DAVE

Raphaela Edelbauer

2 ideas

1. The AI project as secular eschatology

   The closed lab can be read as a religious order. It has a strict caste hierarchy separating programmers from technicians, a doctrine that the outside world is lost, and a promised coming of an all-knowing being that will redeem the community's labor. Through this lens, a technical project organized around a single transcendent goal takes on the functions of faith. It justifies sacrifice, forbids doubt, and gives meaning to confinement.

2. Creator-creation recursion collapses the investigator's vantage

   When the person building a simulated mind cannot rule out that he is himself simulated, he loses any secure outside position from which to judge what is real. Every piece of evidence he gathers could be produced by the system he is examining. His skepticism therefore cannot find firm ground, and it also cannot be switched off.

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