-fact way

Amar Ediriwira, film curator, Boiler Room

2001 suggested an existential shift for music in sci-fi and beyond

. Pairing the dawn of man sequence with the Nietzsche-inspired tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, and Johann Strauss’s 1866 Blue Danube waltz with the interstellar docking scene, was an utterly audacious, even vulgar, thing to do at the time. Both pieces have since become synonymous with space travel; the BBC, for instance, used Zarathustra as theme music for its TV coverage of the Apollo space missions.

A bit like Pierre Schaeffer with musique concrète or Kool Herc with a turntable, Kubrick’s “f%$k you” to traditional scoring recast music recordings as found objects, another tool for the auteur to fully exploit the interplay between moving image and sound. Recycling music to transcend its original form in the context of the “image” is integral to the works of Tarantino, for example, who regularly envisages cinematic moments around songs. The soundtrack as a significant cultural product can be traced right back to 2001.

 

[Keit]

And this is the reason why I'm so skeptical about all that "basic income" shtick. It might sound like a reasonable idea on the surface, but I think the arguments for something like that (i.e. "no existential threat so that we can all be creative") are merely rationalizations. Behind it lurks a deeply STS idea: to eliminate all threats, all constraints, all duty and responsibility. It's nothing but the desire to play video games all day long, and just do some work if you are in the right mood or if it's "fun".

The above also makes me wonder about the original idea behind Star Trek, as was envisioned by Gene Roddenbery. Surely, it sounds amazing for the future economics to be based not on money but on personal self-development and our mutual development as the species. But in reality this kind of ideal would require the human race to change and grow up considerably before even considering something like this. Unfortunately at this point it does sound like a total fiction. And considering the connection between suffering and growth, perhaps this kind of world isn't even desirable? It would be awesome to take a peek at the STO world and see how this really works!