Non-fictional books you find unsettling. Pic related. Also

>>9096486
my diary desu

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This has some fiction but not much, and it compliments Superintelligence quite nicelt

>>9096486
Just read Bostrom's paper on the 'simulation hypothesis'. Thought-provoking stuff.
Is this any good?

Niklas Boström is a hack

>>9096495
People on /lit/ have been memeing Nick Land for a while now but is he actually worth reading?

>>9096495
Keep your simple minded political shills out of this.

>>9096508
Yes, he is a very interesting philosopher and approaches many questions from an alien, inhuman perspective.

>>9096508
He deserves to be read as he's one of the leaders of a significant political movement. Just not fucking 500 pages of it.

>>9096497
It's heavy and actually very dry over long bits. It lays out the dangers he sees with the rise of artificial intelligence pretty detailed. If I remember correctly he opens the book with the thought that AI might well be considered the last problem of humanity: Either it works out and there will be nothing that cannot be solved or it doesn't work out for us and there will be no more humanity because it will simply wipe us all out.

>>9096495
What are Nick Land's main points and themes?

Not a full book, but Robin Hanson's paper on the Great Filter is quite unsettling, and ties in with >>9096486 and >>9096495

http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html

>>9096516
>he's one of the leaders of a significant political movement
Which is? OP here and genuinely asking, I have never heard of this guy till now

>>9096522
There are around 50 notable writers who touch on this subject profoundly. Why read Land's ideas on it?

>>9096524
OP here, yes that is unsettling as well. I remember thinking about this when I started reading into AI a lot. AI could probably be considered one of these filters.

>>9096531
His work touches on things like posthumanism and machine intelligences but from a very dark perspective.

>>9096533
This was probably meant for >>9096495 I think

>>9096551
From what perspective? I was asking about what significant political movement you were talking about. What's it called?

>>9096486
Can someone who has any idea about modern "AI" and read this tell me if it's as much bullshit as I suspect it is?

>>9096558
The Dark Enlightenment

>>9096558
It's just watered down AI philosophy written in a way that appeals to right wingers. You can skip Nick Land and read Bostrom, as political agendas tend to taint everything they touch with bias.

>>9096564
Shut up retard.

>>9096569
>The Dark Enlightenment
First time I hear of this. What is it about, anon?

>>9096583
>Shut up retard.
Is that a yes or no?

>>9096564
It's actually pretty much up there in serious scientific discourse of the matter. He's considered one of about 10 famous experts in the field. Definitely not "bullshit", I'd say.

>>9096607
Why am I not surprised you had to ask and wouldn't understand that statement.

>>9096569
>NRx
>significant
All of mein keks.

>>9096486
I was more of a history person. If you want to read non fiction "books" that are unsettled; go to a library and read first hand accounts of people who survived the holocaust.

>>9096629

Or read on trench warfare in WW1.

>>9096629
OP asked for non-fiction

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Not really unsettling, but it's a great testimony to the utter insignificance of the human race.

>>9096629
>>9096654
Please, for further discussion of this, make your own thread. Thank you.

>>9096522
Thanks, I'll have to look it up.

>>9096486
Unless you're reading an emotionless tech book, they're all unsettling. What part of current global affairs do NOT unsettle you?

>>9096660
This looks interesting. Will check it out, thank you.

>>9096682
Advances in medicine, to name one

>>9096682
>Unless you're reading an emotionless tech book, they're all unsettling

To you maybe.

>>9096486
Read everything by Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom, both the top minds in this field. Our Mathemtical Universe by Tegmark is excellent as well, if you're into these big picture reality/science things.

>>9096511
isn't Fanged Noumena pre-Dark Enlightenment Land? I was under the impression that he was an amphetamine-binging leftist up until fairly recently.

>>9096670
Most non-fiction 'books' are created by historians, rather than 'writers' (Faulkner, Hemingway, Eliot...etc, etc). I think non-fiction books are decreasingly relevant.
It involves less of your time to read actual transcripts of people who experienced an event and as a "bonus" you have to form your own opinion rather than read a book by a historian who most likely published a book in an attempt to generate revenue.

>>9096712
most of it is just gibberish

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>>9096522
>AI might well be considered the last problem of humanity

so you could say we need a 'final solution'?

>>9096718
>I think non-fiction books are decreasingly relevant.
They are already pretty irrelevant, mostly. Then again it depends on what field you view relevance. But non-scientific books have near stopped being socially relevant in a while now.

>>9096718
>>9096787
I think there never was broad social relevance with 'fictional' books or works of literature (or not in centuries); they were -and might still- though relevant to exceptional individuals throughout history and for instance kept them going in times of crisis or inspired them.

>>9096583
Wasn't Land more or less a Deleuze-drunk Marxist when he wrote the material in Fanged Noumena? The Austrian economics, racial IQ science, and China-worship came later.

>>9096495
We are on a literature board, how can you still not know the difference between complements/compliments and nicely/nicelt?

>>9096911
For the same reason you think anyone cares about grammatical correctness on a literature board.

>>9096959

Not him, but the complements/compliments part bothered me as well.

The Ego Tunnel by Metzinger

>>9096874
He's still a Deleuze-drunk Marxist, nothing changed. He was a ring-wing antihumanist from the start.

>Traditional schemas which oppose technics to nature, to literate culture, or to social relations, are all dominated by a phobic resistance to the side-lining of human intelligence by the coming techno sapiens. Thus one sees the decaying Hegelian socialist heritage clinging with increasing desperation to the theological sentimentalities of praxis, reification, alienation, ethics, autonomy, and other such mythemes of human creative sovereignty. A Cartesian howl is raised: people are being treated as things! Rather than as ... soul, spirit, the subject of history, Dasein? For how long will this infantilism be protracted?

That's from 1993.

>>9096874
China stuff is all over his early work, e.g. Meltdown:

>Neo-China arrives from the future.

>As sino-pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the neocolonial world system, the metropolis is forced to re-endogenize its crisis. Hyper-fluid capital deterritorializing to the planetary level divests the first world of geographic privilege; resulting in Euro-American neo-mercantilist panic reactions, welfare state deterioration, cancerizing enclaves of domestic underdevelopment, political collapse, and the release of cultural toxins that speed-up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle.

The prediction of neo-mercantilism in the West was spot on btw. We'll see about the rest.

Bump.

I'd also guess that recent books on neuro-science that tackle consciousness in a reductionist way as a chemical/electro-chemical product in the brain might be pretty unsettling as well.

>>9097013
To be honest, complement and compliment are almost always used in the wrong way. I actually do a double take when I see the right one.

>>9097221

>>9097089
>The Ego Tunnel by Metzinger

>Extensively working with neuroscientists he has come to the conclusion that, in fact, there is no such thing as a "self" -- that a "self" is simply the content of a model created by our brain - part of a virtual reality we create for ourselves.

That's exactly the stuff I had in mind. Thank you.

>>9097089
>Metzinger

I remember watching a discussion with this guy. He came across as an absolute unlikeable hipster and as a deconstructivist deconstructing for the sole purpose of shock value and media attention. A guy who seemed full of himself and who is the exact type of person to give contemporary philosophy and philosophers such a bad name

>>9097659
Yeah he's not particularly likable, but his work is top-notch.

>>9097659
Not the guy you replied to and I don't know what you were watching Metzinger in, but his work is actually highly scientific so I'd say you don't know what you are talking about.

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NEED MORE HARD COPIES OF NICK LAND BOOK!!

I hate kindle Amazon has it at like 300 usd.

>>9097659
>>9097681
Kek I just looked up a talk of his and he is like the archetype of a creepy German scientist. Reminded me of that doctor from the Human Centipede

>>9097702
>Ghost in the Shell

Jesus Christ you ought to be banned for that alone.

>>9097713
U don't like that movie?

>>9097702
...it's not out of print. I don't know why it's so expensive on Amazon but you can get it for $30 from Sequence Press.

>>9096523
Conjunction of AI and capitalism will result in a capital maximizing autonomous market which will preserve/transcend civilization and push complex system information processing matter to its physical limits and highest potential. Renders humans and other slow info processing bio life relatively insignificant. His ideal means to achieve this is right-accelerationism which tends to be anti-humanist and advocates anti-democratic socio political organization. This isn't the best description but should give you the gist.

>>9097639
Shouldn't be that surprising that the map isn't the territory.

>>9098327
But who's the reader of the map then?

>>9098455
I'm not going to recurse with you, bro.

>>9098455
Jordan Peterson.

>>9096486
Kurzweil is a delusional madman. Do yourself a favor and read something else.

>>9096564
It's very much bullshit. It became a fad among the techno-liberal faggots.

>>9098283
I think I hate Nick Land now.

>>9099859
So you've never actually read it?
>>9100968
wtf

>>9101649
I value humanity and the significance of persons.

>>9096564
soft-AIs(task specific) will change the world completely in 5-10 years

'true AI' is at the VERY least 25 years in the future

>>9098283
is this meant to be taken seriously

>>9096486
This book is a piece of doomsday garbage

Fear mongering at its worst. Dull, misleading, and has riled the hearts and minds of the intellectually elite.

Oh sure theres a chance that AI will become powerful and do naughty (see: what we think is naughty) stuff.

But you know whats even more terrifying that this book never once considered? What human beings will do to each other with their new found powers.

So while the intellectuals are oh so concerned about protecting us from the dangers of AI, the human being overlords (who are far more unpredictable and uncontrollable than any AI we will see for some time) will wreak havoc amongst each other as theyve always done, this time with soulless actors like Putin, Trump, Jinpeng playing My Dick is Bigger with millions of lives to throw away to prove just whose dick is bigger

See the Cold War never ended. Instead the divided house called the Soviet Union crumbled like a kindergartners poorly made gingerbread house, and all of a sudden the US had no one else to compare dick sizes to so it assumed it had the biggest. Just how far will these egotistical cock watchers go?

Bostrom doesnt ever notice the international dick wagging contest. Maybe its outside of his scope of study (is he still concerned with highly unlikely events that could wipe out humanity? Why does a brainlet like him focus so much on the shit that most likely wont happen, rather than dedicating the much needed intelligence to more pressing matters, such as how to fix the US political system, or how to ensure world peace between increasingly hawkish nations?

OP if you think this is unsettling dont ever watch the news. There is a rekindling of the Cold War happening right now that is far more likely to happen, far more dangerous than some paperclip spewing AI

The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett is some spooky shit. She's an epidemiologist who's been saying we're all gonna die from an antibiotic-resistant superbug for decades now. Really really lucid and well-written, if slightly alarmist. But then again it's literally her job to raise awareness of infectious disease and potential pandemics.

>>9096486
Is this guy even a scientist working in the field? I thought he was some kind of sci-fi author.

Do people actually think true AI is possible?

where does this illusion come from? is it just burnt out and replaced linear cs fags with no future hope so they resorted to writing literature trying to sway people out of going into AI? it makes no sense.

>>9096702
>Advances in medicine, to name one
yet lifespans are shortening

>>9096628
I'm convinced that there's literally one or two NRx autists on /lit/ all the time desperately trying to turn Nick Land into a forced meme.

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>>9103507
>Why does a brainlet like him focus so much on the shit that most likely wont happen, rather than dedicating the much needed intelligence to more pressing matters, such as how to fix the US political system, or how to ensure world peace between increasingly hawkish nations?
This is so short-sighted and USA-centric it's unbelievable
>/lit/
oh, right

>>9099437
>spiritual materialism

I read one paper by Nick Bostrom and some reviews of his book, the critical review - or one of them - mentioned how she or he felt like it was bar speculation while drinking beer
That is exactly how I that paper of his I've read

I suppose I should look if he has more rigorious papers but that one seriously lacked any rigor

Nick "I'm so awesome" Bostrom

>>9098327
>>9098505
So you were just trying to sound smart, too bad.

>>9103507
Man, you sound like a fucking retard. Sorry but I won't be taking any advise from you.

>>9103720
Some people, way smarter than you, believe it is possible.

>>9105273
lol what?

>>9105974
t. Nick Bostrom