Maciej Ceglowski: Notes from an Emergency

Why harboring with “feudal” internet companies (like Lord Google) for aspects of your digital life can be bad:

This is a dilemma of the feudal internet. We go to these protectors because they can offer us more security, but their business model is to make us more vulnerable by getting us to surrender more of the details of our lives to their servers and to put more faith in the algorithms that they train, and then which train us in return to behave in certain ways.

As always, Maciej is funny:

I'm not convinced that a civilization that is struggling to cure male pattern baldness is capable of [solving the problem of death]. If we're going to worry about existential risks, I propose we address the two existential risks that already exist and we know for a fact are real, which are global nuclear war and climate change.

But these real and difficult problems are messy. Tech culture prefers to pick more difficult, abstract problems that haven't been sullied by any sort of contact with reality. They worry about how to give Mars an Earth-like climate rather than how to give Earth and Earth-like climate. They debate how to make a morally-benevolent, God-like artificial intelligence rather than figuring out how to make ethical guardrails around the real artificial intelligence that they're already deploying across the world.