most charitable psychoanalysis: projecting their sense of rationality onto a fictional world is a way to express a deep longing for rules and logic in an often cruelly irrational world

least charitable: their sense of rationality can only be true in a fictional world, so they want to live in that rather than reality

Neutral charity: the author is dead, all interpretation is essentially fanfiction, and since we are all individuals, all relationships with texts/fanfiction are weird.

doing pony stuff

the most euphemistic description yet of the cursed slab of ponyfucking

It's the combination of big imaginations and little real-world experience. In Friendship is Optimal, the AGI goes from asking for more CPUs to asking for information on how to manufacture its own CPUs, somehow without involving the acquisition of silicon crystals or ASML hardware along the way. Rationalist writers imagine that AGI will somehow provide its own bounty of input resources, rather than participating in the existing resource economy.

In reality, none of our robots have demonstrated the sheer instrumentality required to even approach this sort of doomsday scenario. I think rationalists have a bit of the capitalist blind spot here, imagining that everything and everybody (and everypony!) is a resource.

Whatever, I'll be a pony. Where do I sign up?

they're both extremely online. next question