THEATER OF THE ABSURD

According to Hoyt ^ | 4 Apr 2023 | Sarah Hoyt

[Rummyfan]

Through a mutual friend, I got something ESR said, and it struck me as profound:

“Voltaire can be inverted. If you’re willing to commit atrocities, this is a sign that you believe absurdities.” –

Eric S. Raymond

The context was a discussion of AI and AI advancements but that is not important right now.

The important thing is the actual meaning of those words.

We’re surrounded by not particularly bright or educated (though a lot of them are very credentialed and confuse that for intelligence), but very passionate people causally saying things like We need to reduce Earth population by several billion, or We must all stop eating meat, or We must stop using fossil fuels.

Each of those involves atrocities that would make Pol Pot blanch. Whatever they imagine, they have no idea what it would entail.

They might think all we need to do is stop reproducing. Say, sterilize most of mankind, and let population reduce quietly. But it’s never that way, of course. Even if you managed that, do you have any idea what removing people’s hope of connection to the future — most people’s only way to matter — and making them feel they don’t count? Ooh, boy. I could write an entire dystopian novel on the death and destruction that will follow. Entire industries would collapse, and the ability to feed those humans they left able to reproduce. The end of civilization comes shortly after.

[Tijeras_Slim]

RUR (Rossom’s Universal Robots) published in 1929 foresaw this. Robots were made to build houses for people. People proved a hindrance. Robots killed all the people. Then they could build houses.