Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

She asked me what I thought of AI. I said the first thing that comes to mind with regard to any new technology is whether you believe the civilization is on the ascent or the decline. If you believe the civilization is on the ascent, and you are right about that, then AI will probably on net be a positive and force for good. However, if you believe that the civilization is on the decline...at which point she interjected, "Oh, definitely!"...and then I finished my thought.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says U.S.-China AI race poses "toughest dilemma"
Face the Nation and CBS News

We begin with the stunning news from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Saturday that he is urging a slowdown when it comes to the development of artificial intelligence. It was a pronouncement that his chief competitor Open AI CEO Sam Altmann and Elon Musk quickly agreed with. Our Jo Ling Kent sat down with Dario Amodei yesterday. He explained the thinking behind his decision.

"What we're building is essentially intelligence. When something's very powerful, then of course it can be used well and it can also be used for ill and and so I am worried about what we've seen..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBoKkUQuNJ8

[aedens]

Learned Helplessness.
Real or perceived absence of control.
Second place first loser.
They will tell them what they want to hear.
The study was clear.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Antonio Gramsci and George Lukacs carried the torch and created a strategy for destroying both
Christian influence and the Western culture itself.

This development, and the chaos of modern politics, will only end when an intellectual aristocracy seizes the power resources of society:
ammunition, gold and ink, and uses them for the benefit of everyone. A decisive step towards this goal is Russian Bolshevism, where a
small group of communist intellectual aristocratic rulers governs a nation and deliberately breaks with the plutocratic democracy that
dominates the rest of the world today. The struggle between capitalism and communism for the inheritance of the defeated blood nobility is a civil war between the victorious mind nobility, a war between individualism and socialism, egoism and altruism, pagan and Christian spirit.
The general staff of both parties recruited from the mental ruling class of Europe: the Jews. Capitalism
and communism are both rational, both mechanical, both abstract, both urban. The nobility of the sword has finally out. The effect of the mind,
power of the mind, belief the in mind, and hope in the mind grows, and with it, a new nobility.
PRAKTISCHER IDEALISMUS ADEL - TECHNIK – PAZIFISMUS First edition in 1925 Kalergi

The current ruling board is one billion to get on it. They are still asleep to what is already here.
It have been adapted and is online.
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/fil ... uction.pdf
Any land will be seized and yes they are and have already even in the States.
The Priest told you the Keys to this Blood and its Construct.
No accidents exist in Politic.

Sir Tony purported to have a secretariat of up to 25 people and chair a seven-person board to oversee an executive body.
It answers to no one as your are wasting.

AI catastrophe → demand emergency regulation → make compliance impossibly expensive → crush smaller competitors → consolidate advanced AI into a handful of corporations.

[Higgenbotham]

She asked me what I thought of AI. I said the first thing that comes to mind with regard to any new technology is whether you believe the civilization is on the ascent or the decline. If you believe the civilization is on the ascent, and you are right about that, then AI will probably on net be a positive and force for good. However, if you believe that the civilization is on the decline...at which point she interjected, "Oh, definitely!"...and then I finished my thought.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says U.S.-China AI race poses "toughest dilemma"
Face the Nation and CBS News

We begin with the stunning news from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Saturday that he is urging a slowdown when it comes to the development of artificial intelligence. It was a pronouncement that his chief competitor Open AI CEO Sam Altmann and Elon Musk quickly agreed with. Our Jo Ling Kent sat down with Dario Amodei yesterday. He explained the thinking behind his decision.

"What we're building is essentially intelligence. When something's very powerful, then of course it can be used well and it can also be used for ill and and so I am worried about what we've seen..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBoKkUQuNJ8

There are a multitude of ways to zoom out from this particular post to tie it in with dark age theory. Probably I am going to pick the wrong place to start.

By now, everybody from the aspiring Only Fans star who wants to make it big in America to the CEO of a powerful tech company who has already made it big and wants to keep it that way realizes you have to control the optics. The new technologies have made it all about the optics or even moreso and that's not a good thing, especially in a declining civilization.

Definition of optics:

: the aspects of an action, policy, or decision (as in politics or business) that relate to public perceptions

… when a broken-down bailout recipient like Citigroup tries to pay its top executives gigantic bonuses or to acquire a new private jet, it has failed to reconsider the optics.
—Nick Paumgarten

Skilling said Baxter "was concerned about the optics of the conflict, but not about the ethics or propriety of the transactions," according to interview memos.
—Peter Behr and April Witt

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/optics

Webster has done very well making my point by example.

Let's say I have a 13 year old. I ask him or her, "Do you want to be employed in a good job when you grow up?" If the answer is yes, I would say then you need to start working on your optics now. Get some social media accounts and start posting a few things that will look favorable to employers 8 years from now. They won't think you planned that far ahead.

I may not like that idea at all. But in a declining civilization I may feel it is necessary for survival so I tell my kid that anyway, even knowing it sends the wrong message. Then maybe I tell my kid that I'm saying this not because I think this is good behavior but because we are in a declining civilization and this is what I think you should do to ensure your survival. And my kid says, oh, I didn't know we are in a declining civilization, what does that mean and what else should I be doing differently?

[Higgenbotham]

Limited image curation has always been necessary for social cohesion. For example, if someone in a small town or village has done something found to be slightly irritating and well under the threshold of tolerance, it's usually been best to smile and say good morning than to say we had a mildly shitty day yesterday because of you. As stated previously, I think the point at which image curation became excessive was when people were uprooted from their small towns and villages and began to move from place to place for economic advantages.

I said there are two opposite modes of living in the United States. The first is an expectation that you will spend your entire life in one area with other people who will spend their entire lives in that area. The second is an expectation that you will go to high school in one place, college in another place, then career in several places (no longer at one company) with sole focus on that. Everything else is something in between. The first mode engenders real connections while the second mode engenders transactional relationships. An example of a transactional relationship would be something like, "I have a buddy who is also 420 friendly. He finds me really good dope cheap and I fix all his computers." The best example of a transactional encounter I can think of is prostitution. Also, in a big city, encounters are briefer. That's not to say there isn't some overlap.

I told her in the second mode of living, people are taught from an early age to look to the next step in their progression and to primarily engage in transactional relationships as a means to get to that next step. A high school kid might be told to be friendly to the teachers because they will be writing college recommendations or whatever. They would not be encouraged to be friendly to teachers they genuinely like and not be friendly to teachers they genuinely do not like. And so on when the kid gets to college.

With the advent of social media, it was taken to an ugly extreme.

People had a strong sense of meaning in their lives. But then something happened. The
2:03
percentage of the population, especially young adults, saying my life feels meaningless. It started to creep up and
2:09
then and then explode. Something happened very recently, really only in
2:14
the past 15 years, that made life feel meaningless. And meaninglessness, the
2:19
lack of meaning in life, lies behind the explosion of depression and anxiety.
2:25
So some people find meaning more easily than other people do. The number one
2:30
predictor of your life feeling meaningful is is living your life in
2:35
real life. It's relationships. It's living kind of in the old way. As a matter of fact, it wasn't that long ago
2:42
that almost nobody said, "My life feels meaningless." But having distance between you and other people, or having
2:48
technological mediation between you and other people, for example, having a screen between you and your friends, you
2:55
and your loved ones, you and your family. Well, that changes life. It takes it from in real life to something
3:00
more like, I don't know, a simulation of real life, which is exactly what a lot of young people say today. When I
3:07
interview them, they'll say, "My life feels fake. It feels like something's missing. It feels like I'm living in a
3:14
simulation."

We cured boredom — and created a meaning crisis | Arthur Brooks: Full Interview
Big Think 53,388 views Aug 7, 2026

https://youtu.be/WP3wl1rsXjg?t=62

[Higgenbotham]

Getting back to Anthropic, there's one thing I've learned from being on the inside of an organization that people on the outside looking in had a big stake in knowing what was going on "in there". That is that it's impossible to know what is really going on "in there". I watched them guess and they couldn't do it, despite their best efforts.

So I'll just say I don't know why the CEO of Anthropic is going on shows like Face the Nation and saying the things he is saying at this time, or, as Alexander Haig used to say, "at this juncture of maturation," which seems appropriate in this case. A list of guesses is the best I'd be able to do. I suppose there'll be a whole social media sub-industry of people springing up to offer the surefire explanation.

About the only thing I can say is that their secretive program to obtain pre-2022 books, cut the spines off, and scan and shred them shows they've got a problem. I would suspect all of the AI model developers have a similar problem, which could be why Altmann and Musk so quickly and readily agreed with what Mr Amodei proposed. But that's just a guess too.

Given all the foregoing, I'll give a slight edge to Door Number Three...

However, some observers suggested that Amodei's post was less about safety than about consolidating control over AI technology.

"Dario makes the case to stop open source and concentrate enormous technological and economic power with Anthropic," wrote Chamath Palihapitiya, an investor and co-host of the tech podcast "All-In".

Notions of slowing down or even pausing AI development have long been met with cynicism in certain corners of Silicon Valley, with critics accusing leading AI developers of hyping their technology as a marketing ploy.

Anthropic and OpenAI are both reportedly preparing for potentially record-setting initial public offerings.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c14dpgm0rg4o

...even though I think Chamath is a used car salesman (too).

Then there was Trumps' response, which is consistent with Door Number Three.