“He brings to mind the famous zen teacher, Suzuki Shosan, a famously combative monk who lived in feudal Japan. Shosan was originally a Samurai, and an accomplished fighter who decided to retire from life as a warrior to pursue enlightenment. He was famous for being disruptive and angry, and causing problems for his fellow monks. He hated living in a temple, and sitting still in order to find enlightenment. He believed that the best way to find the truth of all things was through doing. He also believed that one did not need to become a monk or an aesthetic in order to find enlightenment, and was infamous for violently rejecting potential students who wanted to run from their lives to become monks. He believed farmers could become enlightened by farming, and Samurai could become enlightened by dedicated themselves fiercely to their service. He viewed becoming a Monk as the lowest path for those who karma demanded it, and believed that the way was for everyone, and not a precious thing reserved solely for Monastic orders.”

“Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that’s the attitude they adopted. (Of course, they saw nothing wrong with this strategy when they were the ones engaging in it; it’s only the possibility that someone else might be better at it than they were that gives them cause for concern.)”

“I asked Kaevats what he saw when he looked at the U.S. Two things, he said. First, a technical mess. Data architecture was too centralized. Citizens didn’t control their own data; it was sold, instead, by brokers. Basic security was lax. “For example, I can tell you my I.D. number—I don’t fucking care,” he said. “You have a Social Security number, which is, like, a big secret.” He laughed. “This does not work!” The U.S. had backward notions of protection, he said, and the result was a bigger problem: a systemic loss of community and trust.”