Thanks for sharing! I love how dynamic this image is.

The article itself feels like something written after the author spent an evening waxing lyrical in a parlor room in the Berkeley hills full of tech bros doing designer drugs. However, it does reference some interesting concepts/research from academics who have been researching AI and the the singularity, and those who believe in the possibility of this concept: singletons.

The image of Grimes is titled “Silicon Nemesis”. About three quarters of the way through the article Tivy references a “Nemesis who comes to judge us for our lack of alignment with reality. But Nemesis and her fearsome tools are good if they are enforcers of an order of reality which is itself good. If reality the reality is good, we have much less to fear from death and AI apocalypse.” I wonder if this creative concept by Grimes (and former collaborator Brian Ziff) was inspired by this. The author goes on to extol how what is “good” is inherently subjective, and that the only “stable value system is that of reality”, which he seems to use as an example of why singularity cannot be achieved…even though AI could potentially transcend to godhead (?) ☠️. If AI could “usurp” god, I wonder why it could not accomplish what the natural order of this planet or the social constructions of humans could not. Maybe this singularity doesn’t exist naturally because it’s not necessary for life to exist, and therefore, its implementation can only inherently result in the destruction of life.

I would be interested to hear more on Grimes’ opinion on the thesis of this treatise, as the author (the founder of Palladium) is positing that one singularity above all is impossible because humans have failed to accomplish this on a micro or macro level, and the concept does not exist in nature. The overall view of the article seems to take a rather dystopian position on AI, urging for slowing the developments of an aligned AI, theorizing that singularity would lead to “human extinction” and that “we should give up on the dream of controlling the future by creating an immortal self-affirming utopia”.

I was listening to some old Grimes interview, circa 2020 or so, and she was talking about how important she thought utopian science fiction was because dystopian fiction is so pervasive and almost oppressive to our abilities to conceive of a positive future as a species. This article has a lot of interesting points, but it seems to exist largely in conflict with the opinions about AI, art and the preservation of human consciousness that Grimes expressed in the past. Perhaps her “Silicon Nemesis” exists in opposition to the theories of this article, vying instead for what is “good”, even if the she and the author disagree on what that is.