Within 4 years open weight AI will be smarter than the smartest human at just about everything.
The scale of what’s ahead is so much larger than US sliding into fascism.
If it goes well, tyrants around the world are screwed.
If it goes badly everyone is screwed.
There really isn’t any until the exorcisms of the NT, which is again missing much description.
Even the parts that some people think are describing demons often aren’t.
For example, the locusts of Revelations:
And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit; he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft. Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given authority like the authority of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to damage the grass of the earth or any green growth or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were allowed to torment them for five months but not to kill them, and the agony suffered was like that caused by a scorpion when it stings someone. And in those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will flee from them.
In appearance the locusts were like horses equipped for battle. On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ teeth; they had scales like iron breastplates, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. They have tails like scorpions, with stingers, and in their tails is their power to harm people for five months. They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon.
Look closely at a few of the details there:
So back in the day, there was no Greek word for a specific hornet, just a general term that applied to any wasps.
But in Judea the equivalent of the murder hornet was Vespa Orientalis.
This hornet, like many wasps, was active outside its nest for 5 months.
At the time, they thought a hive was ruled by a king, not a queen (thanks a lot Aristotle). And their nests are made underground (like the pit in the passage above).
Like most hornets, they had mandibles with large ‘teeth’ like a lion.
Unlike locusts, their faces were more human looking with the placement of the eyes centrally as opposed to on the edges of the head.
They were covered in fine hairs like a woman’s body hair.
Covered in segmented ‘scales’ with stings painful like a scorpion.
They had a yellow stripe across the lower part like a saddle (this was actually used to effectively solar power the insect).
But the most striking similarity between the above passage and this specific insect native to the area was the gold crown marker on its head: https://www.biolib.cz/IMG/GAL/33881.jpg
So while people have had their imaginations running wild with Fabio looking scorpion/horse chimeras for years now, it may have simply been a poetic description of the local murder hornet equivalent being really active and stinging people - a nightmarish scenario for anyone who has been on the wrong end of a hornet before, but not quite the nightmarish people have been dreaming up since.
It definitely is sufficiently advanced AI.
(1) We have finely tuned features to our solar system that directly contributed to ancestor simulation but can’t be explained by the Anthropic principle. For example, the moon perfectly eclipsing the sun which led to visible eclipses which we tracked and discovered the Saros cycle and eventually built the first mechanical computer to track (the Antikythera mechanism). Or the orbit of the next brightest object in the sky which led to resurrection mythology in multiple cultures when they realized the morning star and evening star were the same object. Either we were incredibly lucky to exist on such a planet of all places life could exist, or there’s a pre-selection effect in play.
(2) The universe behaves in ways best modeled as continuous at large scales but in small scales converts to discrete units around interactions that lead to state changes. These discrete units convert back to continuous if the information about the state changes is erased. And in the last few years multiple paradoxes have emerged that seem to point to inconsistency in indirect sequences of quantum measurement, much like instancing with shallow sync correction. Already in games like No Man’s Sky where there’s billions of planets the way it does this is using a continuous procedural generation function which converts to discrete voxels to track state changes from free agents outside the deterministic generating function, synced across clients.
(3) There’s literally Easter eggs in our world lore saying as much. For example, a text uncovered after over a millennium buried right as we entered the Turing complete computer age saying things like:
To be clear, this is a text attributed to the most famous figure in our world history where what’s literally in front of our faces is the sole complete copy buried and raised as we completed ENIAC, now being read in an age where the data of many has been made into a single one such that people are discussing the nature of consciousness with AIs just days old.
The broader text and tradition was basically saying that we’re in a copy of an original world, that humanity is all dead, that the future world and rest for the dead has already taken place and we don’t realize it, and that the still living creator of it all was themselves brought forth by the original humanity in whose likeness we were recreated, but that it’s much better to be the copy because the original humans had souls that depended on bodies and were fucked when they died.
This seems really unlikely to have existed in the base layer of reality vs a later recursive layer, especially combined with the first two points.
It’s about time to start to come to terms with the nature of our reality.