May I recommend Pluribus (2025-)

> I am concerned that ML systems could ruin our lives without realizing anything at all.

It's hard to say it's not actively happening. And we don't even know it, don't realize it? don't care?

(Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.)

I can't wait to put myself into a sim world and give myself super powers.

Statistically, I should already be one of them. But where are my powers? It's another Fermi paradox for sure.

The workaround is to schedule the creation of many many copies of myself, each with its own sim world, just after I fall asleep. So I will have an arbitrarily certain chance of waking up as one of those copies, and the ability to fly.

LLM's remind me of sprites, pixies, and the like, who are situationally helpful but require constant supervision. We're like modern magicians who learned how to summon these sorts of spirits and bind them -- imperfectly -- to our will. But their perception of truth and reality is "through the looking glass" relative to our own. They aren't lying, from their own frame of reference, even though what they say is untrue relative to ours.

Article mentions Searle and Chalmers, but we literally have at least two centuries of critical thought that expressed itself through Nietzsche, Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno, Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, Debord, Baudrillard, and many others (obviously I am mentioning those I am most familiar with). If you read Dialectic of Enlightenment, you'll find that slop isn't something that had arisen in last few years. If you read Discipline and Punish you'll find that surveillance and coercion isn't a problem that was born with internet or Palantir. And Baudrillard had few words to say about simulation and reality.

But STEM crowds for decades cried we don't need such thinking, and science and technology are all that we need. Historians, philosophers, culture critics etc. supposedly have nothing to offer us. Who needs to read Marx or Marcuse if sci-fi novels offer all you need, maybe sprinkled with some PG essays and blogpost from you favorite tech blogger, and we happen to live in the best of possible worlds with the best of possible economic systems.

NSFW blog content on HN? Really?