You are confusing intelligence with consciousness (qualia). We simply don't know how qualia develops or how to measure it. We cannot discard, for example, than an ant has a greater qualia level than us. There are theories about qualia being connected to microtubules on neurons and quantum effects... the DOOM-playing neurons also have those microtubules. So you cannot say "definitely not".
Why do you quote only the end, the full sentence is: We cannot discard, for example, than an ant has a greater qualia level than
They're saying that since we don't know how to "measure consciousness" we can't be certain that an ant doesn't have more "consciousness" than us. Obviously it seems very unlikely, but we can't be certain
Remember that the US administration is supporting Israel on the ethnic-cleansing and genocide of Gaza, using Palantir technology and AI systems that generate kill lists. It's "IBM and the Holocaust" all over again.
Technocracy had both socialist proponents like Charles Steinmetz and also anti-communists racists/fascists like Joshua Haldeman (Elon Musk grandfather). In some ways technocracy is the acknowledging of the necessity of economy planning to transcend capitalism but without taking into account class struggle. That way, it can be seen like a good-willed engineer dream that doesn't wants to face social reality or thinks socialist like planning can be implemented just by convincing capitalists it's advantages for the entire society (somewhat like the old utopian socialism / fabianism)... or, it can be used as an ideological cover-up to sell the dream of a brighter future but without questioning the billonarie class, the concentration of capital or the property of the means of production, while avoiding taking explicit positions in every class struggle instance.
I think this new version is the latter case, a bad rehearsal used as a veil of the ascent of fascism in the States.
> I think this new version is the latter case, a bad rehearsal used as a veil of the ascent of fascism in the States.
I've found over time that one man's utopia is another's hellish nightmare. This is true of every utopia and should be a pretty strong argument against implementing them at all.
I see this in some cities. They are very clean looking, no litter, no graffiti, very shiny windows. Then you think about how the people must be treated to make this be true.
> Then you think about how the people must be treated to make this be true.
People who have all their needs met (food and safety, social, etc) tend to want to make the world around them better. I would wager the nice looking places are more likely to have well-treated people.
Places that look like dumps are the ones more likely to be populated by people who are treated poorly.
Or because people in the community have pride in the community. One of the differences I've noticed between Hawaii and Tahiti is in how dirty and messed up the buildings and streets are. In Hawaii there's more of a "community spirit" that tends to encourage cleanliness. I felt more despair from Tahiti.
Community spirit is cleanliness but also freedom. In a community spirit place you get no litter but you also get lots of artsy decorations and weird spaces. In a conformist place you get no litter and whatever type of building billionaires make money from.
TLDR; they built a mouse utopia universe 25 with plenty of food water and space . Eventually some grew violent, others sat and groomed themselves all day, they stopped breeding and died out.
War is violent and mucky and you never know if you’re going to make it out on the other side. I think a great value of Marx’s later work is the reminder of its inevitability. All we can do is prepare and hope it works out better this time.
Perl was a bad language, line noise. It was better than using bash and awk for complex scripting, and better than using C for CGI pages. But Python and PHP were better and more readable for those use cases, and killed Perl.
There’s something profound behind that funny observation. God is a creation of the human mind, yet humanity forgets that it created God. The idea then appears as something external, becoming an independent power that shapes and controls human consciousness. Humans become alienated from what they themselves produced.
This was Feuerbach’s insight, and Marx extended it: just as humanity creates God and then treats him as an autonomous force, it also creates Capital. But Capital comes to operate as if it were an external, self-moving—almost “demonic”—power. People end up acting not according to human needs, but according to the logic of Capital itself.
From this perspective, the Marxist project is not merely a struggle against the bourgeoisie; it is an effort to overcome humanity’s alienation from its own creations—to reclaim power from the human-made “demon” that has come to dominate social life.
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