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  • Mr.Mark "The Sharpie King"markmetz
    May 31, 2026, 6:14 AM

    I’m with Camus on this:
    “Albert Camus broke with Jean-Paul Sartre and the French left over the most concrete political question there is: can the people alive today be treated as acceptable casualties in the pursuit of a better future?

    Sartre and the Marxists said yes. History has a direction. The revolution requires sacrifice. Camus said no. Any system of thought that subordinates living people to a hypothetical future has already committed the foundational moral error. Once you accept that logic, there is no limiting principle. Any atrocity becomes justifiable. Any amount of present suffering can be rationalized as a necessary input to the glorious output.

    This is the structure of the AI acceleration argument.”
    owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-eco

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Replies

  • RaRa@mstdn.social
    May 31, 2026, 7:42 AM

    @markmetz holy crap, that's a hell of a thing to read at breakfast. Thanks.

    Camus, for the win.

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  • skuaskua@mastodon.social
    May 31, 2026, 8:32 AM

    @markmetz

    Puts a different slant on the claims by some that someone was a Nazi (or Nazi supporter, or fascist).

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  • Beggar MidasBeggarmidas@mastodon.social
    May 31, 2026, 10:39 AM

    @markmetz Yet Camus never answered when asked about those willing to sacrifice themselves for a better future, did he?

    AI accelerationism is based on trying to answer somewhat different question than the author presumes.

    To wit: Can they beat the expectation clock to profitability OR A mythologized as presented AGI before the bubble pop crashes world markets? Don't forget that this whole thing has dragged in even typically risk adverse investment now. Old money. Hedge funds.

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  • muddlemuddle@infosec.exchange
    May 31, 2026, 3:50 PM

    @Beggarmidas @markmetz He did. He said that those left behind, those who were not willing to sacrifice quite so much know that they have lost the best of us.

    AI accelerationism is based on the same Hegelian view of history that Camus rejects. Hegel's dictum, IIRC was along the lines of "history is not made for man, but man can be made for history." Camus rightly points out that this denial of agency in the face of "history" (and the farcical view that it is always "progressive" in some way) forces people into the mould of either being a victim or an oppressor.

    Bringing it all back, the sacrifice these people make is to break the cycles of victimhood and oppression.

    So, yes, Camus did have something to say on this.

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  • Beggar MidasBeggarmidas@mastodon.social
    May 31, 2026, 9:29 PM

    @muddle @markmetz Thanks for the correction. The world he described could just as easily fit today with some name changes. However he wasn't really solving anything. Just documenting from a hermits perspective. I doubt he'd reach the same conclusions as you ascribe to him. He was not one for being caught up in witch hunts. AI is a mania. With all of manias predictable insensate cheerleaders & luddites detractors engaged in scorn one-upmanship. Its all performance theater he explicitly rejected.

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  • Beggar MidasBeggarmidas@mastodon.social
    May 31, 2026, 9:36 PM

    @muddle @markmetz It helps if you compare the current social climate against past ones. There are periodic storms of controversy around emergent technologies that always carries this very predictable & identifiable format. If you want to break cycles, start with your own.
    pessimistsarchive.org/

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  • muddlemuddle@infosec.exchange
    Jun 1, 2026, 3:09 AM

    @Beggarmidas @markmetz Camus had a thing or two to say about pessimism, too, and it wasn't about knee-jerk reaction to new technology. It seems that the site that you linked to is trying to get the message across that (roughly) "new technology is inevitable and isn't going to be an evil influence on society." That seems to be a possible line of support for things like crypto-currencies and LLMs. If that's the case, just call me a Luddite (and a Camus-ist, fwiw...)

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  • Beggar MidasBeggarmidas@mastodon.social
    Jun 1, 2026, 4:33 AM

    @muddle @markmetz You, uh, missed the point of the site. What it does is show how identical in character human response to whatever the newest tech hotness is. It doesn't assume inevitability. This reflex has dogged us since the move to industrialization. One side fervently believing it'll fix everything, the other convinced it'll ruin everything.
    Until you master that gut reaction you aren't actually weighing merits or harms. You're just participating in the theatrics surrounding it.

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  • Beggar MidasBeggarmidas@mastodon.social
    Jun 1, 2026, 4:53 AM

    @muddle @markmetz The only thing that makes AI any different than previous tech firestorms is the sheer enormous *scale* & *scope* it's grown to. This thing has an appreciable percentage of the TOTAL world GDP sunk into it. It's astronomically overvalued stock prices will inevitably do what they always do in an irrational bubble. When it does there will be people howling for heads & nervous tech bros know it. So they're willing to do near anything to delay the execution another day.

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  • Beggar MidasBeggarmidas@mastodon.social
    Jun 2, 2026, 8:07 AM

    @muddle @markmetz sorry, kid. Don't have a lot of spare attention to offer next few days. I discovered a detectable structural flaw in the newest generation of Ru Disinformation engine. This tactic is the nastiest yet and requires next to no human overhead. You want something to be worried about, this should do the trick. Gotta track down some programmers and other appropriate talent. stratcomcoe.org/publications/b

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  • muddlemuddle@infosec.exchange
    Jun 1, 2026, 3:13 AM

    @Beggarmidas @markmetz oh, and I'm also a Buddhist, so I'm aware of the idea of karmic cycles and working out my own salvation with diligence. Thanks for the advice, though.

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  • Mint SpiesMintSpies@beige.party
    May 31, 2026, 11:08 AM

    @markmetz that was the part of the article that most made me think hard. That, and the fact that it took 70 years for wages and employment to recover from the industrial revolution.

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  • Bernd Paysan R.I.P Natenom 🕯️forthy42@mastodon.net2o.de
    May 31, 2026, 11:38 AM

    @markmetz If you turn that around, it becomes different: can the current generation sacrifice the next generations for their own comfort? Where do you draw your line?

    The logic of Mao (and the french left back then) was that of a warrior: you fight a war now to win a better life in future. Fighting now will have a cost now, not fighting it will have much higher costs later. This is a debt you create by not doing anything, but it still is one.

    Especially with the climate catastrophe now, we shouldn't fall into the trap that doing nothing now is acceptable.

    Of course, the entire idea that we keep a work-based system of wealth distribution and replacing all workers by AI is going to kill the economy. An unhealthy economy that was already killing the planet. Killing this economy is worth it. The collateral damage probably isn't.

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  • George Bgbargoud@masto.nyc
    May 31, 2026, 12:34 PM

    @markmetz

    This is an argument where the extremes are both pretty bad.

    On one hand you have people burning down the world to protect from some imagined threat that they decided is so terrible that protecting from it justifies absolutely everything and on the other hand you have people burning fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow because the problems that causes will come later and be someone else's to deal with.

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  • George Bgbargoud@masto.nyc
    May 31, 2026, 12:35 PM

    @markmetz

    And then you find that both extremes are actually the same people just using any rhetorical trick they can think of to justify their greed.

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  • Queen of Anxietyqueenofnewyork@newsie.social
    May 31, 2026, 12:39 PM

    @markmetz This reminds me if 1776. It’s very clear that a bunch of well-off white men decided that slavery for others was less important than freedom for themselves. And our country is still beset by this same sin.

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  • Richard Michael Blaberrmblaber1956@mastodon.social
    May 31, 2026, 1:24 PM

    @markmetz It boils down to this: the Kantian - or #Catholic, or #Orthodox, for that matter - #principle that people should never be treated as means to some end, however good or desirable that end might be, but should always be treated as ends-in-themselves. You can't murder a baby, even if the result would be to create a perfect world (Dostoevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov", Part 2, Book V, Chapter 4, "Mutiny").

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  • susemnosao@ursal.zone
    Jun 4, 2026, 10:14 PM

    @markmetz aren't staying as we are also choosing to sacrifice people in hope of a better future?

    capitalism already sacrifice people for it's hunger for accumulation.

    choosing not to oppose it is choosing to keep those sacrifices happening.

    Camu's stillness is a choice, and it kills people whilst achieving nothing. The revolution is the hope of a future where no sacrifice is made, its a future worth fighting for.

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