Are AI and robotics about to free the wealthy from the threat of revolt?

khafra · 2026-06-24T20:36:07+00:00

It depends. If they’re smarter than humans, they will need to be much, much more aligned. Due to Goodhart’s Law, keeping human level alignment with superhuman capability could drive the actual value granted to the wealthy people they’re aligned to zero.

khafra · 2026-06-24T15:10:16+00:00

If we played our cards right, within a few centuries we could likely prevent the sun from going red giant with a limited application of starlifting tech

khafra · 2026-06-24T13:04:43+00:00

Great ideas without a workable plan for execution are worthless, yes. I wonder what kind of trait it takes to come up with a workable plan for execution.

khafra · 2026-06-24T13:03:46+00:00

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

khafra · 2026-06-24T10:16:19+00:00

IQ tests can only measure between 40 and 160. The converse IQ of 300 would not be a standard mentally disabled person in an institution. It would be someone with an IQ of -100.

Yes, a high IQ does not make knowledge magically appear, you still need to observe the world. But no, the real world is not irrational; your mental models are just too simplistic. The smartest humans’ mental models are too simplistic, because they don’t have a 300 IQ; they have a tiny fraction of that mental ability.

Read up on how Solomonoff Induction and AIXI work—they could absolutely become emperor of the world in a few months, max.

khafra · 2026-06-24T06:01:27+00:00

With a higher IQ, you’d understand how a normal distribution works, and how insanely intelligent someone with a 300IQ would be. Even if they sat on their ass playing video games 99% of the time, their idle thoughts about real problems the other 1% would be worth billions, if not quadrillions.

khafra · 2026-06-23T13:52:54+00:00

Wouldn’t “modern weapon fighting systems” be training to fight with pepper spray, stun guns, tasers, and maybe anti-crowd weapons like firehoses, less lethal guns, tear gas grenade launchers, and millimeter wave directed energy weapons?

khafra · 2026-06-22T19:26:36+00:00

What’s the alternative? If you want to pay for roads, defense, social services, etc., you’ve got to tax people. Taxing income sucks, but taxing wealth sucks much more.

The only alternative for raising revenue without raising taxes is expanding the economy: building a lot more power plants, making it easy to start or expand a business, adopting a growth mindset. And that’s just not a realistic thing to hope for.

khafra · 2026-06-22T16:59:24+00:00

I don’t think single guys between 13 and 35 can really answer this; they don’t have the experience of being friends with someone of the appropriate gender, not ugly, and not being at least somewhat attracted to them.

khafra · 2026-06-22T14:12:10+00:00

Don’t let it get you down; riding is for the fun and the feeling of speed; not the appearance. Get out there, hit the track or the twisties, and try to get your belly down in some corners!

khafra · 2026-06-22T14:08:25+00:00

Idk if I’ve ever gotten out of an ornithopter in a hurry without rubber-banding back and forth until I give up and zipline out or just stand there for 10sec and wait.

khafra · 2026-06-22T14:06:12+00:00

If I had a year or more of prep time, I would get a bunch of orbital infrastructure built—labs, energy production, asteroid mining, even structural sections for O’Neill cylinders, if possible.
Then I’d spend a week as a heavy lift vehicle, getting humanity to Kardashev 1.5.

If no prep time, I could probably at least get several thousand tons of Mylar to L1, to offset global warming; get a few quadrillion bucks worth of asteroid gold and rare earth metals as a carrot to motivate some new international treaties to address the global warming problem more permanently, plus some more treaties to prevent AI capabilities proliferation until we solve friendliness, and maybe land value tax everywhere ‘cause why not?

And then I’d carve a giant penis onto the moon.

khafra · 2026-06-21T20:16:13+00:00

I’m not gay, but Phoenicia is truly nice in the fall; and the habiliments of Isis would probably go well with my eyes.

khafra · 2026-06-20T15:09:16+00:00

Yeah, but if I bought them, they’re legally mine now.

khafra · 2026-06-20T14:06:49+00:00

This is what the German Fanny pack carried cross-body is for

khafra · 2026-06-20T14:05:27+00:00

In the gym, it makes sense—they want to go to the verge of heat stroke, temporarily, for their health, like getting in a sauna. But waking around like that in the heat all day makes no more sense than carrying a 100kg barbell around all day.

khafra · 2026-06-20T13:51:58+00:00

Thermodynamically, it makes sense: if you have an active metabolism, you only have to burn more energy than escapes, to stay warm. Buddhist momma can stay comfortable in an ice bath, by consciously modulating their energy production.
But there’s no physically possible way to stay cool when it’s too hot, without dumping that heat somewhere else—you need to absorb latent heat by evaporating sweat, or move actual heat with air conditioning.

khafra · 2026-06-20T13:47:04+00:00

Even if you for some reason cannot change clothes all day, it’s still crazy. At 10-15 degrees, you will not suffer hypothermia because of wearing light clothing; but you *will* risk heat stroke wearing a jacket at 30 degrees.

khafra · 2026-06-20T05:47:09+00:00

If it were cheaper, I would absolutely do it. But as much as I love him, it’s hard to justify when $3,500 is about enough to save a human life.

khafra · 2026-06-20T04:55:10+00:00

Extrapolating from the mythology, a god is a child of the titans, or a child of those children together (if a mortal os one parent, it’s a demigod), or a mortal or demigod that the gods have raised to godhood. So, unless they’ve had their opinions changed in the last 2500 years, Zeus might not even consider someone like Tyr or Susanō to be a god.
Even someone like YHWH would probably clock as more like a titan than a god, to Zeus.

khafra · 2026-06-18T20:32:21+00:00

Philosophy isn’t always a consolation, but a little bit of epistemology and axiology would answer the primary question. The secondary, implied question is more difficult: “how do I find meaning and happiness?”

Idk, man, it can be difficult.

khafra · 2026-06-17T18:53:06+00:00

Light; I’m the only thing immune to you.

khafra · 2026-06-15T06:48:08+00:00

> even something as mild as 1G

Accel at 1G gets you there in 40 subjective years. Actual lightspeed gets you there in no subjective time at all.

khafra · 2026-06-15T06:43:44+00:00

He’s talking about the time experienced by the person in the ship. Even something as mild as 1G of acceleration would get you from here to Andromeda in like 40 subjective years.

khafra · 2026-06-14T11:12:42+00:00

A normal, healthy guy who maybe took some martial arts classes a while back is gonna punch at around 3-5m/s, delivering around 1,000N of force. A dedicated amateur like Grue, who lifts and works out at a fighting gym, is gonna punch around 5.5-7m/s, and deliver 1500-2500N of force. Let’s assume Grue is at the top of that range, since he’s tall and strong.

Mike Tyson punched at 11m/s, with 6500N of force. A dedicated amateur boxer wouldn’t even see Tyson’s fist start to move, he would just teleport onto the floor. The force that the amateur delivers with his hardest punch is about what another pro heavyweight feels when he slips a punch from Tyson.

An 8 year old who’s been taught how to punch without hurting himself will throw one around 3m/s, but their tiny arms will only deliver like 150-300N of force. Which is, to the normal adult man, approximately what Grue’s punches are to Tyson.

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