A handful of billionaires led by Google cofounder Sergey Brin are out to prove that money can buy anything. They are pouring unprecedented resources into a political campaign to convince — or if that doesn’t work, to trick — California voters into prioritizing billionaires’ wealth over their own livelihoods.
The billionaires also enlisted the help of Governor Gavin Newsom. Shortly after chatting with Brin about the matter at a crypto mogul’s holiday party, Newsom took a stand against the billionaire tax, vowing he’d defeat the campaign one way or another. Following the lead of Newsom and billionaire donors, a handful of liberal nonprofits and labor unions came out against the billionaire tax as well, joining forces with Republicans and business groups to defeat it — all without an alternative plan to fund Medi-Cal once Trump’s cuts kick in next year.
So far, all these efforts have come to naught. The billionaire tax qualified by submitting over 1.6 million signatures, more than double the required number, becoming Proposition 40 on November’s ballot. It’s since been endorsed by the California Federation of Labor Unions and a host of other labor groups, the California Nurses Association, and recently the state Democratic Party. Now Brin and his billionaires must convince a majority of voters that closing hospitals, clinics, and emergency rooms is preferable to taxing billionaires who won’t miss the money.



On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? (this is the paper that got her fired from Google)
https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922
A breakdown of the ideas in her paper from the MIT Technology Review:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/
Other research from Gebru also led to Amazon putting a one year moratorium on selling facial recognition to police:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/12/1003482/amazon-stopped-selling-police-face-recognition-fight/
Gebru is also credited with creating the term TESCREAL which is a descriptive term of all the inter-related ideologies that drive the Nerd Reich:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL
Anyway, she’s been loud and open and mostly ignored, sadly. Understandably, she is saying this stuff very recently and the seeds of it all actually go very far back, so I would hope the Nerd Reich delves more into where the ideologies of TESCREAL arose and what they arose from.
Well, both her name and the term TESCREAL are in the index, so she and it must be getting covered. I’m still on the intro.
Weird, as someone who has been interested in futurism (extropianism, transhumanism, etc.) ever since first introduced to the idea, probably by way of Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary, I don’t think it has to lead to the douchebaggery of an Elon, for example. Also, I’ve never heard of this acronym until now, so that’s interesting…
Oh, for sure, I agree, I have been interested in similar ideas, but these ideas held by the tech elite are some kind of weird insanity of thinking they will have a hand in shaping the future and not that the future is something that is emergent, not controlled.