Roots in the earth. Eyes on the stars. The AI apocalypse is cancelled. The future is Techno Amish.
the shire
Joined February 2026
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Techno Amish Utopian retweeted
You have no choice but to save the United States. There is literally nowhere left to go. This is it. The last bastion. The Alamo. Last stop Saloon. If the US completely falls, it's checkmate Earth. There's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, you can't opt out. There is no Shire.
Techno Amish Utopian retweeted
Repurpose half of the entire public education budget and use it to build Age of Sail tall ship replicas, on which every American boy will be educated to be the kind of man who conquered the planet and the stars
They’re calling it Techno Amish.
I imagine that lots of humans will buy large areas of land and create private villages for their extended families and friends, to all live together. They will use advanced AI and robotics, along with their own labor, to build houses, farms, and all they need to be largely self-sufficient and just live together, having children and having a great time together.
Techno Amish Utopian retweeted
"People aren't ready, this is gonna change everything"
You know what people weren't ready for? Fucking mammoths. Tigers eating them. Monkeys ripping their arms off. The black plague. The ice age. Smallpox. Vikings pulling up on the beach. Drinking water that gives you diarrhea until you die. Getting a scratch and losing your whole leg. The Mongols. The Spanish Inquisition.
One volcano can send us back to the dark ages and these safety guys are gonna be shocked. Oh the robots didn't kill us? It was a volcano? Imagine their disappointment as the hot ash rains down on them.
A solar flare is gonna explode your phone in your pocket your legs are gonna be covered in battery acid and your bank account will stop working. You're afraid of a computer program doing math?
"Things are moving too fast" homie you live on a rock that periodically deletes everything. You are one the most luckiest entities in a 100 light year radius living during a golden era. Cheer up.
My ancestors crossed an ocean in a wooden box because they ran out of fucking potatoes.
"The social disruption will be enormous!"
Nigga World War 2? World War 2? Hop in the people carrier we're landing on the beach.
Are these people out of their fucking minds? Do they not know what we've survived already?
A couple decades of air conditioning and people suddenly think oh this is the natural condition of mankind. No. We used to have eight kids because seven didn't make it. You're gonna be fine. Man the fuck up.
Accelerate.
Techno Amish Utopian retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
Techno Amish Utopian retweeted
I’m sorry but America did not spend 250 years turning “what’s over there?” into the most powerful civilization on earth just to finally arrive at the most consequential technological frontier in generations and decide actually we’re scared of frontiers now. We ARE the fucking frontier. We cross oceans. We build railroads across continents. We split atoms. We put men on the moon. We turn sand into computers and computers into a global nervous system.
Of COURSE AI is terrifying. The frontier is SUPPOSED to scare the shit out of you. That’s how you know you have, in fact, located the fucking frontier.
The answer is not recklessness, but it sure as fuck isn’t paralysis either. America’s comparative advantage is an unusually high national tolerance for ambitious weirdos staring at impossible things and saying “Yeah... I think I can build it.” That trait is rarer than oil, harder to manufacture than semiconductors, and responsible for a frankly preposterous amount of the modern world.
And you absolutely will not fucking regulate it out of us.
Fuck this noise I’m going to church
Room full of women on the Oprah show starts cheering after a doctor says that black female child murderers need to be supported too, not just the white child murderers like Lindsay Clancy.
"I want us to have the same passion for [female child murderers] who don't look like Lindsay."
"There are women of color sitting around this country in prisons for [murdering their children]. I just wanna remind us to have the pink shirts and the energy for them as well."
Totally insane.
Techno Amish Utopian retweeted
To comprehend where the world is going oftentimes all you need to do is pretend you're playing an Orwellian strategy game.
Make crime rampant by simply letting criminals go. Offer surveillance as the solution. Say that privacy is the price we need to pay for security.
"But I have nothing to hide!" That may be true now, but what about when rules change? People are getting arrested in the UK for things they said that were legal three months ago.
Our crime problem is not a surveillance problem. Most of the people that need to be locked up don't even have cars. We chastise China for being a surveillance state but get called retarded when we don't want infringements on our rights.
Warrantless tracking of everywhere you go will not stop rampant fraud, mental illness, and inner city violence. It will, however, stop regular Americans from being able to organize, protest, or take matters into their own hands.
Flock will only accelerate the decline of the West.
Techno Amish Utopian retweeted
This is the best explanation I’ve seen of the double slit phenomenon. Basically every entity is competing to render the next phase of their local reality and larger entities can overwrite smaller entities deep into their history in the same way that the Bitcoin blockchain can re-org itself if enough hash writes a new branch of the canonical chain
primal.net/royster/rough-con…
