granted there will (or already is) in a sense a world-rending apocalypse, it just won't be as exciting or glamorous as some think it will be. and maybe im doing the goomba fallacy but these are often the same people who scoff at transhumanists for having a religious faith in technology.

it's all just secularized religious impulses, either the belief in world-rending apocalypse, complete with a great flood, or the belief in salvation through extremist politics. I prefer actual religion tbh.

Technocratic practices are of course irrational, inefficient, prone to magical thinking, etc. They represent the nadir of rationalization but that doesn't per se make them rational at all. E.g. the technocrat is blind to the negative psychic effects of their enterprise, and externalizes them.

You can't understand global fascism without understanding, yes, the alienating aspects of modernity in general, but especially the alienating and frankly dehumanizing aspects of Rule By Experts. It is an infrastructure built for cattle rather than people, and even cattle shouldn't suffer through it.

That would be the core disagreement then. I definitely do not think mass public opinion is that dependent on/epiphenomenal
of power, or that mass public opinion unfailingly serves the interests of power. At best it's like riding a bull.

Even if anti-AI sentiment was to a large degree initially astroturfed (I am agnostic on this point; idk), I do not think it's going anywhere anytime soon. People have an essentially religious fervor in their beliefs about this stuff and it fills them with existential angst.

This is only a small part of it, but yes. It's like 21st-century society has across the board conspired to ensure children grow up to be manchildren and womanchildren and adultchildren.

It's a real thing. 25 year olds act and are treated like 16 year olds from a decade ago.

Libertarians are, again and of course, completely right about what is happening here, but regularly get called pedophiles for thinking children and especially teenagers should be taught to be autonomous and independent rather than forever protected from growing up.

The costs of *not* having the everything machine are externalized in several ways, and it wouldn't fit with existing production and distribution models. The thought doesn't even occur. But a human *mind* (i.e. human capital) replacement? That's obvious.

this is the issue, you can't really, at least not easily, put into words what is under most thickly realist views *the* precondition for any appearance-reality/reference-referent relations in the first place.

They aren't useful for cheating, but it would be fine if they were. As a general rule, you should support anything that helps kids cheat, or people say helps kids cheat, if only because it's a good heuristic for opposing authoritarian moral panics.