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Re:Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults? by Terr_ on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @04:27PM (#44881428)
I often like to point out that Earth was already consumed by Grey Goo, and today we are hive-minds in titanic mobile megastructure-swarms of trillions of the most complex nanobots in existence (that we know of), inheritors of tactics and capabilities from a zillion years of physical and algorithmic warfare.

As we imagine the ascension of AI/robots, it may seem like we're being humble about ourselves... But I think it's actually the reverse: It's a kind of hubris elevating our ability to create over the vast amount we've inherited.

Re:Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults? by solid_fuel on Wednesday August 13, 2025 @02:14AM (#44885142)
To take it a little further - if you stretch the conventional definition of intelligence a bit - we already assemble ourselves into a kind of collective intelligence.

Nations, corporations, clubs, communes -- any functional group of humans is capable of observing, manipulating, and understanding our environment in ways no individual human is capable of. When we dream of hive minds and super-intelligent AI it almost feels like we are giving up on collaboration.

Re:Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults? by BlueTemplar on Wednesday August 13, 2025 @05:03AM (#44886168)
We can probably thank our individualist mindset for that. (Not that it's all negative.)