Post #3637591

2026-07-06 21:39 UTC

AI has hacked the code of human civilization | Yuval Noah Harari at Oxford. via naked capitalism. hrmmm. Harari was always a recommended book on rationalist-adjacent sites like ribbonfarm and farnam street back in the day. He too has an ai talk. The important thing to note about bureaucratic systems is that they are extremely artificial environments where a relatively narrow intelligence is sufficient to exert an enormous impact. A lawyer, banker, or government official who cannot hold an axe or hammer can nevertheless cut down entire forests and build entire cities simply by moving documents within a bureaucratic network. If you take that lawyer out of the system and throw them into the messy, unstructured jungle, their legal skills mean nothing, and they would be no match for a chimpanzee, lion, or elephant. However, we have already imposed our bureaucratic systems on the jungle. Consequently, if you were to pit all the lions in the world against one very good lawyer, the lawyer would prevail. Today, the survival of species like lions depends on the lawyers, accountants, and bankers moving documents through the bureaucratic labyrinths of governments and corporations. This is the environment in which AI is gaining agency. While an AI thrown into the jungle could not start mining iron to build a robot army, it is poised to wield enormous power within the bureaucratic systems humans have created, as AIs are native bureaucrats. No human lawyer can remember every law and regulation in the UK, no accountant can track all transactions of a bank, and no bishop can memorize all of Canon law and 2,000 years of theological texts. An AI can do all of these things. So half-right that it’s almost impressive. But I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.

Replies (4)

@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-06 21:49

Harari is an open transhumanist from when I did some research into him when I found him on this interview so this seems in character

Open ##3637790
@BioMan@awful.systems 2026-07-07 00:05

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.

Open ##3639748
@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-07 00:42

I hadn’t thought of Ribbon Farm in like 5 years, but when I googled it today I found this: …venkateshrao.com/…/ribbonfarm-resurrected For long time readers who are still here with me on Contraptions (or who thought I was dead and got this post forwarded to them): If you just visit the site through a search hit or a bookmarked post, you probably won’t notice anything different besides a cleaned up visual feel, and subtle signs that suggest it’s no longer a standard WordPress blog. It is not. It is now a bespoke static site, ridiculously over-scaffolded with AI affordances lurking in the margins and menus. It took less than a couple of hundred dollars in tokens to build, and provided me with a lot of fun over several months. It has already more than paid for itself, since it is essentially free to host in its current form, and I was paying ~$1500/year in hosting fees to host it as a live WPEngine WordPress site (even post-retirement, it remained high-traffic enough it needed high-end hosting to be hassle free). Big debt of gratitude to the WordPress ecosystem for serving me so well for so long though. The decision to keep the basic surface appearance the same was partly pragmatic (obviously, old link structures had to be preserved) and partly aesthetic. It’s fun to engineer an uncanny experience where the surface feels familiar, but something tells you an alien logic has taken over the innards. ?O kay? wget -r wasn’t good enough for a static copy? Not to bury the lede, the most alien piece of all is the curator of this museum-grade mummy blog, a digital ghost of myself, an archival self called vgr_zirp. This is a chatbot backed by a fully digested set of source corpora — ribbonfarm itself, my full twitter archives (@vgr), my non ribbonfarm books from the era (Tempo, Be Slightly Evil, Art of Gig), and a complete bibliography of every book or essay ever mentioned on the blog, either by me, guest authors, or commenters. wat I suspect I’m going to be using the vgr_zirp bot and MCP regularly from now on, to consult my archival self about ongoing projects for my current live self. why can’t you just make a tulpa like a normal person. well whatever, I’ll ask about the harari. Harari’s framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that it’s the suit itself — and the person wearing it has already left the building. what even the fuck is this word salad saying. at least upgrade to the one that isn’t em dash trigger happy. now I’m afraid to google farnam street.

Open ##3639967
@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-07-08 16:58

A lawyer, banker, or government official who cannot hold an axe or hammer can nevertheless cut down … Framing this as a skill issue and not a power issue is a weird choice.

Open ##3676388