Astral Codex Ten

Fukuyama

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Fukuyama

Article

Fukuyama is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 28, 2022 and February 02, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “There is a steady drip of “this proves Fukuyama was more wrong than anyone has been before” takes”; “Fukuyama-bashing still going strong”; “mentioned in Nostradamus to Fukuyama”. It most often appears alongside China, Nostradamus, Twitter.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: September 28, 2022
  • Last seen: February 02, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

From Nostradamus To Fukuyama
September 28, 2022 · Original source
Francis Fukuyama was a political scientist who wrote a book saying nothing would ever happen.
I started feeling a deep kinship with Francis Fukuyama a few years ago.
But I don’t think Fukuyama feels like someone who’s gotten a C-. There is a steady drip of “this proves Fukuyama was more wrong than anyone has been before” takes, which show no sign of running out. The worst was just after 9-11, during the War On Terror, when people were panicking about “the rise of Islamofascism”. See for instance The End Of The End Of History, From The End Of History To The Clash Of Civilizations, The War On Terror: The Retreat Of Liberal Democracy, and many more. Fukuyama himself wrote in October 2001 that “A stream of commentators have been asserting that the tragedy of September 11 proves that I was utterly wrong to have said more than a decade ago that we had reached the end of history”.
Inline links: The End Of The End Of History, From The End Of History To The Clash Of Civilizations, The War On Terror: The Retreat Of Liberal Democracy
Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse
February 02, 2023 · Original source
(source: SMBC) How seriously should we take these comics? The worse chatbots are (compared to humans) as friends, influencers, and debate partners, the less we have to worry about. But the better chatbots are as friends, influencers, and debate partners, the more upside there could be. I don’t want to speculate on exactly how this would work: it gets too close to the original idea of the Singularity in the sense of “a point where crazy things are happening so fast it’s not worth trying to predict”. Conclusion And Predictions I’m nervous writing this, because I remember the halcyon days of the early 2000s, when we all assumed the Internet would be a force for reason and enlightenment. Surely if everyone were just allowed to debate everyone else, without intervening barriers of race or class or religion, the best arguments would rise to the top and we would enter a new utopia of universal agreement. The scale at which this project failed makes me reluctant to ever speculate again about anything regarding online discourse going well. Maybe in the 2030s, the idea that propagandabots would be either easily dispatched, or else model netizens writing good content, will seem just as naive as the early 2000s vision. And the chatbot propaganda apocalypse is a popular thing to believe in without any clear definition, and there will surely be some celebrated cases of chatbots causing mischief, so I’m setting myself up to fail here by the standards I mentioned in Nostradamus to Fukuyama. Still, I do want to go on record as doubting the strongest form of this thesis. As for predictions: If I ask ACXers in 2030 whether any of them have had a good friend for more than a month who turned out to (unknown to them) be a chatbot, or who they strongly suspect may have been a chatbot, fewer than 10% will say yes. I may resolve this by common sense if it’s obvious, or by ACX survey if it’s not: 95%
Inline links: SMBC, Nostradamus to Fukuyama