Nah, it's advanced SEO. He almost certainly didn't even come up with it himself; billionaires and even centimillionaires can have teams of PR people just coming up with this shit for them all the time.
Boris Johnson (or his PR team) did it with the bus thing, and cheese [0].
Yes, Thiel has nutjob beliefs. Utterly insane.
No, this wasn't one of them. Too calculated. Too sweaty.
We're talking about one of the guys connected to Cambridge Analytica here.
Maybe we should be clear about which beliefs we're talking about.
If your claim is that he doesn't believe Greta Thunberg specifically is the Antichrist, then sure. But that's just listening to the words that he says. He never says he believes Greta is actually the Antichrist.
"In our world, [the Antichrist] is far more likely to be Greta Thunberg [than Edward Teller or other mad technologist, or implicitly weapons and surveillance tech manufacturer Peter Thiel himsef]."
He does actually believe this.
So yes OP is correct that Thiel said and does actually believe Greta "is potentially" the Antichrist. But that's a different claim than saying that she actually is the Antichrist. There are thousands or millions of people (most unknown to Thiel) who could fit into the Greta-Antichrist category broadly. So it's a much weaker claim than that Greta is herself singularly the Antichrist.
Both claims are equal levels of insane though. If you believe the weaker claim that the Antichrist would be someone like Greta, it requires exactly zero additional insanity to believe the stronger claim that Greta is actually the Antichrist.
Exactly. The literal claim is just a fig leaf for being able to say 'oh, he surely doesn't mean that' whereas the subtext is far more important and he definitely believes that based on this and many other statements and actions in the past.
People can be profoundly stupid in areas like basic/fundamental morality, while also being in the top 0.001% in areas like manipulating media and making money.
Examples: Every billionaire. Every single one - except Chuck Feeney who proved the rule.
It's not very smart to fail morally and spiritually, over and over, without ever looking into why or trying to correct the issues.
It does take intelligence of a particular kind to examine yourself and what makes you happy, fulfilled. And it takes a certain kind of stupidity to become greedy for more and more and more, neverending.
I don't believe that intelligence is a single axis. You can even have different levels of intelligence on different days for the exact same topic; even on the same day from one hour to the next.
Some people might be great at set theory but terrible at calculus; some people might be great with their hands at sewing but clumsy with glasswork. People are weird and complex.
But what's clear is when people don't even try to be good people. And that requires a particularly dense form of stupidity.
> A pretty simple inner loop of flywheeling the leverage of blackmail, money, and violence is all it will take. This is essentially what organized crime already does already in failed states
[Western states giving each other sidelong glances...]
PR firms are going to need to have a playbook when an AI decides to start blogging or making virtual content about a company. And what if other AIs latched on to that and started collaborating to neg on a company?
Could you imagine 'negative AI sentiment' and those same AI assistants that manage sales of stock (cause OpenClaw is connected to everything) starts selling a companies stock.
> The dining halls are run by Compass Group USA, Inc., which the Army has contracted with to run its new facilities based on the company’s history of running airport lounges and handling the meal-planning for college sports teams, Mohan said.
Cool. You're gonna give us some idea of who Compass Group is, right? No?
Fine, I'll do it. Brb.
...
I see. Million dollar bribes for UN contracts, overcharging schools, listeria outbreaks, feeding horse meat to schoolchildren, slave labor, and "Britain's most heartless employer".
A similar program in the Netherlands once ran for decades. It produced about quarter a million uh, tangible units of art, which not even government institutions wanted anymore, not even for free. The warehouses became full and dusty.
This was later one of the motivations to cancel the program.
BTW credentialism - good or bad? It certainly seems to me that the idea of credentials has crept from medicine, law and engineering into formerly freer and more bohemian territories. An idea of a perepiska for singers or actors would be considered absurd by most people in history. But once money transfers are in place, bureaucracy inevitably follows.
Some accreditations are strong. Others are nearly useless.
Reputation is easily hacked these days. Letters of recommendation don't mean what they used to. Something needs to fill that space - especially when you're filtering down to 2,000 applicants in a country of 5 million people.
Sure, there's a lot of dodgy doctors and lawyers out there. No shortage whatsoever, despite the efforts towards strict credentials. But I'd still rather have someone with a medical degree fixing my broken leg than a random chirurgeon.
We should probably discriminate between the sort of credentials that is meant to prevent harm to unsuspecting clients, and the sort of credentials that serves as a basis for various privileges.
The latter is quite a bit closer to the old feudal system of professional guilds, which were mostly concerned with defending the interests of their own members.
If you want to criticize my post, it would be best to actually provide the data you're being snarky about. You didn't need any money to start that did you? Why suddenly do you need it now? What a crappy and bad faith attitude.
> it would be best to actually provide the data you're being snarky about.
You mean the study you're complaining about without having read? ... The one that's not even a Google search away, because it's literally linked on the page you're already on?
Not being snarky, just really surprised at the expectation of being spoonfed data that's already right in front of you, and the apparent willingness to complain about things that you haven't even glanced at.
Many people worked hard to do this study. I believe if you want to complain about their methodology then you should probably take the time to actually look at what it was first. Is that snark? Is it snark to ask for payment when people ask you to do research (however basic) for them?
> At this point, you have two basic scenarios: something like UBI, or (if the machines are less cooperative) John Conner.
Well, there is a third basic scenario; where the billionaires who control the AI use it to help get rid of all the poors once they're no longer necessary.
If that were true though, we'd probably see them all frantically scrambling to control AI, buying private islands and blackmail networks, getting heavily involved in pandemic preparedness programs, genetic engineering, virus research, instigating massive wars, buying up all the media and politicians, creating massive surveillance programs and building deep underground bunkers. Stuff like that.
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