This is spooky. ~36 hours ago a friend shared a similar insight also
grounded the same book trilogy. We were discussing that AI doesn't need
to be human-like (conscious) to be hugely an existential risk in a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo sense.
His point was that for billionaires their wealth is Goo; their success
in making it is the toxic choking of healthy society in the way that Goo
is. Their near mindless obsession and compounding success with making
this Goo as their dominant activity is the mark of them loosing humanity
. mx
On 05/02/2026 06:48, Udhay Shankar N via Silklist wrote:
The state of the world, and especially the Esptein files cesspool, has
me thinking of _Altered carbon_ (the book, not the TV show). In my
reading, the core point of the book is "past a certain level of
wealth, you're not really human any more".
The key reasons:
* Access to wealth, opportunities, networks and bodily modifications
far beyond what anyone at a lower socio-economic stratum can access.
So much so that you're not really comparable any more.
* Inability to perceive other people as even being of the same
species, but only as exploitable resources.
To be clear, this is not the only artistic work to advance this thesis
- but it is the one that has made the core point in the most memorable
way for me.
At an even higher level of abstraction, one might argue that the point
of all art is to examine the question of what it means to be human.
Which could easily be also interpreted as what it means to be inhuman.
Thoughts?
Udhay
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