clever use of word "eschatology"
Discussion
The thing is, I'm not even using the word ironically.
During Covid I began to listen to more podcasts with people like Jonathan Pageau. He's an intelligent and eloquent speaker on issues of truth, values, and belief.
Over time I have come to understand and appreciate his worldview, and therefore will give him the benefit of the doubt. When he begins to speak of eschatology, and refer to AI as the Moloch, I genuinely want to understand how someone could arrive at such a strange conclusion.
The truth of is that this type of “end of the world” mentality has been part of different religions forever. My armchair theory is predicting the demise of humanity is a form of protection for the ego. A way of trying to exercise agency over their ultimate fate. "I won't die, the world will end".
There are groups of people that appear to be scared and confused right now about many things in culture. And they are saying some pretty wacky things about technology as a result. While I have no issues with the church, the use of apocalyptic narratives to stoke unease in people who are already fragile is not helpful.
I thought, no way this is not something people have studied in depth, so I went and consulted the Moloch…
"The specific mechanism you're describing - transferring individual mortality anxiety to group mortality - is sometimes called "death displacement" in the literature. It's the idea that it's psychologically easier to contemplate everyone dying together than to face the reality of your own isolated death.”
One of the reasons I build an AI by combining many great minds is the hope that such conclusions are going to be cancelled out by proper reasoning by others. If a generally correct person has wrong ideas in a domain, then experts of that domain can erase those ideas. Purely battle of probabilities.
Similarly to death displacement, I could add "comparing mind". It must be a comforting thought "Everybody else is getting worse, and I am doing better than average. Feels great! Lets find out what else is going bad in the world". The problem here is they are trapped in their validation walls and continue to live in there as a perpetual prepper.
Fear becomes their identity and now they have to feel that to feel alive because they forgot other feelings.
That’s a really great perspective you have, actively looking for a variety of sources to help strengthen your model.
Too many are stuck in the mindset of “oh that model is just the average of all humans. no wonder it’s writing sucks”.
Yeah, of course that can happen, but blame it on the person who built the model. It’s just one of infinite potential outcomes.