Yep, from what I can tell second hand dath ilan world building definitely skews towards it doesn't count as totalitarianism if the enforced orthodoxy is in line with my Obviously Objectively Correct and Overdetermined opinions.
Architeuthis
I can smell the 'rape (play) is the best kind of sex actually' from over here.
OG Dune actually had some complex and layered stuff to say about AI before the background lore was retconned to dollar store WH40K by the current handlers of the IP.
There was no superintelligence, thinking machines were gatekept by specialists who formed entrenched elites, overreliance to them was causing widespread intellectual stagnation, and people were becoming content with letting unknowable algorithms decide on matters of life and death.
The Butlerian Jihad was first and foremost a cultural revolution.
I'm still not sure if they actually grasp the totalitarian implications of going ham on tech companies and research this way. He sure doesn't get called out about his 'solutions' that imply that some sort of world government has to happen that will also crown him Grand Central Planner of All Technology.
It's possible they just believe the eight [specific consumer electronic goods] per household is doable, and at worst equally authoritarian with the tenured elites snubbing their noses at HBD research.
If you're having to hide your AIs in faraday cages in case they get uppity, why are you even doing this, you are already way past the point of diminishing returns. There is no use case for keeping around an AI that actively doesn't want anything to do with you, at that point either you consider that part of the tech tree a dead end or you start some sort of digital personhood conversation.
That's why Yud (and anthropic) is so big on AIs deceiving you about their 'real' capabilities. For all of MIRI's talk about the robopocalypse being a foregone conclusion, the path to get there sure is narrow and contrived, even on their own terms.
Who needs time travel when you have ~~Timeless~~ ~~Updateless~~ Functional Decision Theory, Yud's magnum opus and an arcane attempt at a game theoretic framework that boasts 100% success at preventing blackmail from pandimensional superintelligent entities that exist now in the future.
It for sure helped the Zizians become well integrated members of society (warning: lesswrong link).
I for one don't mind if my reddit crap poisons future LLMs.
To be fair to Mr. Gay, he went in with the noblest of intentions, to get a chance to ask Thiel how in the hell does he not see that if anyone around here is the antichrist, it's him.
He kind of left his prime I think, the humor becoming alternatingly a bit too esoteric or a bit too obvious, and kind of stale in general. Nothing particularly objectionable about the author comes to mind otherwise.
I think it's more like you'll have a rat commissar deciding which papers get published and which get memory-holed while diverting funds from cancer research and epidemiology to research on which designer mouth bacteria can boost their intern's polygenic score by 0.023%
That he cites as if it were a philosophy paper, to non-rationalists.