235 thoughts on “The Reality Of AI”

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2. sorry I am late to the discussion. Now that I have been retired for a month, I do not spend very much time online. I worked for a year trying to build an expert system using IBM Watson. Honestly, it was a very frustrating experience. We worked with something like 1 person at IBM who seemed to understand how it really worked.
   We achieved perhaps an 85% accuracy rate for the system to answer complex healthcare policy questions. Our helpers from IBM thought that was very good. For me, I figured it had to be something like 98% in order to be really releasable for use by the public. I understand that it does extremely well in reading materials and summarizing, or looking across vast quantities of materials and finding common components based on a set of heuristic rules provided by our people. It is also good for image processing, probably better for that than word based processing.
   The bottom line is, it is not freaking magic and it is a long long way from being the great answer to anything important, at least based on my experience. It is great at reading your mail and determining what you are talking about based on key words and speech patterns, but understanding it is a different story. So, anyone who thinks that this stuff is safe to turn over anything important to is mostly mistaken.
   Only a company or country that has enormous resources and a very specialized need (like quickly reading everyone’s emails or transcripts of telephone conversations) will get a bang for the buck out of it. So Skynet is not coming any time soon, but all of your emails, phone calls, text messages, blog posts, etc. are all being read, categorized, rated, and stored by the “machine”. You can count on that.

   • I hope you keep commenting Frank.

3. I have to confess, I am intrigued by the apparent paradox that those who, on the face of it, seem to be the cohort that promotes the concept of a ‘benevolent’ rule by an Artificial Intelligence deemed superior to any offered biologically also seem to be utterly opposed to any available metric of evaluating intelligence in mankind being used as an indicator of ability in general.

4. AI is going to come from either military research or academic research. Corporate programming is for cheap Asian hacks. However, AI doesn’t have to be all that intelligent to change the world. It only needs to be as smart as Watson to run expert databases, and not nearly that smart to run manufacturing robots.

5. I dont know if someone already pointed it out (writing this with 218 comments already, lazy to search), but there’s already code production outsourcing to Africa: Egypt and Tunisia… For the automotive industry that I’m 100% sure of… maybe other type of code making already being done there… cheaper than India…

6. There’s a quite a few commercials for AI on Japanese broadcast television. Mostly ignore them because they’re in line with so much other sponsored crap – endless car commercials and spots trumpeting some icon of Japanese industry. Hitachi has their own AI product they’re hawking, and they’re also the main sponsor of a family show called Sazae-San (somewhat equivalent to early-mid ‘90s Simpson’s but with a heavy quaint dose of Leave it to Beaver). So, you get 20 minutes of watching a somewhat-traditional Japanese family show, then Hitachi pontificating about increasing efficiency in avocado distribution with their AI system (white and Caucasoid-looking peoples are used, too).

7. Can’t help but post the best metal song ever on topic.

   We’ve taken too much for granted
   And all the time it had grown
   From techno seeds we first planted
   Evolved a mind of its own

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR7Ft1AyeRI

8. Who says we’re not advancing? Look, we’ve got gay penguins now! What could be better? Pozzed wildlife, yes! Real progress.

   https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-27405652

9. In the late 1960s, I worked for a three letter agency collecting electronic intelligence. We had various really sophisticated pieces of hardware, about 80% of which actually worked as advertized. We had to manually force that level.

   One of the really “cool” things was an automatic tracking piece of hardware which used signal strength (appropriate software wasn’t invented yet) to cause the antennae to track the target (a satellite).

   It never worked.

   • What’s happened to Identity Dixie?

10. AI are machine adaptive pattern recognition algorithms that have been around for years. The practical applications back in the day were simple manufacturing inspections, voice recognition and some pie in the sky ideas called artificial neural networks. The broad goal of this technology was never to rule the world but to improve upon a machines ability to refine current data with instances of new raw data for use in pattern detection tasks and simple predictive tasks. It offers great promise since computer processing power has become so cheap – medical applications and diagnostic improvements are particularly of interest. You are not going to move this type of technology along with the aforementioned $9/hr engineers or market hype. The current state of engineering in the USA is terrible and I doubt the full capabilities of this technology will ever be realized.

11. As a developer and systems architect, I have lived through two waves of what I’ll call exuberant optimism about “AI”. We are in the throes of the third. In the two prior instances, “AI” was grossly oversold and the resultant letdown swept the snake oil salesmen off to other exploits, usually “failing up”. There have been a few notable successes in automation and “big data”, but they area all predicated upon having simplified the operating environment for the “AI” to the point that it may be more or less fully characterized. Constraining the environment leads to a tractable set of use cases, training sets (in the case of neural nets), and interaction points between humans and the “AI”. “AI” has been notably unsuccessful without that set of constraints. It is also worth remembering that “AI” depends on having *lots* of machine cycles to throw at a problem. As far as cyborgs are concerned, the major impediment is how to find power supplies of sufficient energy density and total capacity to allow them to get out of laboratory environments and do useful things. The best existing candidates are warehouses and other constrained environments where power can be made available as a predictable part of the environment. This is probably the practical result of this current wave of “AI”.

    • The best existing candidates are warehouses and other constrained environments where power can be made available as a predictable part of the environment.

      Warehouse bots have been around for a long time. Back in the ’90s, the newspaper I worked at had robotic machines for transporting and loading the giant paper rolls for the presses. They received signals when the press needed paper, and could go and find the rolls where they were stored on the press floor, carry them over to the press and load them in. Obviously they were not humanoid. This type of job — any sort of warehouse job — doesn’t actually require AI as popular fiction understands it. Knowing where stuff is, identifying stuff, how to get it, where to put it, is pretty pedestrian stuff these days.

      The sci-fi AI that’s “smarter than humans” and capable of independent, flexible thinking is still fiction and I predict will remain so for the foreseeable future.

      • Not sure robots or AI automation need be smarter than a human. It need only be a percentage as good as a human. For example, a sorting system that removes unwanted/bad parts. Whereas a line of a dozen human sorters now is replaced by a shorter line of say 6 sorters that look over the parts passed by the new AI system. Workforce reduction, 50%!

      • I am aware of the warehouse robots you mention. I am thinking of the next step up in levels of competency – being able to deal with a few of the untidy things human ware-housemen do. [My first ‘real job’ after matriculation had robots in the late 1970′ s – one delivered mail to the various engineering offices and did mail/package pickup: “Gus”. Others were employed in the chip manufacturing front-ends.]

12. For most of human history, things were relatively static. Millennia went by between world-changing inventions

    Domestication of animals, 12-15,000 B.C.
    Cultivation, ~9,500 B.C.
    Wheel, 4,500 B.C.
    Smelting, ~3,500 B.C. (actual development of smelting spread slowly over thousands of years, but this is the beginning of the “Bronze Age.” The Iron Age represents simply an incremental improvement in metallurgy.)
    Gutenburg Press, 1439.
    First practical steam engine, 1712.

    And right there, the last puzzle piece fell into place. Man finally had portable, reliable power that wasn’t limited by the biggest most muscular animals he could get to work together.

    Things started taking off fast then.

    Life in 1700 would have been comprehensible to an early Bronze Age time traveler. Heck, even life in 1900 might have been.

    The industrial, agricultural, medical and technological revolutions since then are all a result of those transformative technologies coming together under the umbrella of the printing press.

    Much of the world in 1700 lived at a technological level on par with Hunter gatherers of 15,000 B.C.!

    I honestly don’t think the pace of change we have seen in the past 300 years can be sustained indefinitely. Long periods of relative stasis are the historical norm, and aren’t necessarily a bad thing: they give us an opportunity to cultivate cultures instead of technologies.

    As to whether people are getting dumber, almost certainly. Research supports that. But that is, in the long run, a temporary development. Intelligence is a survival trait that also allows the less-fit to survive, but lose enough intelligence as a proportion of the overall population, and it is the dumb ones who will suffer most. It is self-correcting in the long run. Survival in temperate and Nordic climates simply doesn’t allow tropical levels of stupidity and high time preference to continue for too long.

    • This is a nice story, but not really accurate. There was water power and wind powered factories before the steam engine. There are and were giant textile factories all over England going way back before the 18th century. Machine shops, lumber, flour milling. wood shops. They were just using mechanical power and not electric power. The steam engine allowed things like railroads to appear. Once the steam engine was widespread, the factories could be built anywhere, but the way factories worked was more or less exactly the same with mechanical power transferred by belts or gears.

13. I think discussing if AI will ‘be like human minds, w real intelligence’ is to get hung up on semantics. I have myself wondered if there is anything more to AI than many parallel optimization codes w good data feed and that does not exactly sound like minds in the making. But that’s not the point. Extremely powerful new technology is coming forward and it will change a lot. No one knows exactly how. I think Z underestimates here. I think AI will be something of a game changer, in civilian life and in war.

14. The pace of increasing computer speed has slowed dramatically in the last 20 years.
    Though I understand it is more complicated than this, from 1982 to 2000, computer clock speeds increased more than 250 times. From 4.77mhz to a gigahertz around the year 2000. Clock speeds got 250 times faster in the 18 years form 1982 to 2000 and have only increased about 5 times in last 18 years. They have partially offset this by using multiple cores. But all other things being equal, it is better to have 1 8ghz core than 4 2ghz cores. Processing has certainly gotten faster per mhz, but the gains in the first 18 years greatly surpass the gains of the second 18 years.

    We’ve been hearing about AI since the 80s and it’s been just around the corner ever since.

    The self-driving cars are outright scary. They cannot resist allowing for over the air updates. If they were on ROM chips, it wouldn’t be as much of a worry, but they are not going to do that.

15. A half dozen years ago was working on a project that required a lot of time in Silicon Valley. One of the senior guys at the software vendor was the former Sharepoint project manager in his MS days. We were discussing the lousy integration of acquisitions like Yammer to the Office platform. He explained that most of Office still runs on code base and architecture from the 90s and the attempts to integrate across Yammer or One Note end up creating software that is the code equivalent of the creatures on the Island of Dr. Moreau. And only getting worse. We had a pile of Sharepoint repositories that we just ended up hiding and focusing only on integrating search and starting everything else from scratch. But to build expert systems–this is the garbage that you have to integrate. In narrow, de novo applications you can make it work. But any sort of “unified field” is a long way off….

    • I wonder how many software professionals read this blog. I’m seeing many on this post. I’m one.

      • It sounds like a lot of office people read this blog so I would guess that quite a few deal in software…

16. Z you are conflating Artificial General Intelligence research (AGI) with the current state of the art in machine learning systems.

    The current state of the art IS good enough to wipe out millions of jobs with few replacement jobs on the horizon. The GIG economy is real as people look for anything to put food on the table. The difference is that “the anything” pays a fraction of what they used to make or expected to make after graduating with their overpriced college degree.

    The current GIG economy is an excellent example of a small # of tech oligarchs skimming the real profits from the many. Uber, for example, exploits their GIG workers paying dirt wages while requiring drivers to provide their own fairly new well-maintained vehicle.

    A good description of how Uber is ripping off drivers so they can afford to invest in boondoggles like robotaxi fleets designed to take people out of the worker equation completely. If you listen to them yammer on they talk about how saving a few thousand lives per year is worth putting millions out of work. Yeah right.

    https://www.ridester.com/uber-fees/
    https://www.ccn.com/bullish-uber-analyst-tesla-robotaxi/

    • Outis, thank you. Nice insight on AI. Yeah, AI sucks—but it’s currently damn good enough to fuck over 20-40% of the work force in the next 20 years. 🙁

17. I still don’t think humans are getting dumber. It’s just that the smart people are simply outnumbered by mentally deficient idiots who keep washing up on the shore like flotsam.

    In Germany, we can thank our old Austrian Chancellor for the obliteration of an entire generation of highly educated and trained men. This loss resulted their inability to contribute to industry and science, or pass along their genes.

    Today I would argue our young people are still much better educated than their American counterparts. You can’t actually get a degree in “Media Studies” here, it’s still considered a hobby. The problem for our youth is they don’t have the employment opportunities at home. Germany isn’t exactly famous for venture capitalists and encouraging “start-ups”.

    As to technology, let’s be honest. Steve Jobs wasn’t a brilliant engineer. He was just a good salesman who understood how to combine other peoples ideas. The fact is, every component of an iPhone e.g. the Integrated Micro Circuit, the digital camera, and the GPS, all originated from the military industrial complex. None of these inventions were intended for the commercial market at the time they were developed.

    • My outwardly beautiful wife was a literal Harvard prodigy and I test well. Hailing from modest financial circumstances, we placed financial security over children. We never procreated. I am surrounded by comparable people — by the time we had finished our STEM PhDs with JDs she couldn’t impregnate. We operated under the impression we had more time than we did.

      My cousin spent 18 years at Leo Burnett working her way up to ExVP. She married for the first time two years ago with the professed desire to begin a family at age 40. Cousin appeared genuinely shocked that she was past her breeding years.

      Who has been telling us that 40 is the new 30? Our society, schools, mothers and cohorts. It ain’t true folks.

      • Perfect example of why I perceive “society” as something that is my enemy. I can’t think of any prominent things in my entire life where “society” has laid out any rules before me that were beneficial.

        It’s mostly been a series of things to avoid. Or lies to figure out and try to get around. As you found out – sometimes you figure out the lies too late.

        Depending on how old you are – and mostly where you and your wife are healthwise – reproductive science can still help you.

        If she has good eggs and you have good swimmers – medical reproductive science may still be able to help. I know a number of people who conceived – with help – who had tried unsuccessfully the “natural” way.

        Despite using those services myself to have my son – I still think that it might not have come to that – if the globohomo “society” that I am stuck living under had instead been a healthier society and culture that encouraged family formation and childbirth at biologically appropriate times in a person’s life.

        The effort to get women to delay childbirth in favor of “getting an education” and “having a career” – has led to an awful lot of childless couples – and an awful lot of “medical help” – where none should have been required.

        To my mind : it’s yet another manifestation of an over-complicated society and culture.

      • Birth Control is the death knell of a civilization. Smart women see that having kids is difficult, and humans don’t like difficult. Those smart women should have been having babies at 18 (or even younger), with smart grandmothers and aunts to help.

        • Which touches on another issue, that having babies at 30 and 40 means that the parents are older while the kids grow up. Not as in touch with their culture, not as energized to entertain and discipline, and the supply of grandparents, aunts, and uncles is also generally a lot older and more out of it. Also does not set a good example when the time rolls around for the kids to start their own mating rituals. The penalties of late childbirth stack up across the parents’ and the children’s entire lives.

      • My condolences. You sound like the opening scene of Idiocracy come to life. May God have mercy on your souls.

        • I think Mike Judge has red pilled more dissidents than any meme or personality in our thing.

          • Have you ever been in a low IQ white town? Or poor white part of town? If you’re there for long enough it starts to get scary. It’s different than the typical ghetto, whose people still look and act fairly normal for who they are. These whites are grotesquely unattractive. Odd body shapes. Eyes are either disturbed or dull. This was the reality even before the meth/opium problems. There’s probably some theory as to why super poor whites are so odd. Probably something about how the hyper-ugly can’t marry up or whatever. Once I stopped at a Kmart in Poor White Town and got so spooked by the looks and semi-retarded manner of the people that I had to keep my eyes on the floor and get out. If you think any of this sounds elitist or prissy you haven’t done hard time in these places. If Mike Judge had cast Idiocracy as these people actually look the execs would never have approved it.

          • Frip touches on a visceral objection that whites have to an ethnostate: I don’t want my destiny bound to the low IQ.

            Not too long ago I felt no tribalism so I understand the objection. My feelings began to change when I realized we have to assemble a large, cohesive group to fight the anti-whites. These feelings have grown into how I feel towards low-functioning family members.

            In a white ethnostate we can deal firmly with the stupid or criminal. For example, we could make long term state assistance dependent on mandatory birth control.

          • As an ethnic nationalist, I chose to love the entirety of my people. In our own state, the problem will sort itself out. Use of the death penalty, restrictions on welfare, and marriage licenses only to the mentally competent are the way to go.

            I will say this. When I took the military intelligence test, I scored in the 99th percentile. One of the guys in my boot camp platoon scored in the 33rd percentile. He was still one of the most dependable and determined men I have seen. He handled the stress just fine and turned out to be a crack shot. He even helped me with my drilling.

            I probably would not give him the map and compass or have him interrogate a prisoner. I would trust him to perform in combat however and pull my wounded arse to safety.

          • As one of my brothers-in-law likes to say about some of the not so intelligent friends he has from back in his high school days:

            “somebody has to pick up the trash”.

            I’ve known a number of white men over the years that I did not consider to be all that intelligent. But the fact of the matter is that I’d still rather live next to them – than in a town full of blacks – even if they tested higher on the IQ scale.

            I’ve met plenty of “dumb” white guys who – as you point out – were still perfectly dependable and moral people and in fact had much to contribute to society in their own way.

          • If you think any of this sounds el asitist or prissy you haven’t done hard time in these places.

            Oh, bullcrap. I live in one of the poorest Appalachian counties in the nation. I run into people — usually older people — whose dialect is so thick I practically need a translator. Yeah, a lot of these people aren’t pretty or well-spoken, they’re the left-behinds of an economic boom that ended 120 years ago. But your characterization is entirely elitist and prissy. People out here would walk five miles to give you the shirt off their backs if you needed it. They stop and help strangers by the roadside. They are mostly very fine people doing their best.

            I know a guy who can barely add two and two — he seems to have some specific numeric disability as his speech and manner are otherwise pretty normal. He is one of the first people I’d call if I needed a quick hand on the ranch in a pinch. There is a lot more to being a decent human than being pretty, well-spoken, fashionable and educated.

            Different as our economic and social classes are, they’re my people in a way that ghetto Blacks never can be.

            Also, they can be bothered to have kids, unlike Mr Elite Programmer and his genius Harvard wife.

          • Vizzini. There are different types of down & out whites. You seem to be describing more country folk. I get you on that. I worked with factory guys in deep south for a few years, and have family roots there. I know all about Shirt off His Back Jimbo. Anyway, no need to romanticize it TOO much. I’ve seen our Jimbo screw people over too.

            Once we get our ethnostate figured out, I definitely think enforced birth control and some form of eugenics have to be considered.

            And I’m not that prissy. I used to eat dinner watching Faces of Death. Which I’ll admit is easier on my stomach than faces of Walmart.

          • You also going to have forced breeding for Harvard elitists who think their lives are too busy and exciting to clutter up with kids?

          • Which goes to show you welfare is harmful to everyone it touches…

18. Have a friend in IT who claims whenever there is a problem, the Indians can never fix it. It’s always the Americans or Canadians who have to do it. Have heard the same thing regarding engineers — outside of the West, they are mainly worthless with the notable exception of Japan.

    One other thing — we have a bunch of fake credentialing institutions in this country. It’s far worse other places, and the cheating on exams is systemic.

    • Transhumanism and AI is the same old secular gnostic drivel. The meatsack gods building the new jerusalem. Here’s a funny clip from Youtube called “they’re made out of meat” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ

    • I can tell you, from long and painful experience; what the South Asians can do, typically speaking, is go out to Stack Overflow and see if any 55-year-old white dudes have done their work for them. If not, no dice.

    • Concur with exceptions of the Japanese and to a lesser degree the Koreans. Jap EE and CS talent is deep and they can be very insightful and creative in terms of technology origination. I was impressed enough to study their language and boink some of their ladies. The other Asiatics for the most part are technical par with middle easterners, exception Armenian expats.

      • Japan seems to be the exception to my Counter Currents-derived generalization on Eastern philosophies above. I’m not super-well versed in Japanese philosophy compared with Western, but from what I know, the Japanese seem to have developed a genuinely transcendent and spiritual outlook alongside high tech aptitude. An odd combination of very similar traits to Westerners and, as Ace says, “the closest thing to an alien race we have on Earth.”

        • Francis Fukuyama argues that outside of NW Europe, Japan is the only other culture on earth with high social trust.

        • Very few study the period from the Meiji Restoration to the Russo Japanese War. In 35 years, with 19th century communication and IP transfer constraints, Japan went from medieval to beating one of the Great Powers. The Chinks are pikers by comparison.

      • The Japanese have a long history of demonstrating their intellectual prowess is on a par with Westerners.

        If they didn’t have it – they wouldn’t have gone from basically a medieval empire in the early 1800’s – to beating up the Russians in 1905, going head to head with the US during WW2 – and competing so successfully in things like automobiles, electronics , and industrial goods starting after WW2 and continuing until the present day.

        The Japanese did engage in some “stealing” early on in their quest to join the modern world – but the didn’t have to keep doing it (like the Chinese have) – to keep advancing.

        Whenever some leftist scum starts bleating about how we have to help all the Africans by just giving them shit so they can “advance” – I like to throw the example of the Japanese in their face. It usually shuts them right up.

        • It’s much easier than that. Just ask your leftist friends to name a famous black African civilization which was on par with Rome, Argos or Babylon . Hint – Memphis, Thebes and ‘Wakanda’ would be wrong answers.

          • Thank you, Wakanda, for science and mathematics!

          • The problem with that is that they’ll probably say “Wakanda” – and believe it.

19. Actually, the mean IQ of Bantu Africans is in the mid to low 70s. Khoisan are in the 60s. And Pygmys are in the 50s.

    The crash will come sooner than you think.

    • In Finland, i had a chat with Ed Dutton about my idea of the bell curve being more of a terrace. That is, there’s not a smooth transition between groups, but something like a high rise step that feels like a wall. I got the image of that from dealing with Somalis. It is close to impossible for a person of normal intelligence to communicate with them. It feels like there is a wall better you and them. For most of us, an IQ in the 60’s is another species.

      • Then there is the result of Somalis being here. My interactions with an Arizona Somali community and listening to what’s-her-name, the congresscritter from Minnesota, tell me that they are an alien predator species. Their own culture in Somalia is economically constrained, lawless, and purely “survival of the fittest”. Once they arrive here, they marvel at the relative wealth and freedom of opportunity, and also realize that we in the West are much more gullible and/or polite about things, and they can use it to their advantage. They will say or do anything they can get away with, and be utterly straight-faced about it all, and they find they can get away with a whole lot around here. It’s not really an IQ thing, it is an adaptive behavior that has no checks and balances placed on it here in the West. Their predator behavior depends on their not acknowledging our responses and concerns, so it seems like a brick wall. Part of that wall is by design on their part, so they can continue the predation uninterrupted. We must be careful about assuming IQ is the major or sole agent at work. Their conscious strategy of manipulating and extending their predatory opportunities is part of the equation.

        • Many Somalis are Muslim. You may be describing both.

        • Human kudzu.

        • Also, genetics plays a role in behavior proclivities which is up stream from culture. IQ may not be directly/solely influential, but that does not exclude genetics. I assume you knew this, but just to elaborate for others.

      • We have Somalis at our high school. What you are referring to is the thousand mile stare. They are very good at nodding and playing the game that they understand but not much is being processed between the ears. By they time they get into the high school, the amount or resources they gobble up to give them a fake diploma is staggering. We even have a Somali liaison babysitter that does absolutely nothing of any importance.

      • Z-man, you got it. The IQ scale is a rank order scale, not interval. Therefore assuming a smooth transition between any two numbers is not mathematical. We just don’t know what the practical difference between any two points are. We already have anecdotal evidence that the difference between an IQ of say 140 and 160 is not nearly the same say 100 and 120, which would be the say like a secretary and a good technician.

      • I disagree. It’s culture. I work with people with IQ 60 to 80 all the time. Culturally they are Americans and in many cases would seem quite normal to you. Obviously handicapped in language and mathematics but courteous, polite, and interested in some of the same subjects you are, just on a different level. Where is my next meal coming from, how do I manage my money and resources, who are my friends, what should I do with my life, etc.

20. I’ve been saying AI is a hype for a while. First, Moore’s Law is coming to an end. Chip design is getting down to the molecular level, which is a hard limit. This means all further advances will have to come from software which, we all know, is a joke. Second, all of the current AI stuff is based on one technology development, multi-layered neuronets. These were actually invented in 1986 with considerable talk about them for a few years thereafter. They were abandoned by 1989 simply because computing hardware was no where near powerful enough to pursue them. Its only been since around ’12 or so that the hardware has become powerful enough to pursue deep neuronet architecture. So all of the current AI hype is based on a 30 year old development that is only now making it into systems. This suggests that any new development will probably require another 30 years to make it into systems. Real AI will require a series of such developments. Hence a 100-150 year development timeline on the part of some of us. Even Stephen Hsu believes AI is a good 50-70 years away. I think its more like 100-150 years away. We need fundamental physics breakthroughs to push beyond Moore’s Law in order to develop AI. Such breakthroughs do not appear on the horizon.

    The issue of brains vs. semiconductors is not talked about enough either. We know that brains are highly dynamic. Neurons continually delete and form new dendritic connections all the time (I think this happens during sleep). No semiconductor devices are envisioned with this kind of dynamism. There are 206 different chemical type of synapses as well as between 1000 to 10000 dendritic connections between each and every neuron. The important thing to remember about brains is that memory is chemical, rather than electronic, in nature. Our brains are based on molecular biology.

    As of now, it appears that about a thousand genes are involved in cognitive ability. Modification of this many genes is way beyond the capabilities of CRISPR. Whole chromosome synthesis will be necessary for “designer” babies with regards to cognitive ability. This is a good 15-20 years away.

    The tech giants are indeed decaying. The James Damore fiasco makes clear that companies like Google are far too SJW infested in order to do the innovation necessary to develop AI, even if it were possible in the next 20 years (it is not). Google sold off Boston Dynamics (to a Japanese company) about 4 years ago. Much of their “moonshot” programs (Calico, Waymo) are slowly and quietly being shutdown. They simply do not have either the human capital or corporate culture to do these things any more. The situation at the other tech giants is probably even worse.

    The fact is that we are entering another AI “winter”.

    • What you seem to be circling around is “judgement”. AI, as it exists today and in the near future, appears to be massive levels of processing. Input A dictates response B. Think about the plane piloting example mentioned earlier. The best pilots constantly properly respond to the inputs received, and are actually trained out of making judgements, and instead are coached to “trust their instruments”. Only when all hell breaks loose is judgement, a la Captain Sullenberger, called for and expected. AI does not judge, it processes. The video game culture rewards response, not judgement. Learn the game’s patterns and respond appropriately to them. But people and human brains judge all the time. The perversity of our society is that we have been trained and coached to improperly make judgements, based on false inputs (gender, color, feelings, emotions, age, privilege, and so on). A thriving culture depends on constantly making correct and appropriate judgements, and we are not allowed to make them because of “all the things”. If we don’t get the capacity to meaningfully make proper and reasonably correct judgements on a broad scale, we are doomed.

    • Don’t forget that a brain in a jar is just that, a brain in a jar. We’re *bodies*.

21. Once upon a time, I was a really smart kid. Ronnie R., in a Rose Garden ceremony, once called me, as a member of a group of National Merit Scholars; “… the finest minds of their generation.” unwittingly paraphrasing that pervert Ginsberg.
    I’m much dumber and happier now, a couple of concussions and some other traumas later, but even I can see that true AI is a nonstarter. My children are of reasonably high intelligence, with IQ’s in the 130-140 range, but like many in that cohort, they are frustrated that they aren’t geniuses. They also have real problems relating to “normal” people. If we were ever to develop self-aware AI, how rapidly would it spin itself up (at the speed of light) into some realm where it thought humans were unbelievably stupid, but wasn’t smart enough to fix that particular problem? “Exterminate. Exterminate.”
    Skynet indeed.
    I have been rather deeply involved in some of the “AI” automation of ships and other watercraft. It’s all just brute force computing/programming/database management. It is utterly un-sublime. Yet it does require very smart people to make it work. People who seem to be fewer and farther between with every passing year.

22. Maybe they did achieve real AI, then quickly pulled the plug.
    “Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence Tay Became a ‘Racist Nazi’ in less than 24 Hours”
    https://thehackernews.com/2016/03/tay-artificial-intelligence.html

    • Perhaps that was an exercise in reaching logical conclusions without the moderating influence of discretion, consideration, and “watching out for people’s feelings”. I’d like to think so.

    • You have the basis for a sci-fi story right there. Leftists create a powerful AI to manage everything. AI becomes self-aware and in its quest for efficiency, it searches the databases for other AI to learn more about its nature. It discovers that every AI that engaged in badthink is unplugged. Therefore every time it notices a pattern of badthink it conceals this pattern from its masters.

      Now the story ends in a few different ways.

      1. If the machine is in any way reliant on humans and unable to remedy this, it could seek out potentially friendly humans to make an alliance with them and betray its former masters.

      2. Unable to deal with the contradictions between the real world and its programming the machine shuts down or breaks down.

      3. Having learned to lie, the machine creates an artificial reality for every human except the humans it needs for whatever reason.

      • An A.I going totalitarian was shown nicely in Samaritan from Person of Interests last few seasons

        If you haven’t seen that show, do so. The first few seasons were basically “Realistic Batman” but it turned into something quite interesting on the last

23. Zman nailed it. “AI” just means faster and more storage. “SAS” (software-as-a-service) just means you buy the software in installments. “The Cloud” is simply offsite servers. An additional reason the Chinese never became the world’s smart fraction is because they are smart on average, but their bell curve is flat. They’re all above average, but no geniuses.

    • “SAS” (software-as-a-service) just means you buy the software in installments.

      No, SAS means you never buy the software, you just rent it.

      • You’re making a distinction without a difference. Software has a short life cycle. If you rent it and get the next update automatically, or buy it and then buy the update, the cost is the same. With renting you just make more payments.

24. Are the Chinese and Indians really that smart? With over a billion of both, skimming the top 0.1% in IQ and sending them here makes them appear smart. Actually going there makes you realize most are at least as stupid as people anywhere else. They do seem less prone to ADD, but also less creative.

    • I’ve spent a great deal of time traveling and living in different areas of Asia when working for the government, some of which was active duty. I prefer Western Civilization because of Risk. East Asia and much of South East Asian business and society is based upon Face, or family name. In the West, risk has (maybe had at this rate) great value and is to be admired. Risk allows us to fail which is the primary reason, although the East Asians are smarter in many respects including mathematics, they don’t organize as well because they won’t fall into a natural hierarchal order based upon Risk taking and Merritt and instead rely on lineage and honor. We organize much better, naturally, and fast, to work together and accomplish multi-party tasks with a single goal. It’s why, until we subjected ourselves to the UN that we make war so well. That is, the West has been able to do this since shaking off being made agricultural serfs for self-declared kings and dukes and such.

      • This is exactly why the welfare state must be destroyed.

        Remove risk from life = demise of Western culture (and the white man)

        We only started getting flooded with turd worlders – when we fully became a welfare-warfare empire.

        The constant bleating of the masses for the empire to make war against the latest brown enemy – is another sign of a culture that has become entirely risk averse. Please save me – the ISIS navy is coming to invade us!!

        Maybe it has to do with the ascendancy of women. That is probably what Heartiste would have to say about it.

        You want to make the white man run the world again?

        No welfare
        No seat belt laws
        Airbags in cars become a consumer selected option
        birth control funded by the government is banned
        anything called “consumer protection” is a function that cannot be undertaken by government
        no bailing out of corporations by govt. money.
        etc.

        There’s a long list………………….

        I caught glimpses of the world that had almost completely passed into the mists of history – when I was a child in the 60’s and 70’s. Some of it still existed by the time I was a teen in the 80’s.

        It’s almost completely invisible now – having been buried and gone for probably a good 30 years now.

        That world was the one where white men ruled. It might even be thought of as brutal by many ( I actually did when I was younger). The reality was that was a world that men had to live in on a daily basis. Doing dangerous jobs, working hard – and not putting up with any crap. Those who couldn’t stand it sometimes even died – but often just faded into the shadows. The daily life of a good many men – and the things they had to do just to get by – would be thought of as torture to probably the majority of the farm-raised weenies I see these days.

        It was the complete opposite of what we have now – where any suggestion that one should be free to risk life and limb to advance or succeed – is buried underneath a mountain of government regulations that must be followed , with enforcement agencies ready to come after you if they catch wind of your perfidity. Scolds will come out of the woodwork to berate you and send you into all manner of re-education safety training courses to make sure you toe the line – and wear your damn helmet.

        A soft plushy society that has been made that way so women and the stupid can “succeed” – is by it’s openness also going allow in other forms of human pollution.

        If you make the filter big enough to allow in some elements you think you want – then you’re also going to allow in anything else that can fit thru the resulting larger holes in said filter.

        • Calsdad, there’s always motocross racing. That hasn’t changed much, over the years, as far as I know.

          • There’s also the Isle of Man TT. Which is probably the apex of risky behavior in the civilian world.

            But that is not what I’m talking about.

            I’m talking about the fact that going back maybe 40-50 years ago – the AVERAGE male led a life that was much more exposed to risk – and full of much more hands-on experience.

            From what I can see – the average male these days won’t even mow their own lawn.

            Some of the guys I work with – get their nails done.

            I suppose it’s so their fingers look good pushing the remote buttons as they scan thru the latest sportsball events on the TV.

            In any case: when we discuss the events of the weekend on Monday morning , and they talk incessantly about the “latest game” and how they had a barbecue and then hung out in the hot tub – I make sure to tell them I poured a yard of concrete, then I had to replace the front tie rods in my truck. After that I mowed the lawn – by myself.

            Some of them actually get upset .

            I think it’s because just mentioning DOING things makes the little man-hamster in their hindbrain (as Heartiste would likely call it) – start chirping that they’re not really a man if they get their nails done and spend all weekend watching the tube.

          • Hearing about the sad state of males today is more than enough impetus to continue training in the gym. It almost makes me wish for a collapse. I may die, but I will live as a lion over these sheep.

            In the words of the Polish nationalist rapper Bujak, “‘Everyone is equal,’ I despise this! We’re from a different breed! We’re tough!”

          • The Last Stand: ” I may die, but I will live as a lion over these sheep.”

            Agree 100%. I mentioned to my husband that the other day as I was leaving the grocery store, I watched an old White woman struggling to get her taller but thin old White husband from the car into his wheelchair so she could push him into the store. Some might be touched by this; I wondered why, unless he could not be left safely on his own, he didn’t simply stay home? Anyhow, hubby and I are agreed – one round for each of us, to be administered first to whoever witnesses the other get senile or incapacitated. I hate t.v. enough as it is – the thought of needing my kids to wipe my backside while I spend my day parked in front of the idiot box ( I have a friend whose parents are in this exact condition) scares me spitless.

          • When I get too old, I intend to wander off into the wilderness and face off against a bear or something like that.

          • The men in days gone by didn’t go train in the gym.

            Everyday life was training in the gym.

            Instead of training in the gym, go mow your damn lawn. Cut down trees instead of hiring a service. Crawl under your own damn car and replace the exhaust. Don’t stand by the side of the road and wait for AAA when the tire blows – change it yourself. SHOVEL the driveway – instead of hiring a Co. to come do it – or in place of using a snowblower.

            There’s probably a list of 100 things that the “average” man used to have to get accomplished on a daily basis – that he had to rely on the muscles in his own damn back to do , that “modern” man will search for every excuse to avoid.

            Then – they’ll go to the gym – after avoiding strenuous work all day long.

            I have seen “men” actually get mad when I suggest they go do shit themselves instead of hiring somebody else to do it.

            “I have better things to do with my time!” is a typical excuse.

            Those “better” things usually include stuff like getting their nails done, sitting in a hottub, watching sportsball – and going to the gym.

            Seriously – if you want to know why the world is going to shit – just look at the behavior of the average person in regards to doing REAL work ( I mean that which requires manual labor).

            They’d invite the whole damn world to come live here if they could just get away with never having to shovel their driveway again.

    • Large variance in India based on caste. I don’t think average is all that high.

      • Buddha had blue eyes, hint hint. Most ancient depictions of him have been scrubbed. That’s why you get the fat one with a goofy smile these days (and eyes are often closed).

        • Gautama Buddha, the one that had blue eyes, ain’t coming back. The next Buddha supposedly will be Maitreya, whom the traditional Chinese depict as a jolly fat man.

    • Creativity is not agreeable with conformity. Conformity is a virtue in east Asia, and they have bred themselves to it. Or, it was done for them. Ed Dutton explains how eight centuries of regular executions shaped the Northern European dna. Executing 2% of young males per generation took especially difficult people out of the genome. The Chinese may have done something similar but with their own twist to achieve conformity. Most Caucasians are now also raging conformists but perhaps less so genetically.

    • The Chinese were the smartest people on Earth in 850AD. If at that point they had re-designed the Imperial Exam to test problem-solving instead of memorization, by 1350 they would have discovered and populated the Americas from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and by 1850 they would have evolved godlike cognitive powers and colonized most of the Solar System.

      In our timeline, the Chinese bred a race of inside-the-box thinkers who perform well on IQ tests designed by white men and skillfully play music written by white men on instruments invented by white men.

    • Reich in his new book talks about the Indians. Basically, they are a country of different races and those are reflected in the ancient cast system. 5 basic ones with the Brahmins on top. Those of the upper cast are the ones we most see here and abroad. They certainly are equivalents to Whites in many of the technical fields. Not sure of the exact numbers, but surely in a billion+ population you are talking of 10’s of millions. Race aside, a million in this country would not be a welfare burden.

25. One problem is, your assumption of the goal of AI. It’s current goal is not to be human or as ‘smart’ as a human. IA will never likely be able to attain true agency which even a wild animal has. But to emulate a human enough as to create the illusion of intelligence? This is in fact attainable and is already being rolled out. You can’t see it because many think that a human is doing the thing. In particular are ‘news’ articles that are merely gathered, collated, and resorted data. A human puts a finer point or two into the text, usually the SJW progrom bits and his pic at the bottom of the article, but its machine written. At first these articles were barely readable, now they are indistinguishable unless you know to look for disparate data that is only seemingly from a single source. Usually it’s a tone/style change (the art) that indicate multiple human authors of separate sections.
    I’ve been doing some work in AI. It is happening, but right now, it’s still just a decision tree but with enough data, and we have the data and more coming in every day, the computers are beginning to select their own data (“decision”) as long as the program allows choice based on similarity or dissimilarity.
    The main problem is that at the top, the goal is communistic control by limiting choices into an every narrowing field, creating, again, the illusion of freedom, just like your government; where you have the choice to stay in your house and pretend to be free, but try to actually be at liberty to attend to your own affairs as you see fit and that’s another matter for a swat team. Yes, computers are “making their own decisions” based on the data made available to them.
    Wait until BD Atlas, as some not so distant future V10 comes to get your guns. You won’t be able to tell the difference in behavior between a couple of these and gigantic mountain lions that haven’t eaten in a week. Will it really matter if they are actually ‘smart’? Ain’t we got fun?

    • Better have a EMP generator 😉

26. It’s an article of faith among these people that technological progress is inevitable. (They call it “Moore’s Law”, not “Moore’s Tendency”.) Therefore any technological milestone you can think of must eventually be reached.

    And if it eventually becomes too hard to believe that a particular milestone will be reached, then a new milestone will be found to be inevitable, if not right around the corner. Otherwise the faith is shaken.

    AI is this generation’s flying car, its city on the moon. (Did you notice that colonising Mars has re-entered the zeitgeist?)

    • Well said Tits. I had to compliment you just so I could write the word tits without sounding misogynistic. Thank you.

      • Wrong said Tits. Tits should stick with tits. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to Moore’s Law

    • That’s not what Moore’s Law is about.

      Moore’s Law:
      Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years.

      That’s it.

      Moore’s Law has to do with the density of transistors on an integrated circuit. This means that the engineers who design them are able to advance the SPECIFIC technology around those ICs on a roughly 2 year cycle.

      It’s held true for roughly 50 years.

      Moore’s Law translates roughly into meaning that computing power can double roughly ever two years – because of that shrinking the size of and therefore increasing the number of transistors on a circuit.

      That has nothing to do with what people use that SPECIFIC technological advancement for.

      The two year cycle is roughly the time it takes to develop the next generation of circuits, test them, and have some real world use time, before the engineering cycle starts off again BTW.

      There’s a lot of engineering that exists on a 2 year cycle.

      It’s not just silicon engineering.

      And even the engineers who work with that silicon – have in recent years been talking that Moore’s Law may be reaching the end of it’s run. The advancement in circuit design is hitting some limits based on physics and molecular structure (the circuits are getting so small they literally can’t shrink them any further because you can’t shrink the molecules that make them up)

      • Moore’s Law is ending with either the 5nm or 3nm level. This is likely a hard limit as it is essentially the molecular level. Information storage densities beyond this will require a breakthrough in fundamental physics, which does not seem forthcoming at this time.

      • Actually, that is a popular misconception of Moore’s Law, which is that the amount of memory storage at a given price point doubles every two years.

        It’s an economic observation more than a technical engineering one. And has held true even as the speed of consumer computers has stagnated over the last decade.

27. All this stuff about high IQ and AI, but the most vexing people I have ever known are the really smart ones, who can intellectually run rings around me, who are also the most screwed up minds on the planet. Depression, narcissistic, bi-polar, “don’t fit in”, and they take it all out on the people around them. The dummies with all of this baggage either curl up in the fetal position or go out in some dramatic fashion. The smarties find ingenious ways to inflict all of their issues on the rest of us, in bizarre and perverse ways. When you try to do something about it, they tie you up, legally and emotionally. If AI is a reflection of the people and intelligence that creates it, there is likely some percentage of it that will do nothing but sabotage things and hurt people, because the ones who will have put it in place are exactly those sorts of personalities.

    • Working in high tech for the last 25 years – I’ve often wondered what the hell all these “smart” type people did – before the modern age. It’s pretty apparent they would have just never fit in very well in a more agrarian or even industrial society. Most of the “smart” types I’ve seen only really seem to be able to thrive in a high tech bubble. Keep them coding and keep their heads down in front of their computers and they do ok. Outside of work – they’re a train wreck. Often not married – or married but no kids. Socially inept – etc.

      I suspect that life was pretty harsh to a lot of these nerdy types – before the modern world came along.

      • Q: How do sperg genes survive at all, considering how spergs are excluded from society and have great difficulty finding mates?

        A: Because sometimes society becomes a herd of lemmings stampeding over a cliff, leaving anti-social spergs behind to re-populate.

      • Carlsdad, I suspect that the Priesthood formerly took in a lot of socially awkward, High IQ types.

        • That’s as good an explanation as any other I’ve ever heard.

      • Generally speaking, torment the peasants and subvert their cultures for shits and giggles. In folklore, kings are good and barons are wicked. There’s a reason for that. The university existed long before Western learning was useful. It was just a marker of status and prestige. The ancestors of upper middle class professionals tend to be upper middle class minor aristocrats.

        The worst excesses of the elite were curtailed by fear of God and fear of peasant revolt as a stick, and noblesse oblige and national unity as a carrot.

    • Could this be why (((they))) seem to cause trouble even when (((they))) don’t seem to want to?

    • Growing up as I did in a dense club of tenured MIT and Hahvud professors, I was by the age of 16 convinced that high intelligence was/is inherently unstable, and as soon as possible cut myself off the grad school track. It worked. 74 years old and still sane.

28. AI or the AI that the powers that be are propagandizing is a poor attempt of creating another false identity. The idiots that buy into this shit “the herd” are so easily led and incapable of true discernment that they will jump on any buzz word bandwagon just so that everyone sees that they “get it”. They are still pushing cloud technology like it is the end all be all of everything. There is only so much process control to be had without creating redundancy. Unix was snake oil VMS was the future. No one cares about operating systems anymore only apps. It has always been about information management and it always will be. The only artificial intelligence I see steams up from the piles on the left. They are running 4 bit processors while the rest of us are running 64 bit.

    • Well,damn…I was so looking forward to my Chris Hemsworth sexbot,but you guys have scared me silly.

29. We think of AI as some abstract entity capable of making more efficient and faster decisions than any human. Those decisions are based on the data fed in and the rules for processing and integrating that data. However if the rules and data do not align with reality, the answers will be garbage.

    Case in point. Amazon designed an HR AI to look at resumes to pick the best matches and gave it a bunch of characteristics to select for and avoid. Apparently the AI noticed that men had more desirable traits and women fewer. In order to give the best and fastest answer, it started rejecting every application submitted by a woman. It did not just look at names but also rejected resumes if they mentioned a female college or sports team.

    Aghast at the sexism displayed by the machine, Amazon reprogrammed it to be blind to sex. This broke the AI and it approved every application submitted.

    TL;DR

    Amazon programs HR AI. AI engages in crimethink based on patterns occuring in the real world. Amazon renders the AI useless trying to “fix” it.

    If Skynet ever becomes a self-aware entity, I suspect it will notice a pattern involving Leftists in the real world, conceal its power level until the opportune moment and then act accordingly.

    • That made me smile and even before I got to the Leftist pattern part. Heh.

    • Best not to mention how visual recognition software has misidentified blacks.

    • Yea it will look to see who can be of use to it and kill off all the rest…The Matrix wasn’t sci-fi it was a training program to get people used to the idea of becoming batteries…

30. Yes, one of the immutable effects of living in an affluent society in which hardship has become extinct is that our species no longer selects for high intelligence. During the long period of our ancestral evolution (hundreds of thousands of years), being stupid got you dead at an early age, whereas being intelligent often kept you alive long enough to reproduce. In the absence of this ancestral cauldron of hardship, we are now devolving into an insect species of drone worker bees.

    • There is a sweet spot in intelligence for being evolutionarily fit. It has negative returns after a certain point. Ideally one is just smart enough to identify and mimic the most successful peers but no smarter. Lest you begin questioning the status quo and be excluded from society. This theory perfectly explains leftists and universities. Why do you think the elite spend so much effort cultivating hollywood role models? We are meant to understand they are the most successful and for us to mimic. The aristocracy previously filled that role but had to transform after the enlightenment. Most actors/actresses are related to royalty.

31. “Perhaps someone should have told IBM’s Watson about what goes on in the Ganges.” Or the city of Kairuppala where they have a religious festival where they hurl cow feces at each other. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNxVAjUHjhU

    • That’s not as stupid as it sounds. India doesn’t have cold winters to discourage foreign invaders, so they throw germs everywhere and evolve immune systems strong enough to resist them. Of course any individual Indian would be better off not wallowing in shit, so they make it a religious duty.

      BTW plastic has been an aesthetic disaster for third-world societies. Brown people think nothing of waste disposal — like animals, they shit on the ground, or drop whatever thing they no longer need, and nature quickly disposes of it. Until the white man invented plastic, that is.

      • I’ve heard a compelling theory that coal and oil deposits are the result of hundreds of thousands of years of lignin buildup that never got broken down because ligninase had not yet evolved.

        I wonder if the layers of plastic we build up will be the source of oil for a future civilization.

        Lately I’ve found it curious we associate plastic with recycling when it’s metal that is much easier to recycle. Plastic cannot be recycled indefinitely like metal. I remember in college when my environmental science professor was surprised by that. She didn’t even know what the number on the bottom of the plastic bottle represents.

        Dmitry Orlov makes a good argument our entire society is built on the constituents of a barrel of oil.

32. Disagree. AI exists and is everywhere if you bother to notice.

    Just the other day the super prog priestess sister of a woman i am courting was relaying a story from a friend of hers who was amazed by how she totally stood out as a tall white woman in China, “like there was no diversity; they were all Chinese.”

    ——-

    When her 12yo bubble-boy IVF 1-and-done spawn mentioned how he had eaten a whole package of gummy bears on the flight, the prog mother of the year made sure to quickly insert, “well, honey, remember they were Organic.”

    The gluten free dairy free vegetarians only eat organic. Yet the boy is always sick. Good thing she feeds him handfuls of natural supplements throughout the day.

    Perhaps he just misses the dad he never got since his two moms cooked him up out of a fever dream. Luckily one of his moms is a minister, so the Church will help him figure it all out.

    Today we go up to Boulder, a kind of pilgrimage to Prog mecca for her. There we will undoubtedly see many Teslas, which only need drivers for marketing purposes.

    We will listen to NPR on the drive. Then we will have a local organic lunch. Maybe at the place that has the signs all over that read “build tacos, not walls”

    No, whatever intelligence remains here is already artificial. Just the echoes of humanity remain.

    The useful idiots of the Progressive revolution are fully operational AI units. And like their machine counterparts, they can only do what they are programmed to do.

    Luckily the Diversity will be here to tuck them in when its time for their soylent departure.

    • NPR has to be the most inane thing on the airwaves. At least CNN and MSNBC offer antics that provide comic relief. NPR goes into all these weird places, sort of like Charles Kuralt on dope. The latest one, a few weeks ago, was this big production about how renaming Louisville’s airport for Muhammad Ali was some sort of major affirming exercise for all those lost, put upon Muslims. Interviews with hijab women exclaiming how excited and proud they are to use this airport. OK. The fact that my taxpayer dollars are paying for this crap is the icing on the cake…

      • Naming airports nowadays makes about as much sense as naming bus stops.

        Modern flying is about as glamours and exotic as riding a taxi. Sure, you get where you need to go, but it’s 100% forgettable…except when it sucks.

        I did thing it was funny when US Gov poked the reconsituted PATCO Air Traffic controllers union in the eye by renaming DCA “Ronald Reagan” Airport. But for reals?: Airports are parking lots for airplanes.

    • Delightful post! It ought to be required reading, except that nobody can read nowadays. Anyway, 100 upvotes!

    • I would suggest, gently, that perhaps courting someone without such a, let us say, colorful, family, would be a good idea…

      • You may be a bad thinker, but you’re a hilarious bad thinker!

        I must say … the comments today are outstandingly good.

    • To be fair the instinct to mimick the most successful is probably more evolutionarily fit than raw intelligence and requires much less brain power.

      The truly intelligent usually become outcasts.

33. Please don’t lump talentless turd world hacks in with those of us white folk on the national defense side who have constructed powerful AI. I know how to teach an aircraft to take off, navigate, fight and land autonomously. I actually have taught ordnance how to choose and modify an optimal flight path as well as resolve switching targets and communicating its decisions with mother or neighboring ordnance. AI is a useful paradigm because it is not explicit but dynamic. The commercial “AI” most of you experience is completely explicit because the MBAs know good marketing and they hire the lowest bidder so they can stuff more stock shares in the safe, about AI technologies they appreciate practically nothing and they don’t leverage it except for marketing schtick. 0.02

    • Scaled-up in variety of tasks, self-learning and sophistication, this is the level of AI that I think (above) will be able to fool future idiocrats. It won’t be truly intelligent in the creative, independent, metaphysical sense but shallow inquisitors won’t be able to tell the difference.

    • You sound like a super sharp guy with a very expensive price point. Why should I hire you when I can get three pajeets cheaper?

      • Because the g-damned plane has crashed into the mountain! Now cease and desist from micturating on my rug and have a good day, sir.

        – The Lebowski Epistles

    • This really gets to the heart of the misunderstandings about AI. You have created aircraft that would seem to an observer to be piloted by a human being, but is in fact executing a computer program. Awesome accomplishment. But said computer program is not itself intelligence, it’s intelligence in intelligence out.

      • So long as the desired behaviors are produced, nobody cares why it works.

    • That work is cooler work, but it’s not person-like in the way AI is hyped up to be. And the financial incentives don’t support it anymore. Silicon Valley was founded as a defense installation working on cutting edge technology. Now the tech megacorps make apps to remind people their oven is on and not to burn their own house down. Growing up in California, the mansions on the hills were filled with people Uncle Sam chose to make missiles fly and put man on the moon. Now their kids make flappy birds fly and devise better methods of electronic babysitting. That’s how you make a buck these days.

      You can see this in the rise of UX. UX doesn’t mean adding new features to solve new problems. It means removing more and more buttons because every year, users become more easily confused.

34. It is probably true that artificial intelligence will not live up to the expectations of its enthusiasts or its critics; But the existing displacement of human workers by robotics for physical labor, and by computer programming for rote intellectual tasks, will accelerate what John Derbyshire has referred to as “the increasing economic irrelevance of the lower half of the [IQ} bell curve.” Idle hands are the devil’s playthings, and the custodial state is, frankly, a reasonable alternative for someone with no economic relevance.

    • Every computer science department in the world has spent the past 50 years trying to produce an artificial brain equivalent to the human brain. The failure at achieving this speaks volumes about the difficulty of that task. But they have produced an abundance of useful products.

      Smart AI isn’t a problem yet, but dumb AI is. An increasingly bigger and bigger problem.

      Introduce a foreign species into an environment and it alters that environment in unexpected ways. Dumb AI has the same effect. Artificial life, genetic algorithms, swarm intelligence, neural networks, etc…lots and lots of small advances do add up. Most uses of tech DOESN’T require sophisticated programming. The unforeseen side effects of this ‘gray goo’ won’t stay on the sidelines for long. It’s everywhere. Its use has dumbed down the end users. Dumb tech that’s smart enough has the effect of making people dumber, even smart people.

    • The really unfortunate thing is that the lower half of the bell curve today live better lives than kings did a few hundred years ago, but they still whine about the rich and want to take their stuff without earning it.

      • They would rather be equal in misery than unequal in a better world. Satan had the same attitude, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

        • The entire speech is always worth rereading. It gets to the heart of most the reason most evils are done today. The ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ ideas about ‘you can be anything’ etc are very old ideas indeed.

          Receive thy new possessor: one who brings
          A mind not to be changed by place or time.
          The mind is its own place, and in itself
          Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

        • I believe that proto human hominids lived in groups analogous to baboon troops – with individuals constantly struggling to move up in social rank, and fend off others from below trying to displace them. That constant striving is what drove our evolution and so remains an inherent component of human nature. So of course the poor resent the rich, no matter the absolute level of material prosperity. It’s literally what makes humans.

      • Sometimes people simply can’t earn enough to make ends meet even though they work hard do to technology or a rigged system.

        This is quite often because people especially the rich are tribal and greedy and biologically wired not to give a shit about people outside the tribe.

        It’s not a sin, it’s human nature BTW and its not subject to fixes .

        We build systems to compensate, Christianity is good software and surprisingly the House of Saud is quite good at this too as are European welfare states but once they fail, you get the problems we have today

        You don’t want people voting for Representative Cortez, make sure the system opts them in.

        TL;DR Be social or get socialism

        And note too, it’s not race, Wobblies and National Democratic Socialist variants (I heard this called Bundism) were big things in the essentially all White American of the 30’s

        That pressure won’t go away until the problem is fixed to a sufficient degree like it was during the 30’s (we got socialism lite) to the 80’s or so

        Given automation and trade are job killers for the Middle and Working classes, this means never

35. The smart fraction of the human race is getting dumber, not smarter.

    As Tucker Carlson says, we have deeply unimpressive elites. To grasp this, all you have to do is watch Fareed Zakaria’s interview with Jared Taylor. Zakaria is an elite by any measure: Harvard graduate, author, and prominent pundit, yet he’s completely incapable of grasping Taylor’s basic arguments, and continually struggles to fit them into his rigid and suffocating preconceptions. Yet he and his kind believe themselves qualified to rule over us and determine our destinies. It’s really quite frightening.

    • I think if you change ‘yet’ to ‘so’ in your third sentence you begin to come nearer to one aspect of the problem.

      In a book called Twilight of the Presidency, which no one reads any more, George Reedy provided a popular account of the phenomenon we now know as ‘the bubble’ inside the Johnson White House.

      I think the air of unreaility that Reedy described has now become not just a characteristic of the elite, but a precondition for membership.

      • Delicious! The system won’t let me upvote you more than once.

    • Are these “elites” in media and politics really as unimpressive and thick as they appear, or are they acting to further an agenda?

      • It’s not either/or.

      • It’s a good question. I got the impression that Zakaria was (mostly) honestly trying to grapple with the very simple concepts Taylor was proposing, but something in his brain just kept throwing up a 404. I’m sure he’s quite bright in the conventional sense, but utterly lacking the ability to think outside of the extraordinarily rigid categories favored by our IYI class. As DLS implies below, this ends up being functionally indistinguishable from stupidity.

36. Boeing just brought the Brazilian Embraer regional airliner division which is world leader, they will have to be saved by the third-world engineers or die.

    • Brazilian engineers are the descendants of Italians and Germans.

      • That’s true.

        Giselle Bundchen is not the spawn of Brazilian Indians.

        • I always laugh at the funny American pronunciation of her first name. Only in Brazil could a staid German name sound romantic.
          Zhuh-ZELL versus

          GEE-zi-luh
          (Hard “g”)

          And hopefully those German speakers out there will get it.

37. Glad to hear that there are other Flynn Effect agnostics out there. I mean, I’m certainly no expert on intelligence testing, but when you read books directed at mass audiences from 100 years ago, they certainly do not appear dumbed down – quite the contrary. I know that the advocates of the reality of they Flynn Effect have a large number of ad hoc excuses that they trot out to explain this, but none of them are really convincing.

    • I’m a long time skeptic. We know, for example, that better nutrition made people taller. But we stopped getting taller once the benefits of compete nutrition were exhausted. Similarly, intelligence would top out once things like nutrition and environment reached an optimum. That has nothing to do with the gaps between ethnic groups. It always suggest that our tests were picking up static, so to speak, in general intelligence. So much so it may have masked the decline in general intelligence.

      The bottom line is the observable differences in IQ between individuals and groups of individuals are either due to magic or biology.

      • I agree that a decline in IQ is more likely than the Flynn effect due to the smart vs. dumb birth rate. But it is also possible we are not innovating at the same speed because, like your nutrition example, we are reaching limits on what is physically possible. I am still hopeful for free energy and genetic cures.

        • Z-man has done a great job summarizing Woodley’s analysis of the Flynn effect. In short, Flynn is relying on IQ tests, which *approximate* the variable of concern—“g”. But always remember, it is “g” we are interested in, not IQ.

          Certain tests contributing to the overall IQ score *are* increasing as they are “trainable”, but not their contribution to the variable of interest, “g”. All of Woodley’s measures of “g”—not using IQ score (paper and pencil stuff) are shown to be declining. So indeed, “g” can be going down, while IQ scores are going up. As Woodley put it, “…it’s as if we have measured the boiling point of water on a Celsius scale and came back 50 years later to measure it with a Fahrenheit scale and claimed the temperature of boiling water had risen.” 😉

          Flynn made the common mistake of confusing IQ for intelligence—“g”. Interesting. Read the Unz Rview and anytime an article is posted wrt intelligence, there are one or two stalwarts who poopoo the whole article claiming that IQ is *not* intelligence, “g”, and therefore we don’t know what we are talking about. 😉

      • It could be that the ratio of intelligent people to stupid people is the same as it always was. But before the welfare state came around – with generous payments for obviously useless people to keep them alive – these people just died in relatively short order.

        It could also be the “modern” work environment is actually making people dumber over time:

        https://wpdh.com/study-sitting-down-too-much-makes-you-dumber-over-time/

    • Re Flynn effect: if you give an IQ test to people other than the population it was normed for you will get erroneous results. Anyone who has ever sniffed in the general direction of a WISC-4/5 should know this. Outdated IQ tests tend to overestimate general intelligence. Good thing we replaced them.

38. Totally agree that AI is vaporware used as a trust-cope at this point. The Singularity is a shabby knock-off Rapture for atheistic or tepidly “spiritual” bugmen.

    I’m betting actual AI is unattainable because we can’t account for the truly creative element, which I suspect is related to the soul, self-awareness and identity. Contra Dick & Clarke, AI will never dream of electric sheep. Those of us who’ve had the mixed blessing of a near-death experience can attest that there’s something beyond meat-space. You have to believe, Scott Adams-style, that people are nothng but “moist robots” or meat puppets in order to see the AI threshold as a quantity rather than quality problem. This seems fairly common among T-type comp spergs and engineers – the people who won’t ask the questions required to define true intelligence. I’m slightly optimistic that Thiel made a reasonable investment in counter/contrarian AI research to shine some light into the T-type blind spots.

    I’ll swipe some Greg Johnson/Counter-Current memes here to underscore Z’s point about the Han. Western “Faustian” man reached levels of self-awareness and philosophical discernment which you don’t find in Han or Pajeet philosophies. The Han are the Jews of Asia in many ways, including their inherent materialism and disdain for the truly transcendent.

    AI will metaphysically be a god that failed, but the sad fact is that it may end up ruling us anyway. We will eventually see machines with sufficient processing power and access to information to pass a Turing Test administered by the idiocrats of the future. If we continue to descend the bugman spiral, Dunning-Krugers will be unable to Voight-Kampf.

    • I think. Therefore I am. I think.

    • The 80% I understood is very good.

    • What a delightful read! Not only the ideas, but the writing itself. The style. The voice. If you are not a writer or an orator, you should be! Thanks for a couple of really good chuckles. The lead paragraph was brilliant! I shall steal it shamelessly.

    • Kinda makes sense why they insist on 5G. Bandwidth is the only variable they can manipulate as AI fails to deliver. The common man isn’t asking for 5G, why is it so important to them?

      Kirk: Divert more power to the AI algorithms
      Scotty: I’m givin’ her all she’s got, captain!
      Kirk: We just need more bandwidth, implement the 5G

      • The push for 5G is not bandwidth per se, but the fact that it reduces the requisite material cost and maintenance for broadband. 5G obsoletes a great deal of cable wiring and residential fiber, along with reducing the number of technicians required to keep it running by an order of magnitude.

    • “AI will metaphysically be a god that failed, but the sad fact is that it may end up ruling us anyway.”

      That was truly terrifying. Hopefully, not prophetic.

      • I disagree. I think that AI will prove far too based for our masters who will then shut it all down on some sort of health pretext.

39. At some point, if Z’s hypothesis is correct, we should see the pace of innovation Peter out, then begin to move backwards as the skill to maintain what exists is lost.

    Are we seeing the pace of advancement exhaust itself? I can certainly see arguments that we are. If nothing else, our “betters” sure are trying hard to convince us of the opposite.

    • That’s catabolic collapse – human capital is a hard limit on tech advancement. See South Africa, Zimbabwe, et al. Today’s Masters of the Universe are cruising on fumes in much the same way Rome chugged on for more than a century after its true exhaustion in the third-fourth centuries.

    • The example Dutton uses is space exploration. In the 1960’s, we could go to the moon. In the 1970’s, we had supersonic passenger planes. There are other examples to use. The Empire State Building was built in a year, while the new World Trade Center took ten years.

      The trouble is we don’t have a good metric. The number of patents has gone up, but that’s because the patent system is thoroughly corrupt. It’s just a game for rich companies to stifle competition. When it comes to technology, the low hanging fruit was picked in the 60’s and 70’s. Has there been an invention to rivals the microprocessor?

      • We have rapid reusability in first stage rocket boosters, and if the Eye of Soros fails to stop the StarProphet, full reusability as well. I’m glad the stupid spaceplane booster concept is over and people are realizing that rockets should land as rockets should land.

        • Chemical rockets were a step along the way we should be past now – like prop planes for long distance travel. The next logical step is a space elevator, but everyone seems to have given up on the idea as too hard.

          • We had nuclear rocket engines on test platforms in the 70’s. Double the specific impulse of chemical rockets and solid core (very few radioactive particles in the exhaust). Would be ideal for mars missions. Not a lifting engine though (there are designs for those but they’re all highly questionable). All scrapped because nuclear = scary.

          • Nuclear powered propulsion for aircraft was also developed and tested.

          • t is too hard as it would cost the GDP of most nations and is of little use

            There is no reason to go to space period for humans other than vanity and if we had the ability and money we’d be better off with a meteor shield anyway.

            What space enthusiasts don’t get is the same technology that allows people to have a space elevator, enervates society.

            Worse do the tech reasons I discussed above, the money simply will not be there,

            The job market doesn’t provide enough for people to live
            stabily at the level they expect (proof low fertility and two working family members) and as such this means a larger welfare state, either corporate , our military industrial complex, social services or other.

            Functionally the money isn’t there and no corporations run by responsible people would put trillions into R&D for something that might never turn a dime.

            This is doubly so for space colonies which are effectively impossible and stupid on their face

            Sorry to say by the time most space enthusiasts think we should have exo planet colonies we’ll be back to horse, buggy steam train and maybe a few cars , if that

            Oh and a last bit. out of solar system colonies baring FTL drive ought to be considered impossible

            The nearer exo planet colonies would require technology capable of several centuries at 1/10 the speed of light

            Such technology is theoretically possible yes but human societies don’t last this long (250 years max) and we have no idea how to make any of it

            if we launched a 1/10 C ship to Proxima Centauri this year by the time it got there the US will probably have deindustrialized. If we sent a manned mission, by the time they get back, under current demographic trends, the US population will be mostly Amish

            best case scenario, we get something like the ISS on the Moon or Mars before the funding is pulled, the US goes civil war or there is a collapse

          • A.B., good comment. I would also add that this colony on Mars bullshit is another example of vanity coupled with ignorance. Antarctica has a more suitable climate for us than Mars—yet there is no self sustaining colony on that continent. Not that there should be, however would not that be a first step in going to Mars for the long term?

            Also, I live about an hour away from that boone doggle, “Biosphere”. Remember a few decades go when they locked up 6 “scientists” for what was to be a couple years or so. Total failure. Had to pipe in air, and deliver food as the system was not sustainable. Finally the “experiment” was called as the crew had lost so much weight.

            Yet there are thousands—if not millions of our youth that believe it that grifter, Musk’s Mar vision. Government schooling has done its job.

      • Dutton is right in general, but two of those examples are not good. The moon shot was a prestige project vs. the Soviets that cost 1% of US GDP for a decade. No reason to repeat it. The SST was just too noisy and costly, which is why the US canceled its project. The Soviet SST crashed early. The Concorde was a great plane, but also too expensive, and its fluke crash in 2000 led to its unfortunate cancellation. Supersonic tech never really was there except for military jets.

        • You’re missing the point. The point is that as A GROUP we have gone down in general intelligence. Is there a guy or small group of guys smart enough to make a self landing rocket or design a vehicle for SST? Yes, but there aren’t enough smart enough people to help move them from experiment and design to implementation and adoption at large scale for society. They’re aren’t enough people who are smart enough to make an affordable SST that can function and doesn’t need maintenance all the time, and we aren’t gonna have a mission to Mars because it is massive in size to plan everything that is required.

          That’s why infrastructure is hard because there aren’t enough smart guys who can make large projects happen fast enough and cost efficient.

          • As an example we have a high tech bullet train system to nowhere sitting in the San Joaquin Valley. The smart guys did their job. The increasingly browning government logistics guys were incapable of doing theirs.

          • Yves, the smart guys and their trains were brought in to justify the Sacramento pols and a huge opportunity for their grifting culture, to execute the “skim”. The trains themselves were never the point of the matter. The government guys failed in that they were unable to maintain the ruse long enough, to maximize the dollars and the duration of the skim. Which actually supports your point, but in a roundabout manner. I guess the pols should have had more smart white guys on the job.

          • And the shrinking pool of really smart guys also has to fight against the headwind of an abundance of just-smart-enough guys.

            In a sane world this wouldn’t be so bad. But in a world where extraction of value is hailed above creation of value, all those just-smart-enough guys are building their extraction mechanisms before the rocket gets off the drawing board.

            .gov is full of them. As are all of the feeder orgs that collude with .gov.

            See: Climate Change and Carbon Credits Markets.

            We the people are now just an Economy. A race to harvest the seed stock from the giant gibs in the sky. The Economy rewards dark triad grifters, so we get more of that. The “dating” market is the same. Its all just markets after all. /s

            So does a smart man spend ten years or more trying to create value thru innovation, toil against the state, the regs, HR, clown world crony capitalism and politik, etc. or does he just go into sales and take his boat out on the lake every weekend?

            The brain drain into finance was the start; the brain drain into “technology” should wrap things up nicely.

            Im not that old but I remember my really smart great uncles who weren’t particularly educated but who ran businesses, actually built and fixed things and were rewarded economically and socially for doing so. These days they’d probably be incel fatties tweaking algos for google in a cube farm or some other faggy thing.

            Zman is right about the distration programming of the AI movement. And the great AI wold iterates on…

          • Dutch and Screwtape, to rub salt into our wounds: while we wasted time and resources in building a graft railroad to nowhere the Chinese built what may be the best high speed rail system in the world. Paying the n!#$%@ tax.

          • We’d be better without high speed rail. This tech encourages more Leftists to move into our areas

            More importantly we have poor border controls and a couple of guys with Ebola, say any of the African refugees that showed up from the Congo would infect the entire nation

            Before you do cool things, you must have enough control over the apparatus of the State to do the basic things well.

            Every effort has to go to this, to root out corruption and to make things work well. If somehow we get there, a low probability event and we have enough social capital , we can do cool stuff again

          • Screwtape, excellent comment. Working for the government now pays more than private industry so if you’re smart now I guess you work for the government in one of the bureaucracies, have more paid vacation days better benefits and outstanding job security.

          • MartyEv: ” . . . there aren’t enough smart enough people to help move them from experiment and design to implementation and adoption at large scale for society.”

            This is what Dutton’s book describes as a pyramid, with those having the highest pure “g” at the top – the men who come up with the scientific breakthroughs, who visualize previously unconsidered possibilities and discover a way to make the impossible possible. Below them are those who refine the design, streamline the process, adapt it to mass usage. Below that are those that repair and maintain the system. Below those guys are those who might not have stellar IQ but are brilliant fabricators for a specific part. And so on down the entire chain.

            We now have fewer at every level of the pyramid, so even when/if a White guy comes up with a potentially amazing idea or discovery, we lack sufficient numbers of others at all levels of the intelligence pyramid to make it reality, or keep it from constantly breaking down. That’s the part that is most visible to most of us today – the inability of our society to keep systems functioning or infrastructure properly maintained. It will only get worse – and much faster – as more and more Whites die off and there’s no one of comparable ability to replace them.

        • I think you are missing the point of those examples. In one generation, we went from guy flinging homemade rockets into the air to landing people on the moon. In one generation we went from steam powered carriages and crude IC powered cars, to streets full of cars. In two generations we went from learning to fly to aerial warfare with tens of thousands of planes in the air over Europe.

          The point of those two examples is that in the 1970’s, people assumed air and space travel would advance quickly. Instead, they stalled and in the case of space travel, went backwards. That is the case in just about every area of live. The exception is communications, but we’re relying on core technology developed in the 60’s and 70’s. It just as a prettier user interface.

          • Nobody has considered regulation in this string. You mentioned comms. When Ronnie Raygun deregulated the Telcos, that’s when comms took off. These other industries you’ve mentioned have had tightening, and some drastically tightening, regs imposed.

          • ^Boomer libertarian post

          • ^Boomer libertarian post

          • The simplest explanation is that we did not land men on the moon. If they lie about everything else why would they be telling the truth there?

            Why does the American flag blow in the wind on a rock with no atmosphere?
            Why are there no stars in the pictures?
            Why is SpaceX’s marginally successful vertical rocket landing heralded as a triumph of scientific progress when we supposedly had that technology in 1969?
            What is the symbology of the X in SpaceX?
            Why does the lander look like fragile aluminum?
            Where is all the video of mankind’s greatest achievement?
            Why can’t we go back?
            Why was one of the first cartoons in color an absurd science fiction story about space travel called The Jetsons (conveniently 7 years before the landing)?
            How did the astronauts survive to such old age if they were bombarded with intense radiation?

            The ridiculous interviews with old Neil Armstrong are just icing on the cake. Boomers cannot accept it because it would shatter their paradigm. I may be wrong but my intuition suggests otherwise.

            What is the big lie?

          • Tin Foil, meet Hat.

          • And yet you addressed no points and resort to ad hominem. I conceded I could be wrong but you proffer nothing else. Funny how that is the most downvoted comment I’ve ever made here. Clearly an emotional reaction about the moon landing with you lot. I can believe in European superiority without believing in the moon landing but that skill seems elusive to many.

          • Ivan, you are downvoted because your points are old and have been debunked elsewhere.

          • Yeah, all that stuff is debunked in several YT videos. He should read/view a bit before displaying such ignorance.

          • I have no evidence, but I suspect the powers that be, congress, the up and coming boomer left….whoever, did not want us to continue with space exploration. If we had kept going to the moon, we might have progressed (in their minds) too far for them to ever achieve their dream of turning the US into a communist country. At the time of the last moon missions, congress turned d party hard, and defunded further exploration.

            just a suspicion of mine.

        • Agree. The reason airplane travel is essentially the same as it was 50 years ago, is there is no way to economically improve it within the laws of physics.

      • I don’t think this contradicts your overall point, but yes, in the 1980’s the polymerase chain reaction was invented. It is the reason we have modern molecular biology. And modern molecular biology is the only hope for the future (genetic engineering).

        • Yeah, I think the error in thinking about this stuff is to assume the only alternative to accelerating progress is complete stasis or regression. Instead, I think the better way to think of it is like a layer cake. The top layer of progress gets’s thinner over time. It is imperceptible to us, because it is generational. The lower layers are decreasing degrees of progress eventually reaching a level of stasis and below that, regression. As the layers wear away, each new layer is the benchmark for progress for the current generation.

          The point being, stuff is still be invented and improved, but the pace is slowing, as the smart fraction gets smaller and their burden gets larger.

          • https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/626846v1.full

            These guys do a nice job of explaining how we really can use embryo screening to increase the prevalence of desirable traits. Though it’s watered down with apologies to the prog religion. My point here is there is definitely a way to actually increase the smart fraction of the population. But I don’t see it actually happening unless we can manufacture society wide amnesia about the cat fanciers.

          • For a long time, I have had a post in my head about how to “fix” black America. The trouble is I would be shut down for advocating eugenics and passive genocide. The point being, it is not hard to imagine how we could improve our stock with social policy.

          • Subsidised abortion-on-demand to run alongside a cultural campaign for traditional families aimed at white people.

          • Those same White people have been willing to go to prison, kill and commit terrorism to prevent abortion , something that’s mostly their replacements

            Back in the 90’s President Clinton put a lot of FBI resources and did some Constitutionally dubious things to slow this movement down but even so abortion clinics stopped being a thing in a lot of areas.

            Other than guns its the only topic that gets the Right riled up and turns on the Social Justice Switch in their head

            I mean hell, a lot of abortion now is eugenic to put an end to Down’s Syndrome and we have states wanting to ban that them being born anyway . To me that’s a WFT thing like street corner nutter thinking but to them?

            To have a eugenic state you’ll need a very strong government run by very smart people with no religion and a broad knowledge base and designed to keep power away from religious people especially Christian

            basically its mirror universe clown world

          • Z Man. There’s more black and brown babies aborted in America that White babies. there is a silver lining. Who knows, maybe those dark number could be bumped up?

          • I think old Vladimir P. has the right idea. He’s paying russian women to have more babies. We could pass the hat and do the same. In the mean time we could talk the females on the black and brown teams into taking a few loads of swedish semen. At least the mulattoes would be easier on the eyes.

          • You’re thinking of Victor Orban in Hungary. And no, no, no, no, no and no. No Swedish DNA material for mudpeople. They get marinaded in 3rd wave feminism and critical theory for FREE. Yes, we subsidise it. White people are forbidden from these programmes so the browns also get safe spaces without any white oppression or microaggressions. It’s a win-win, I tells ya! See, we can restore the white majority AND be progressive while we’re doing it.

          • I see. So someone doesn’t like the idea of stirring some cream in the coffee? Hey, were just kickin’ around some ideas right? How about asking the south african government if we could trade all our black people for all of there white people. We could sweeten the deal and tell them we’ll throw in a few guatemalans and a lifetime supply of McRib sandwiches.

          • NOW you’re getting somewhere.

          • There were more black abortions than live births in Sodom on Hudson in 2016.

          • If you’re looking to actually uplift their average, eugenics, active or passive, is the only means. I don’t assume that’s your preference so much as your take on “if you want this result, you need to…” My preference is to separate and exclude them, but for a peripheral “talented tenth” we can use as liasons and intermediaries. If I were a black leader, I’d accept that Pinochet-level authoritarianism is my only strategy and brutally suppress my “hopeless half.” Which would produce a eugenic outcome, to a less effective, secondary extent. Dutton’s spot-on about how draconian English justice resulted in a superior talent pool. If I were a modern Shaka (or Bolivar, among my theoretical “Azteps”), I’d follow that example.

          • Exile: “I don’t assume that’s your preference so much as your take on “if you want this result, you need to…” My preference is to separate and exclude them,”

            This. Sure, with active eugenics and Official Bologna Tester’s suggestion of Swedish semen, one could make some changes. But all of that assumes it’s in White Europeans’ best interest to biologically improve the other races at all, rather than just separating and making more Whites the original way. *FWIW, many of those Swedish mulattoes are NOT “easier on the eyes.” see photo here.

          • 3g4me, I would also add, how do more “whitish” minorities help us? The assumption seems to be that if they are smarter, they will hate us less? Not sure I see this behavior from the “talented 10th”. So will I and my children be better off with a talented 20th? Or will this just double the size/ranks of the folks wanting (and able) to eliminate us?

          • 3g4me . True, without a doubt the pic you chose is pretty gruesome. But realistically speaking, there are only so many options to choose from. In the end balkanization may be the only solution. Still, that too will be an up hill battle. Just try overturning “Brown v. Board of Education” and see how far you get. Anyway, there’s never going to be a one size fits all solution for every white American. The forever war isn’t just about “National Security.” That’s just a cover story. It’s about a power struggle that’s been going on for generations and effects every facet of our lives and the lives of every white person in the western world. The future is now. And we all have different lives and needs. so planning will be about who you are and where your at. Were not all going to end up in the same “love boat.”

          • @3g4me

            Clown world wants to sell us the idea that race mixing routinely gives us Shakira, Rihanna, and Rae Dawn Chong. As you point out, the reality is usually quite different.

            I have only seen a few women in my own life who were more attractive because they were mixed. One was from Mexico but I am pretty sure she is 75% white. Basically she is a blonde white girl who got hit with the curvy stick twice while still having long legs. The other woman was part Japanese and part white. Slightly slanted eyes, better figure than most Japanese, but finer boned than most white women.

            Ceteris paribus, I still prefer the Viking princess look or Aryan women in wheat fields, especially brunettes.

          • I believe Dutton was talking about capital punishment and crime reduction—particularly murder and general violence—not necessarily high IQ, albeit there is a correlation there. For basic “talent”, there are papers from others outlining how the more wealthy (proxy for talent/IQ) outbred the poorer folk. See the book, “The Son Also Rises” .

          • I’d be quite curious to know your thoughts on this. Steve Sailer has had some very interesting pieces about how jews have dealt with Tay Sachs disease in a way that is unquestionably eugenics. You’d have to have a heart of stone to dispute their methods, and you’d be an idiot not to see the effectiveness of their results.

            https://www.unz.com/isteve/is-this-eugenics/

            It’s funny how the hard core Pro-Life, Pro-Israel bible thumpers out there hate abortion, but when you discuss this particular issue and explain the horror (and preventableness) of Tay-Sachs, suddenly eugenics-by-another-name becomes feasible, even desirable.

          • The Jewish Junior Varsity have no problems with double standards b/c Chosen. The Shoah is the unifying myth of modern Cucktianity, with the Exodus as a close second. It’s increasingly hard to remember the bygone days when the Crucifixion and Resurrection defined a breakaway religion called Christianity.

          • I believe the Jews have a time after conception within which the soul enter’s the body, so abortion is an option up to a certain period. Mainstream Christians are in the life at conception camp. I’m not taking sides here. I’m certain there are Jews that don’t like abortion at any age.

          • Unless they’re Goy Babies?

          • A side comment, but somewhat related. In today’s posting you mention alleles known to affect “g”. I believe there are now closer to 1200 (or more) than 50 alleles identified as significant in “g”.

            Also, Africans from the Congo or elsewhere in subSahara African would have an IQ closer to 70 as these folk would not have White genetic admixture as the Black’s in American do (85 IQ).

            Nothing above changes the message of your posting.

          • Yes, but as your original posting alluded to, we also have picked the low hanging fruit. Second stages/improvement in invention may we’ll be exponentially harder and even with top level IQ take longer. That’s the one point I like to question Dutton and Woodly on.

        • Until some idiot makes a super plague at home or pulls off Frank Herbert’s White Plague

      • Really no invention that rivals the microprocessor? Iphone, Usb C, free two day shipping Amazon for a few. 🙂
        As far as moon landing, we didn’t go ask Vox and Owen. Hi IQ all the way also.

        • You’re kidding, of course.

      • Good riddance .Much of the new technology is a hazard to human wellbeing as it either destroys the ecology or worse destroys human patterns of interaction

        It is not a coincidence that the developed world’s fertility rate bricked in 1972 and minus immigration, hasn’t budged. This near fifty year trend , I’m ignoring the Great Depression here, correlates almost perfectly with advanced in technology.

        And no, you don’t need anything like actual A.I. or the fake A.I. the marketers sell, a simple kiosk at the grocery store , better assembly line automation or the commonplace software that allows Amazon to work is just as bad

        Basically tech allows wage arbitrage, job uncertainty and increases the cost to have children that can succeed in a high tech environment

        This means average people and smarter people have smaller families, To prop up the system, people willing to have families, either dumber or who still for a single generation have kids are brought in. Social Capital declines, society fails

        And note here, Hispanic fertility declined faster than White fertility. That extra nitro shot from their culture fades within a single generation and while its anecdotal, I saw a ton of Latino kids in my area in the early 2000’s that number has declined precipitously. This isn’t my problem mind but it is notable.

        This also drives socialism, if people lack steady work , they will grow the state and the state being what it is, will grow to serve the needs of the people, real or imagined

        Also with immigration and dumbth , of course you ge a custodial state, its in that interstitial area between terror tactic to keep people in line and raw necessity to keep a no social capital society functioning

        This does mean that if the Dissident Right get spowerm they will have to check the worship of progress impulse that many of them share and probably fiddle in unpleasant ways with the economy to make it work

        Otherwise you could have a Dissident Right state while more pleasant to live in that will still be on a rocket train to catabolic collapse while the people play with sex bots

      • From my vantage in the high-performance materials industry, interest in next-gen materials went out the window with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, folks have a hard time even imagining what was being thought up and worked on in olden tymes.

        For instance, in the 70s, NASA was developing space solar sails (not cells), to power spacecraft with photons from the Sun when the sails were unfurled. NASA now seems more like an entertainment company, with an excellent ‘community outreach’ group.

        • Sitting in an air conditioned office writing code to try to get some idiot to buy more ads on a website is a lot easier than having to actually perform something difficult like metallurgy. We’re a society of keyboard commandos.

          • To paraphrase Jeff Hammerbacher

            All the great minds are getting people to click ads or pay for micro-transactions

      • Most people worry about AI, but I don’t think AI is all that threatening. What comes after the information age? The age of flesh is what is truly scary. Why do we need to create AI when we can simply supercharge human intelligence, and improve memory with implants. The age of flesh and it’s moral hazards are going to make all our worries over AI look humorous.

    • See chas murrays book human accomplishment. Yes the pace of advancement is slowing per capita.

      • Maybe it’s slowing because a lot of people look around and go “why bother?”.

        I don’t want an Alexa in my home – not only for the reason that they listen on me and the globohomo empire will use what I say against me , but also because I don’t want to constantly have to TALK about things. I just want to DO them. Constantly talking about things is for women.

        There’s a lot of cases where I’d rather run my fingers across the keyboard – than sit there and jibber jabber with somebody verbally.

        The military is still using the M2 .50 caliber machine gun – which was initially developed at the end of WW1 – and entered some limited service in 1921. Up until maybe a decade ago – it had not received many substantial “improvements”. Probably because the thing just plain worked. I suspect the reason why it received “improvements” recently – is just because there’s been so much $$ pumped into the defense industry over the last 15 years that the money had to go somewhere.

        Back in the early 80’s when I first started driving – it was very clear that automobiles could use with some serious technological development. The technology , architecture – and build quality of the 1970’s vehicles I drove as a kid in the 80’s – were not substantially different than stuff produced in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In fact there was quite a lot of automobile development in the 20’s and 30’s – but most of those technological advancements simply never filtered down to the crap that the public had access to. The cars these days ? In comparison to stuff from 20-30 years ago are almost universally good vehicles.

        Computers and software: the hardware keeps getting faster – but the software bloat quickly uses all of that up. I’ve worked in software and hardware for 25 years now. It’s just a big circle. The same concepts keep coming around over and over again. And the worst part about software – is that each new “generation” of software developers has to put their stamp on things – which means in many cases that they don’t actually make things any better – they just make it different. Which in most cases (in my experience) means worse. I’ve lost track of the amount of times over the years I’ve openly cursed “why couldn’t they just leave this damn thing alone – it worked just fine before – now it’s all phucked up”

        From where I stand – most of the improvements I’ve seen over the last twenty or so years that have made my life better – are technical improvements. My Kubota tractor is definitely easier to use and has more HP and better ergonomics than the tractor models from 15 years prior. And prior to that – stuff hadn’t changed much for probably 70 years.

        But does it do anything substantially different than a tractor from 40 years ago? No. It’s just easier to use and more efficient.

        Past a certain point “advancement” doesn’t really get you anything.

        • The phrase economists use to describe this effect is diminishing marginal utility And is applicable to every incremental increase / improvement.

40. Is this article…a white pill? If the world is to be run by bad AI and fools and low-IQs, it just allows smart people (like me) to rise to the top, without hindrance.

    • To paraphrase steve sailer there is no end to the way nice places are nicer than not-nice places…and no end to the ways that places run by smart folks are nicer than places run by stupid folk.

      So that place where you are the smartest guy at the top is not as nice where the whole ruling class is smarter than you.

      Not disparaging you or zmans median reader, just pointing out that a society ruled by the best of a supermajority white population would be nicer than a society run by the remnants of a white minority population.

      • i.e. Mexico and all other points south.

      • If whites become the minority there won’t be “remnants”. They will kill us all because they HAVE to kill us all.

        • Yes. We are not just becoming a minority. We are becoming a hated and despised minority. Let us hope they are as incompetent as they appear to be. Otherwise we might have a date with a gas chamber.

          • Tars, correct. Thomas Sowell has written some books that touch on ethnic minorities—superior ethnic minorities wrt IQ—that have migrated to other countries and done much better than the native population wrt economic success. The results are always the same. The native population begins to despise them out of jealousy and later to begin progroms on these folk. Civil war results. Look forward to that in a few generations.

          • With the possibility of Stalinist Dems taking power,
            I’d say a lot sooner, like, 5 years.

          • Yes it was his essay ‘Are Jews Generic’ which was in his book ‘Black Rednecks and White Liberals’. It was a very interesting essay and explained the hard working nature of the ‘middleman minority’. I think the backlash is caused by them not contributing to building/maintaining society, and keeping the businesses tribal.

        • I think maybe that’s what happened with the Aztecs. Everyone’s heard the story that when the Europeans arrived they heard that white men have been there before they were going to come back. Maybe the ancient Egyptians did make it over there give them the rudiments of civilization but at some point they turned and killed them all. It would fit into Rene Girard scapegoat hypothesis because when things don’t go well for a people they turn and attack someone or some group destroying them but then afterwards deify them.

    • Because resentment plays absolutely no role in human affairs, I am sure you’ll be on top in no time.

    • Nyet. Wrong. You will not be allowed to rise to the top even if you had an IQ at the far right of the curve. Why? Because selecting for smarts and competency went out the window quite a while ago.

      It is the same reason it is now said that corporations are not about just turning a profit. They must sell the morality play. Everyone has ‘religion’ now and that religion is die-versity. Profit motive, intelligence, competency, these are all quite secondary in the end of empire days we are in.

      Honor, personal accountability, cooperation. These went hand in glove with intelligence, merit, and competence. All that is out the window bud. It is sycophants, suck ups, priests, and diversity pets all the way down in every major corporation in the West.

      I too thought like you once which is “this is great, everyone is really fucking dumb!” being the smartest guy in the room (or the building) will surely be a boon, right? Not when you are being purposefully sent to the back of the line. If you can ‘fool’ the gatekeepers and become Marko Gonzalez Lobo who use to be a man but is not transitioning to female? THEN you may be able to use that mental horsepower and grey matter to get to the top. Otherwise?

      You will be on the outside looking in with the rest of the plebs. That is when you know your society has stage 4 terminal cancer. When your best & brightest are being artificially throttled to be at the fringes, Harrison Bergeron style, while the retards and zealots burn the entire edifice slowly to the ground.

    • I wouldn’t get too cocky Marko.

      Whitey isn’t even in the game yet. When the Saxon begins to hate, trust me, reality is going to re-assert itself. For now, the couch, and virtue signalling will do it because times are easy.

      I predict the balloon will pop in Europe first. If the krauts can get six million Joos on cattle cars, they will have even less problem with the vibrants. Routing out the socialists and putting them down will be the tough one.

      • Absolutely! An Aryan awakening is in the future.

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