Silicon Valley is a strange place and allegedly full of transhumanists (basically cyberpunk for real people). As far as I understand it, this means humans are flawed beings and building machine gods to transcend our own deplorable meat existence is a good thing. Perhaps I am exaggerating here, but the rather strange statements emanating from AI-related rich people with massive platforms are so resoundingly odd that I am less inclined than usual to bother with subtlety and nuance.
These days, the United States has become the source of excellent screwball comedy, and that is just the political and business news. Hard to compete even for SNL, I imagine. It does mean that my rather serious podcast fare is far more amusing than it has any right to be.
And then, inured as I now feel from all the drama, real life and legacy media suddenly wakes up to the fact that all of this might mean something for academics, too.
This follows on from some posts earlier in the year about AI and social scien…