Choose Your Own Religion

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This week: is it “depraved” to worry about whether AIs can feel pain? A lot of people in Silicon Valley really buy into the idea that they might be building the machine god, and they think this might even be a good idea, even if they also think we might end up enslaving the machine god and/or that the machine god might kill us all. Mike Solana, founder of Pirate Wires, joins us to help understand these influential weirdos and the influential weirdos they disagree with. We also, necessarily, talk some about what consciousness even is.

In cocktail hour this week for paying subscribers:

* SlutCon, an annual conference in San Francisco with lanyards and PowerPoints and what-not that is organized by an honest-to-god prostitute and which for some reason is popular among the AI safety crowd.

* The Cornell Seven case — which, rather like Silicon Valley, is an object lesson in why straight people shouldn’t be allowed to do ketamine.

* The bizarre conspiracy theory that James Talarico was in an mental institution, and how Republicans have mis-learned the lesson of the successful “they/them” ad.

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