Fuck AI

I talk about survivability because it's easy to grasp, but I'm really referring to any kind of incentive structure. Success, for instance, while similar to survival, is not actually the same thing. Prestige can be something that motivates somebody to be a great artist.

The kinds of lazy basement dwellers I'm talking about are more like people with social anxiety refusing to take phone calls in place of texts. Or, people with executive disfunction watching YouTube instead of getting any work done, which I can speak to personally because I hated doing homework and would watch YouTube instead until the anxiety of deadline failure pushed me into finally getting something done. But that homework was useful.

I obviously believe in the human ability to rise above yesterday's achievements. I am an example of such. I used to have the social anxiety that would have prevented me from talking to you now. I overcame that by having a very insisting personality.

But even so, there are people today who could, even through the tiresome hustle of working day to day, learn to play piano and want to but never do. My concern is leaving people like this to their own devices. To a person who willingly shucks all of life's goals, I think that giving them goals is actually better for them.

There is one particular way in which I think a Star Trek utopia might be overly optimistic, putting it in the realm of hopeful fantasy, and it's that it overlooks the very biological urge to hibernate. The principle of least action, at least as far as education goes, would be not to.