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Just a bunch of great links this week. Army Cyberpunk Commercials, AI + Capitalism, Generative Art, and more!
LINKS
1) The new U.S. Army and Marine commercials are full of dystopia cyberpunk.
Searching for meaning in a relentless world. Always connected, but somehow alone.
We offer another path. Where the battle to belong begins. Awakened by a calling. United by purpose. Defined by the cause you fight for.
No one can ever take away what it means…to be among the few, the proud, the Marines.
I recommend watching the 1min video itself:
It makes sense. Smartphones connect us to the world, disconnecting us from ourselves. But community connections are decreasing—organized religion in the US is below 50% for the first time ever. So you have lots of young men and women looking for Future Us meaning. They can find it in the Marines.
This Army commercial below is another example of marketing to Gen Z. But here, they frame Army roles similar to Fortnite roles: The Virus Hunter, The Code Fighter, The Sharpened Steel, The Ground Breaker, The Nerve Center. Again, very weird.
2) Exciting new AI + Capitalism org: AI Objectives Institute! Their first blog post is quite good, Artificial Intelligence and the Transformation of Capitalism:
The implications of AI for the future of humanity is one of the greatest questions of our era.
We are increasingly delegating high-stakes decisions to AI systems, relying on them for our understanding of the world. Can we define what matters to us well enough to entrust important decisions to those systems?
Another set of AIs already exist, more powerful than any person, capable of both great benefit and harm to the world: corporations, with their objective of maximizing shareholder value. Capitalism already provides a setting in which we need to align impersonal superintelligences to human flourishing.
When left to their own devices, competition and the drive for accumulating capital will often squeeze out any other set of values. We believe we are overdue for an institution dedicated to the project of “aligning capitalism” as the first case of powerful AI.
3) Excellent, excellent overview of all the new #DeSci experimental research orgs: The Overedge Catalog: New Types of Research Organizations. Featuring orgs like Other Internet, Santa Fe Institute, Emergent Ventures, and more!
4) What the Robot Saw is really trippy. Probably the weirdest Twitch channel I've ever seen. (Yes, weirder than vtuber Code Miko.)
It’s a “live, continuously-generated, robot film, curated, analyzed and edited using computer vision, neural networks, and contrarian search algorithms.”
It finds Youtube videos with few views, takes clips of them, and stitches them together. V weird.
5) Wayfinder is a delightful “experiential game” that connects us to nature.
Wayfinder is an expression of our connectedness to the natural world. The calming, contemplative gameplay is symbolic of the cause-and-effect relationship humans have with nature. It underscores our role in both affecting, but ultimately remedying, the effects of climate change through action and a greater appreciation of the environment.
The art is generative. The visual assets and poetry are assembled procedurally and algorithmically through code, creating different combinations for each new visitor. The poetic verses are created with AI processes, providing thousands of possible combinations. As such, Wayfinder is an ever-changing, emergent artwork with infinite possibilities. Each time it runs, it produces a new and individualized world.
V cool.
6) Babylon Bee: To Make Games More Interesting, WNBA To Switch To Little Tikes Hoop
7) The Onion: Contractor Informs Biden It’d Be Cheaper To Just Tear Down U.S. And Start Over
8) Rhys: Mormon Church Offers Polyamory Lessons To Attract New Members
9) TikTok of the Week. Using TikTok’s new “bug-eye” feature. (Found through Hot100, a good way to curate the TikTok firehose.)
JOBS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Borg is an excellent company that has developed Hive.one. They are building a PageRank for people and are hiring for a bunch of great roles in Berlin and remote.
Support the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation on Twitter through the 2021 Information Operations Fellowship. 6-month stint for academic researchers.
Knox Networks is a new stealth company developing and white-labeling Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). They’re hiring a bunch of developers and product folks.
Primavera de Filippi is hiring ethnographers to understand crypto governance.
Pledge 1% helps companies pledge to self-tax their profits. They’re hiring a new Executive Director.
EVENTS
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
MUSIC
This is an excellent new jazz album from the Afro-Caribbean jazz group, Sons of Kemet. The song below is weirdly good. Just a saxophone, tuba, and drums but feels immensely full. Trance-like, too.
I learned that their drummer, Seb Rochford, leads the jazz group Polar Bear. They made one of my favorite jazz albums of 2014, In Each And Every One, which was nominated for a Mercury Prize.
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
If you like this newsletter, check out the online community of systems thinkers that I helped co-found, Roote.
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