It occurred to me that the recent Grok Nazi stuff maybe wasn’t just poor 
impulse control and not to just to flex his power.

What if it was to show investors that Grok can extract and mimic cultural 
behaviors?  That would be valuable for super PACs and other people spending 
money on advertising.   If you want to reach certain audiences online you need 
to act like them.   

 

From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2025 11:52 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] thread bent toward Utopian/Dystopian Singularities

 

If you want to go back to the past of the future, I found Star Trek: Strange 
New Worlds [Long Strange Trip??] playing on Max the other day, and the premier 
episode explains how we destroyed ourselves before finding the federation.  
Fighting over definitions of freedom or some such.

 

Then watching The Last of Us made me see how the zombie apocalypse is the 
perfect entertainment for our age, since both left and right can project 
themselves into the narrative as human and the opposition as the zombies.

 

-- rec --

 

On Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 12:29 PM Marcus Daniels <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:

This seems interesting for a pivoting virologist.  

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682222001908

 

From: Friam <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On 
Behalf Of steve smith
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2025 9:23 AM
To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> 
Subject: [FRIAM] thread bent toward Utopian/Dystopian Singularities

 

 

On 7/11/25 7:44 AM, glen wrote:


https://www.mbdialogues.org/ 

"We invite groups and individuals who are interested in organizing discussions 
about mirror biology to submit an expression of interest for funding." 

The "Strange Attractor" path we are on is closer and closer to any number of 
possible exit routes from the Basin we know as the Holocene  than we have been 
before?   Crises tend to bring out the innovation in us (for better and for 
worse)?  Or is that just a neo-Darwinist fallacy?

I think most of us here might fit the technoProgressive 
<https://ieet.org/philosophy/>  title, though clearly we have those whose lens 
is technoUtopian while others are more cautious.   My contributions are mostly 
just contrarian, hanging as far out the other side of the boat as I can to keep 
it from tipping immediately into a "weak" or "fizzled" singularity.  Is there a 
clean path into the singularity or is it (socioeconomic) "tidal forces" all the 
way down?  I sometimes feel like a mid-level surfer knowing that the next "big 
one" is actually a Tsunami and I might as well paddle out toward it and see if 
I can catch "one last ride" knowing it likely ends rather dramatically bad for 
everyone whether they are "riding the wave", "running for high ground" or 
"cowering in a bunker"...

Re: Mirror biology.  My  nephew, a freshly minted materials scientist 
specializing in phase change materials (PCM) , unable to enter the very 
"chilled" job market, will naturally be drawn to ICE9 development?:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine

?Fortunately? I introduced him to Wellstone 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queendom_of_Sol#The_Wellstone>   via Wil 
McCarthy quite young, so programmable matter is more his style. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Matter

<random aside>Unfortunately he's "stuck" on a QC line for a company which Uses 
PCM to build milspec field-portable human-blood coolers/heaters.  Their only 
customers now are US (and maybe IDF?) special forces because of the cost of the 
units (and the value to a small combat team far from support in saving a life). 
  But they are trying to re-engineer into the more general EMT space.  No more 
arm-to-arm transfusions like in WWII movies?  Is Seal Team 9 fully constrained 
to have compatible blood types?</aside>

McCarthy is one of those fascinating SF writers who has a firm foot in the more 
serious Sci/Tech world.  For better or worse, his patents and inventions have 
barely made it above water... barely.  He's making his living as a patent law 
guy right now.  His flagship company is going forward without him.

https://www.ravenwindow.com/

With MTG (marjory taylor greene) pushing weather-manipulation conspiracies 
(leading to vigilante attacks on weather-radar installations?) I think of J. 
Storrs Hall Weather Machine 
<https://web.archive.org/web/20090826074614/http:/www.acceleratingfuture.com/people-blog/?p=2637>
 .  But it is his Utility Fog <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog>  that 
I find most profound (in the vein of McCarthy's Wellstone).   With Hall's 
Weather-Machine swarm I suppose we could implement the most grandiose version 
of the Vegas Spher possible?  Or maybe 

Grey Goo <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo>  anyone?

  _____  

addendum re: Ice IX/9 (is that the name of one of Elno's as-yet-unclaimed 
children?):

While none of the 20+ known water ice polymorphs behaves like Ice-Nine, some 
have exotic traits:

*       Ice VII: Stable at high pressure, can exist at room temperature if 
compressed
*       Ice XI: Ferroelectric, proposed for astrochemistry
*       Ice XIX (most recent): Still under investigation

But no known phase of water ice propagates itself through ambient liquid water 
like Vonnegut’s Ice-Nine.

Attribution:  GPT4o

 

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