This very much reminds me of the "Children of the Atom" in the Fallout games, who love to worship nuclear installations and the atomic "glow". Their language is not unlike the language found in the article such as a miraculous healing through being "hit by an electric current". Makes me wonder if the Fallout designers based the Children of the Atom on this.
I thought it was a more general Cold-War-era apocalypse thing. As a late 90s game, Fallout reuses a bunch of tropes from earlier decades in the form of dark-humor.
For example, "Planet of the Apes" book series had the nuclear-bomb-worshiping cult in its 1970 sequel.
I wouldn't be a bit surprised should a serious religion spring up that worships the concept of a GAI, and in fact may as a part of that worship, work toward implementing it.
I am really surprised that Mentifex hasn't started such a cult himself already!
/or maybe he has, and it's a cult of one member only...?
Right, I know the term. But it's not hard to type and it's not hard to read, unlike GAI or AGI (I can't tell which) and it's hardly the only interesting concept that you can construct with those letters.
That particular memetic hazard has never inspired a religion. It was a thought experiment; I don't know of anyone who admits to seriously believing in it.
Meh, only by people who consider any weird beliefs to be a cult. They are just an online forum and dont have any of the other aspects, like an isolated compound in the woods.
And their beliefs have become a lot more mainstream in the past few years. At one time AI risk was pretty obscure and no one took it seriously. Now there are best selling books on it and its entered popular culture. I see it discussed seriously here all the time. That's all because of Lesswrong and Yudkowsky.
> I wouldn't be a bit surprised should a serious religion spring up that worships the concept of a GAI, and in fact may as a part of that worship, work toward implementing it.
The LessWrong crowd is exactly that. They've got their own saints, demons, eschatological prophecies, and, of course, a money basket where you're encouraged to tithe generously (https://intelligence.org/donate/)
I think that's a bit unfair. The LessWrong-o-sphere encourages tithing in the name of effective altruism generally. It's just that MIRI considers itself to be effective for these purposes, and it argues this way (as it is naturally incentivised to do).
> [...] the Oneida Community of New York. Founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848, the Protestant commune believed that Jesus Christ’s power was a form of liquid electricity that could be transmitted to believers through touch. As the most intimate form of touch is sex, the group also believed that, if they had enough of it, they’d create a spiritual battery that would make them immortal and create heaven on earth. So the community encouraged polygamy, orgies and generally engaging in as much sexual activity as possible.
Wait a second...wouldn't having sex among themselves only serve to redistribute the power more evenly among the group? To increase their power and gain immortality wouldn't they need to be having sex with Jesus?
BTW, according to Wikipedia: "The Oneida Community dissolved in 1881, and eventually became the giant silverware company Oneida Limited". No mention of liquid Jesus electricity in the Wikipedia article. Googling for it only turns up a few mentions, and they all or almost all seem to stem from one article.
> wouldn't having sex among themselves only serve to redistribute the power more evenly among the group
Reading that I thought about the perhaps more conventional sense of 'power' in that context. Monogamy to some extent at least is a social construct designed to establish and consolidate power.
Marriage and the concept of legitimate children was the pivotal aspect of feudal society. Inheritance today still largely depends on this notion. Dynasties are possible alone because of lineage.
If it doesn't matter who has sex with whom and who someone's parents are because there's no clearly delineated nuclear family this might indeed work as an equaliser.
You are underestimating the women. They will remember who is the mother of who, and try to favor their own children. Perhaps with enough time it will develop into a matriarchy instead of a patriarchy. (Elephants and whales are organized in a matriarchy. Is this a good comparison?)
And gossip, memory, guess and comparison will try to track who is the father anyway. Men will not be ignored.
Well, one reason the ancient Greeks largely prevented women from leaving the home was anxiety about false paternity. A woman's maternity is never in doubt but a man's paternity can be.
> A woman's maternity is never in doubt but a man's paternity can be.
That's not always true. See the Lydia Fairchild case [1], and the earlier Karen Keegan case [2]. These are both cases where women were told, wrongly, based on genetic testing, that they were not the mothers of their children.
Fairchild was pregnant when the controversy over her maternity arose, and the court overseeing that controversy ordered a witness to attend the birth and ensure that blood samples were taken for testing from both Fairchild and the newly born child. Those samples were tested, and the result was that she was not the mother of that child.
How could this be? The answer turned out to be that both Fairchild and Keegan were chimeras. A chimera is a single organism composed of cells from different zygotes. This can happen when multiple fertilized eggs merge. In other words, both of these women were conceived as part of a set of fraternal twins, but sometime during development they merged with their twin.
Some organs and systems developed from one of the twins, some from the other, and so when you do a DNA test you get the DNA of one or the other, depending on where you sample. In Fairchild's case, for instance, DNA taken from her skin and hair did not match her children's DNA, but DNA from a cervical smear did.
> "So the community encouraged polygamy, orgies and generally engaging in as much sexual activity as possible. Needless to say, the Oneida members were a happy bunch, and the commune lasted more than three decades."
Actually, Oneida had a commitmee of elder woman. You applied to the committee to have sex with someone one time, and they could approve or deny you. (This was designed to prevent forming couples, slow down the amount of sex, eugenics to make perfect humans, and make sure the founder got all he wanted). Oneida, while not monogamous, was pretty far from a sex fest (unless you were the cult leader).
Given how wrong the article is on Oneida, and that's the only one I know about, I'm suspicious of the rest of it.
So earlier on HN I was wondering how two willing co-workers could proposition each other for casual sex without creating sexual harassment problems for themselves or the company.
The Oneida cult was basically a business where everyone worked but also had lots of casual sex and they had a solution. Elder women served as the go-between. Men would not ask women directly for sex. This is a bit like Tinder with a trusted person to tally swipe rights and swipe lefts.
"“The word ‘interview’ was the Oneidans’ euphemism for a sexual rendezvous,” Wayland-Smith says. “It was mostly men who requested the interviews, but they would never ask a woman directly. A couple of older, respected women of the Community acted as go-betweens. A man would say, ‘I want to have an interview with so-and-so,’ and he would ask this go-between to speak to the woman. In theory, a woman could decline without being embarrassed. In practice, the group was small enough that there was definitely social pressure like, ‘It will be good for you to sleep with this person.’"
There would be less social pressure in this cross between LinkedIn, Legal Zoom and Tinder because it would be a SAAS app and not a person being the go-between, but it still would probably be a problem if the office started getting gossipy, which would inevitably happen.
People always misunderestimate the difficulty of formalizing things that are easy for people being people to deal with into legible systems that an institution (like law or a company HR team) can deal with. People tend to know what harassment is. There would be some disagreement if you ask a group of people, especially in ambiguous case. People's opinions will be culturally informed, informed by bias...etc. But, groups of people have an instinctive knack for this.
People do not have a knack for creating institutions that can work with this sort of efficiency at determining truth, or justice... Institutions need formal rulesets, absolutes.. like machines made of people.
Anyway, since harassment is very relevant in the context of the quasi-litigative, something like this could actually happen.
The precoital consent form is a cliche already. But, some sort of formalized policy for hitting on co-workers in a harassment-safe way... That could actually happen.
Frankly, completely flubbing the specifics of events they reference is a big problem with works that have sweeping subjects (in terms of time and place) like "the history of salt" or "religions that worshiped electricity."
Seems like people can find spirituality/religion in just about anything. It reminds me of the Cargo Cults. They started as contact with more technologically advanced societies was force on less sophisticated societies. It was less than 150 years ago.
While I don't know about religion, I personally love to think of electricity as "magic" or "mana" more specifically. It is the magical fuel that powers modern-day magic. We etch arcane runes (circuits), pump mana (electricity) through them, and generate magical results.
Raw mana can also be projected to inflict damage, heal, generate light, heat, etc.
Ha, yes, definititely! Did you ever come into contact with RF design? Things like antennas are quite literally drawing-pentagrams-on-the-floor-style witchcraft ;) [1]
You might also like [2], a story where magic is real and treated as just another field of science/engineering (yes, there are ISO standards for your magic circles and everything ;).
"On a Pale Horse"[1] also takes place in a world with magic and science. Airlines have to compete with magic carpet companies and computers are often used to cast magic because they can be incredibly precise.
I started Ra a while back, but the writing style just threw me unfortunately. RF design is an area I had not considered, but that is kind of funny with the analogy to pentagrams.
For those wondering about "Electricity And Religion": it's pg213 ( https://books.google.com/books?id=NqQZ3XSvWcAC&lpg=PA213 ), chapter 27 of _The Truths of Spiritualism: Immortality proved beyond a doubt by living witnesses_, Wilson 1876 (not to be confused with Henslow's 1919, _The Proofs of the Truths of Spiritualism_), which as the name indicates is a rather credulous retelling of American spiritualism.
Appears to not be a full essay but one of the summary descriptions of it from the table of contents ("Electricity and Religion - Christian Generosity - Brick Bats and Theology - Baptized into Glory").
You can find advertisements for seances referencing "X-ray Science", and various products attributing mystic powers to radium and the like.
All that technology was so amazing that it seemed genuinely magical: Light without fire, instant communication, seeing through objects, etc. We just don't appreciate it having grown up with it.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYRYcEw0svE&feature=youtu.be...
For example, "Planet of the Apes" book series had the nuclear-bomb-worshiping cult in its 1970 sequel.
I am really surprised that Mentifex hasn't started such a cult himself already!
/or maybe he has, and it's a cult of one member only...?
Also, why would that be a particularly interesting worship object? I'd be curious to read some imaginative sci-fi if anyone can furnish it....
And their beliefs have become a lot more mainstream in the past few years. At one time AI risk was pretty obscure and no one took it seriously. Now there are best selling books on it and its entered popular culture. I see it discussed seriously here all the time. That's all because of Lesswrong and Yudkowsky.
The LessWrong crowd is exactly that. They've got their own saints, demons, eschatological prophecies, and, of course, a money basket where you're encouraged to tithe generously (https://intelligence.org/donate/)
Wait a second...wouldn't having sex among themselves only serve to redistribute the power more evenly among the group? To increase their power and gain immortality wouldn't they need to be having sex with Jesus?
BTW, according to Wikipedia: "The Oneida Community dissolved in 1881, and eventually became the giant silverware company Oneida Limited". No mention of liquid Jesus electricity in the Wikipedia article. Googling for it only turns up a few mentions, and they all or almost all seem to stem from one article.
"What we're doing is going to be a problem if social conservatives in government notice, but they'll go after the Mormons first."
Later: "They went after the Mormons."
"Ok, it was fun but we gotta shut it down now before the government comes knocking. We can still do the silverware thing though."
Reading that I thought about the perhaps more conventional sense of 'power' in that context. Monogamy to some extent at least is a social construct designed to establish and consolidate power.
Marriage and the concept of legitimate children was the pivotal aspect of feudal society. Inheritance today still largely depends on this notion. Dynasties are possible alone because of lineage.
If it doesn't matter who has sex with whom and who someone's parents are because there's no clearly delineated nuclear family this might indeed work as an equaliser.
And gossip, memory, guess and comparison will try to track who is the father anyway. Men will not be ignored.
That's not always true. See the Lydia Fairchild case [1], and the earlier Karen Keegan case [2]. These are both cases where women were told, wrongly, based on genetic testing, that they were not the mothers of their children.
Fairchild was pregnant when the controversy over her maternity arose, and the court overseeing that controversy ordered a witness to attend the birth and ensure that blood samples were taken for testing from both Fairchild and the newly born child. Those samples were tested, and the result was that she was not the mother of that child.
How could this be? The answer turned out to be that both Fairchild and Keegan were chimeras. A chimera is a single organism composed of cells from different zygotes. This can happen when multiple fertilized eggs merge. In other words, both of these women were conceived as part of a set of fraternal twins, but sometime during development they merged with their twin.
Some organs and systems developed from one of the twins, some from the other, and so when you do a DNA test you get the DNA of one or the other, depending on where you sample. In Fairchild's case, for instance, DNA taken from her skin and hair did not match her children's DNA, but DNA from a cervical smear did.
Human chimeras are thought to be very very rare.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild
[2] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013452
Actually, Oneida had a commitmee of elder woman. You applied to the committee to have sex with someone one time, and they could approve or deny you. (This was designed to prevent forming couples, slow down the amount of sex, eugenics to make perfect humans, and make sure the founder got all he wanted). Oneida, while not monogamous, was pretty far from a sex fest (unless you were the cult leader).
Given how wrong the article is on Oneida, and that's the only one I know about, I'm suspicious of the rest of it.
Here's a great (long) article on Oneida:
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-polyamorous-chr...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14854649
The Oneida cult was basically a business where everyone worked but also had lots of casual sex and they had a solution. Elder women served as the go-between. Men would not ask women directly for sex. This is a bit like Tinder with a trusted person to tally swipe rights and swipe lefts.
From the article: http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-polyamorous-chr...
"“The word ‘interview’ was the Oneidans’ euphemism for a sexual rendezvous,” Wayland-Smith says. “It was mostly men who requested the interviews, but they would never ask a woman directly. A couple of older, respected women of the Community acted as go-betweens. A man would say, ‘I want to have an interview with so-and-so,’ and he would ask this go-between to speak to the woman. In theory, a woman could decline without being embarrassed. In practice, the group was small enough that there was definitely social pressure like, ‘It will be good for you to sleep with this person.’"
There would be less social pressure in this cross between LinkedIn, Legal Zoom and Tinder because it would be a SAAS app and not a person being the go-between, but it still would probably be a problem if the office started getting gossipy, which would inevitably happen.
People always misunderestimate the difficulty of formalizing things that are easy for people being people to deal with into legible systems that an institution (like law or a company HR team) can deal with. People tend to know what harassment is. There would be some disagreement if you ask a group of people, especially in ambiguous case. People's opinions will be culturally informed, informed by bias...etc. But, groups of people have an instinctive knack for this.
People do not have a knack for creating institutions that can work with this sort of efficiency at determining truth, or justice... Institutions need formal rulesets, absolutes.. like machines made of people.
Anyway, since harassment is very relevant in the context of the quasi-litigative, something like this could actually happen.
The precoital consent form is a cliche already. But, some sort of formalized policy for hitting on co-workers in a harassment-safe way... That could actually happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
Raw mana can also be projected to inflict damage, heal, generate light, heat, etc.
You might also like [2], a story where magic is real and treated as just another field of science/engineering (yes, there are ISO standards for your magic circles and everything ;).
---
[1] See e.g. https://www.sv1afn.com/pcbruler.html or http://www.digdice.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/panel22dbi... for some examples.
[2] https://qntm.org/ra
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_Pale_Horse
All that technology was so amazing that it seemed genuinely magical: Light without fire, instant communication, seeing through objects, etc. We just don't appreciate it having grown up with it.