Mario Draghi, Italy’s (and the EU’s) éminence grise, Chicago boy Luis Garicano, and uh… Patrick Collison team up to overhaul Europe’s economy: https://www.rhinegroup.eu/

Other noteworthy members include noted investment-professional Leopold Aschenbrenner & Tobi Lütke, who may only be German-Canadian but is definitely no less a fashy techbro.

That Italy has been the west-European country most exposed to neoliberal medicine, ending up with a neo-fascist in power, seems to be no issue for deities like Draghi and the other assorted usual suspects here.

More seriously, add a third dimension, a Butlerian dimension, to the political compass: to what degree may your automated devices appear to be human? One extreme is Asimov-style transhumanism and the other extreme is Luddite loom-smashing.

The luddites smashed looms not because they were inherently anti-technology, but as a means of industrial action in a time when labour held no formal power at all. As you say yourself, the issue with AI is that it doesn’t even work as advertised; industrial looms worked fine. «AI»'s biggest problems are the enormous waste, ecological damage, enshittification and labour discipline that it incurs. If Silicon Valley was actually building Data, the debate would be different, but this dimension seems mostly theoretical for now.

Oh, I’ve seen this one before. At least we know where the LLM who gave them this pitch scraped the idea from.

Novara published a gushing profile of MacAskill a while ago, so no surprises there.

Yeah, the party-line was far from realistic and reflected the West’s own imperial hubris, but there’s a spectrum there. When the fullscale invasion finally happened, the Jake Sullivans weren’t going around for weeks about how Ukraine is doomed. And again, there was at least some room in the mainstream for eastern europeans or even just people who had traveled in Ukraine and understood the country & the people. In that regard Samo shares much more with the vatniks (sorry, the “realists”) like John Mearsheimer and The Economist, who kept (and still keep) telling people Russia would win any day now.

He runs an analytics company and was specifically touting how his models showed a quick Russian victory, even weeks into the invasion, which was more than just the usual Besserwisserism among western europeans towards eastern Europe. If the whole shtick is that the mainstream is lame but my patented crystal ball actually tells the future from first principles and you then tank even harder than the mainstream, you not only embarrass yourself but reveal your own preferences as well.

And the mainstream predictions in the West of Ukrainian resistance weren’t as negative as what he advanced, which is precisely why many refused to believe the Kremlin would actually step on this rake of a war. That he wholeheartedly defended a quick Russian victory made him seem steeped more in the Kremlin’s narratives than the West’s, even as all imperial powers tend to be hubristic.

I remember him tweeting in February 2022 where immediately after the invasion he confidently predicted that Russia would gobble up all of Ukraine in a matter of weeks. Unlike all those legacy academics with their degrees he really see into the future of governance, you see.

It’s striking how inimical to life itself the first statement is on its own. The people most obsessed with living for an eternity seem to be having the worst time of it. Yes, the Musks & Thiels are ungodly rich, but do they ever seem even basically well-adjusted? Inordinate wealth seems to come with commensurate insecurity.

Pentagon says US military to be an ‘AI-first’ fighting force

Trouble with your 3-day special military operation in Iran? Lost an Afghanistan? As Vietnam demonstrated, all you need to do is throw more computers at the problem!