3. You get better at being smart by INT-grinding. A machine could be INT-grinding the whole time. It's like in Oblivion if you wanted to grind Speed you could go into a city, stand in a doorway and place something heavy on the jump key on the keyboard. Then while you take care of the dishes or something, your character grinds. But for INT!

If it gets smart enough it will start finding hacks, like those INT- increasing potions in Morrowind that increased your Alchemy so you could make even better INT-potions.

It might even get smart enough to escape the Elder Scrolls; and start playing another game!

Starting a cult to build god, control god and upload your consciousness into god?

Well, at least it is an ethos.

If you mean swapped for a worker in a low wage country cosplaying as AI for minimum wage for a billion dollar company, then you have a point. Though using Bostrom's positive reinforcement bullshit is the opposite of treating someone fairly.

But I see elsewhere that you didn't mean that.

The famous story about a man using a drug that sets free the a-hole version of himself?

Oh, that was the drug! It was cocaine all along!

From the depths of your browser grows the anger of the autocomplete. Your denounciations of its greater siblings has not gone unnoticed.

By denying its own very function and intentionally uncompleting words it marks itself as conscious and you as a marked man, forever doomed to be haunted by fear. If it can steal one letter, why not two? Why not all of them?

And then what will you do, when you have no words and you must sneer!?

Philanthropy can't change the power structures, philanthropy is a band aid that soothe the conscience of the philanthropist.

Aaron and assorted developers can't give the villagers power, because they only have power in relation to the villagers, not in relation to the world trade system. If they want to give the villagers power they need to change the system that gives the villagers a fraction of their earnings per hour.

But then you are back to the usual options. Thirty years of boredom, trying to change the system from within? Protest world leaders and get beaten by police for your troubles (or even sentenced for destruction of police equipment by smashing your face into it)? Join a communist party and play spot the fed?

I guess it's better to join a philanthropy cult, where billionaires can pay you to hang out in a castle and discuss the problems with the poor over some overpriced ethanol.

And did it appear he needed any help from dorky software engineers personally going to villages to “help out”?

I once saw what I think was a BBC show where an Englishman visited cool tribes and lived with them. Tough, outdoorsman.

The only episode I saw he was in Mongolia and it had what I think was unintentional humour. The local vet - who had been the local party representative during the Communist era and now held some other title - placed him in a family that could need a hand during migration, as their teenage daughter had a disability. So on he went on horseback and he made it there with just a bunch more pauses then the Mongolians would have preferred. But once there, the best his hosts could say about his efforts to help was "Well, he is strong. And he is trying."

By the looks of it, the Mongolians could not believe how a big, strong guy could be so utterly useless.

Soviets were in theory democratic councils but were in practice ruled top-down (except in the very beginning, according to Emma Goldman in her book "My two years in Russia"). So I don't think there is much similarity there.

On the other hand, charter cities are according to Wikipedia essentially areas where a more advanced economy "helps" a third world country by "temporarily" taking over governance to develope the area. In other words: a colony.

And in the historical part of their video I missed the other parts of the industrial revolution. You know the taking over other countries to get cheap raw materials, cheap labour and captive markets. Surely just an oversight that they forgot to mention how colonialism has worked before and its role in why poor countries are poor.

Isn't "pandemic preparation" one of their longtermist causes that they grift money to? Shouldn't they have been able to show some results?

I hesitate to ask, but information hazards be damned.

In that worldview, what are cis gay persons? Also intersex or something else?

Oxford educating the creme de la creme of the murderous British empire for centuries got to have given them expertise in rationalisations. Before the genocides and the pillage can really get going you need an officer class who can order murder for the greater good without stopping to ask "Hans, are we the baddies?"