Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Can’t shake the feeling that that the ozempic revolution is more important than the AI revolution 🤔 Intelligence is a commodity it turns out. Enough said. But being able to chemically fine-tune patterns of motivation/desire/caring/intentionality by content is rather astounding. The weight-loss effects are the killer app, but the GLP-1 agonist “platform” is more profound. It’s the opposite of the Focus drugs used by Emergents to create overclocked focused slave-like classes in A Deepness in the Sky. Glp-1 drugs seem to broadly moderate addiction/desire. If you see them in a broader pharmacological context of other drugs with related effects on focus (are Ritalin, address etc real-world examples of Focus drugs?), or mood (serotonin tweakers…), we’ve created a very messy motivation programming technology suite. What happens if this improves and gets very targeted, creating a technology like the “glanding” in the Iain M. Banks Culture novels? Fascinating futures.
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Eric Platon
@ic
This looks like bringing Brave New World in a new world. Fiction is fantastic mind opener on reality, but reality is so much richer when it unfolds.
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@na
Intent is a commodity it turns out. Enough said.
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avi
@avichalp
contraptions rule everything around me
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
@msms
Desire as the allocation mech. for commoditised intelligence—wonder what that does to incentive design for protocols, and disciplines like microeconomics. Min-maxing desire kinda unlocks on-demand enlightenment and that has Consequences.
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