To me that sounds like a very post-romantic interpretation of the past, where everything that happened before now, the enlightened times, was savage,cruel and retrograde. It's my understanding that things were a lot more subtle than that and that's a very simplistic approximation. I don't think Da Vinci, Vauban Euclid or Grosseteste were burnt to the stake, not even Galileo was.

> Obviously, there is nuance. You can take this argument to the limit and say that ultimately the world is made of only two things: Chaos (a.k.a. the vast seas of Wolfram's computational irreducibility, a.k.a. pure noise, a.k.a. quantum randomness) and Logos (the small islands of compressible patterns).

Within computational irreducibility, there's pure noise as well as universal computation, which is neither meaningfully predictable nor random. Since you mentioned Wolfram, in terms of elementary cellular automata, it's the difference between rule 30 and rule 110. The latter seems to me to be on the boundary between Chaos and Logos, and where I would expect to find the human intellect. (I think this is also largely the same distinction I made above where unpredictability can be useful or not.)

Since you also mentioned the economy and the possibility of UBI...I also don't know the answer, but I think it's worth thinking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which to me is pretty tightly coupled to weirdness. Moreover, I think societies similarly have their own hierarchy of needs, but that's something I don't understand very well. In any case, weirdness seems to be coupled to both of these, in that it best flourishes at the higher levels, when the more fundamental needs are mostly taken care of. At the lower levels, there's too much pressure to reduce social friction to cooperate with others for the sake of survival, and you just can't really afford to be too weird. I don't know if UBI is the answer, but there may be some benefit to just solving the lower levels of the needs hierarchy so we can move past this.

Maybe we will need humans to experience entirely new things instead. No one knows the taste of a new, bioengineered animal. No one knows what it's like to stimulate specific cell types in their brain. And so on. There are things that are and will remain uniquely human, forever.

Guarantee it's almost (but not quite) universally no.

Lady Gaga, its already here.

Still only a limited number of slots for weird to be successful.

AI sees we have too many 'cogs' available, and they are using up resources. Lets cull them back a bit.

That it might actually be remunerative (economically, socially)...

And what about weirdos who are wrong and selfdelusional? Are they minority of majority of weidos? Then can you blame masses who avoid/exclude veridos?

--

To have a society in which weirdos thrive means to put at risk so many things the ruling class thrive for: control, power, social status. Such society will need to cultivate curiosity and critical thinking. Good luck with arranging that at scale.

--

It's indeed easier times for weird. But way far from thriving or even "having the future".

--

There are way more things in the article to argue about. I just outlined couple.

The reality is that everything that was considered weird has been co-opted by the tech industry already. LGBTQ and Burning man are boring, commercialized and institutionalized now.

The tech industry did this, because tech people are relentless online advertisers for the industry and they had to placate them. It stopped when Trump was elected, which shows that the people holding the power are normie CEOs and not weirdos.

If you say Amodei is a weirdo: Only to a certain extent and he will be removed one day just like the Google founders. Some Eric Schmidt figure will take over.

Really, this is just AI generated or assisted fiction that improves morale for the tech influencers.

Why would it tend this way before AI? Something to do with the creative potential where tech reduces the consciousness and menial work requirement perhaps.

You must toggle to the minified telescopic version of the essay to experience this closing statement.

Environmentalists may be weird, but they bring attention to real problems for society generally and have had significant success despite being targeted for murder by corporate criminals globally. Cannabis enthusiasts may be social jokes, but even during a drug war managed to carry on and find ways of not just existing but bonding and and sharing.

This kind of situation keeps coming up and it seems like the weirdness is a side issue relative to the commitment to some specific sharable experience.

I suspect this is a very Eurocentric view. Take India for a counter-example, it has always been full of weirdoes starting their own cults.

I would argue this is precisely backwards. The normal and predictable is more valuable. Human errors are largely predictable. AI errors are not. This is one of the reasons why human code is much easier to review than AI code.

good luck with that.

Change that and the weirdos will create a society that will die out.

See: modern liberal society and feminisim which leads to population collapse and destruction of the civilizations that embrace it.

I think it depends.

For measurable goals and simulatable systems, AI and other methods like evolutionary optimization can create weird things on their own.

But what if the goals themselves are weird? This exists, There's a niche for that in the economy, but it's pretty small.