David Noble builds on the work of White and Ovitt to offer an account of what he terms “the religion of technology” which amounts to a pervasive intermingling of religious concerns with the project of technology as a well as a tendency to link the quest for transcendence to technology.

From L.M. Sacasas's blog: https://thefrailestthing.com/2012/02/22/christianity-and-the-history-of-technology-part-one/ titled Christianity and the History of Technology, Part One

Sacasas has a newer Substack that goes into more recent events: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/secularization-comes-for-the-religion-6df . There are some great references in this newsletter, including American Technological Sublime by David Nye.

Nye tells a fascinating story about how Americans routinely experienced the advent of new technologies as encounters with the sublime. Not all technologies, of course, but Nye documents how technologies of a certain scale and dynamism elicited feelings of awe and wonder that could easily be described as religious in nature. Nye considers, for example, first encounters with the railroad, the factory, the Hoover Dam, the electrified cityscape, the Golden Gate Bridge, and, later, the atomic bomb and the launch of a Saturn V rocket during the Apollo program.

Nye shows that the experience of the technological sublime was incorporated into elaborate civic ceremonies and rituals that celebrated not only the technological marvel at hand, but also human ingenuity and the body politic.

The broad argument is that technological development is a religion in the United States. This is not meant as a metaphor, but as a literal fact: how Americans treat technology is not like a religious activity, it literally is one. I think this goes a long way towards explaining why we're so weird about #tech here and now and especially why there are actual cults formed around it. Noble calls this phenomenon the "religion of technology" and spells out the connections. Sacasas weaves this together with modern developments.

Meghan O'Gieblyn makes these connections with modern developments as well, for instance in this talk God in the machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTXleWp5fUA . So has Émile P. Torres: https://www.xriskology.com

#TESCREAL #longtermist #EffectiveAltruism #AI #xrisk

cc @timnitGebru@dair-community.social @xriskology@mastodon.bida.im

NIST staffers revolt against expected appointment of ‘effective altruist’ AI researcher to US AI Safety Institute

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is facing an internal crisis as staff members and scientists have threatened to resign over the anticipated appointment of Paul Christiano to a crucial, though non-political, position at the agency’s newly-formed US AI Safety Institute (AISI), according to at least two sources with direct knowledge of the situation, who asked to remain anonymous.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/nist-staffers-revolt-against-potential-appointment-of-effective-altruist-ai-researcher-to-us-ai-safety-institute/

Good for them! #longtermist / #EffectiveAltruist / #TESCREAL people are cultists and have no place in government. They're obsessed with fantasies like #xrisk that are disconnected from reality and distract from the actual harms #AI is already causing here on Earth. It's precisely the same phenomenon as holding endless discussions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin while ignoring that people are suffering. It sounds like Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo might be a Kool-aid drinker herself or is sympathetic to the viewpoints of the Kool-aid drinkers.

From her Wikipedia entry:

Gina Marie Raimondo...an American businesswoman, lawyer, politician, and venture capitalist

Emphasis mine.

It's alarming that this is even happening, and you know the fix is in because they tried to rush the appointment without informing staffers ahead of time. I hope #NIST staffers prevail.

cc: @timnitGebru@dair-community.social @xriskology@mastodon.bida.im

P(doom), the "probability" that #AI or #AGI will doom humanity, is a quantity that #longtermist / #TESCREAL zealots seem to care a lot about. It is the quintessential example of the reasoning error that ecological rationality calls out. There is no way to quantify the likelihood of "doom", no matter how you define that word, and it's pure nonsense to try or pretend you have. Doom is a large world phenomenon. The people credited with inventing the frameworks and techniques that allow you to even think in terms of P(doom), like Leonard Savage, explicitly called out just this sort of application as preposterous.

Nevertheless, US Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer invited a bunch of tech CEOs and technologists, among whom numbered many #longermist and similar kinds of zealots, to opine on their personal assessments of P(doom) in a legitimate hearing in front of the US Congress (there's good reporting on this here: https://www.techpolicy.press/us-senate-ai-insight-forum-tracker/ ).

I lack the words to express what I feel every time I'm reminded of this. Not good things.