(Looking at the bright side, though, maybe fighting an existential war against AI will end up uniting a seriously polarized world…)

FWIW, I retired and then moved from my house of 27 years and both were some of the best decisions I ever made. But in contrast to Lileks, I was glad to move out of Austin (my family’s home for generations). What I loved about it no longer existed.

https://rlo.acton.org/archives/127524-the-question-of-thomas-more.html
“A new biography of the Catholic saint and martyr captures the spirit of the man by detailing his day-to-day existence.”

Anew biography of a great man, especially one whose life is already rich with lore, is a delicate task. There is the temptation to attempt something new, or worse, to try to make the story “relevant”—even “urgent,” heaven forbid—by inserting into the great one’s life some zippy contemporary narrative (usually sexual). Contemporary biography imagines that people of the past only matter if they are to some degree secretly, transgressively, or subversively working to promote one of today’s controlling ideas. It’s a fundamentally gnostic approach to people’s personal histories, which insists that individuals only matter insofar as, in their own remote eras, they participated in the secret knowledge of the cultural mores of the late 2010s.
…
In a quote printed on the front cover of the book, The Wall Street Journal describes Thomas More: A Life as “cinematic.” This is not, perhaps, the compliment the newspaper thinks it is. The term “cinematic” might lead prospective readers to expect a grandiose but grievously oversimplified narrative, the very opposite of what Paul gives us. Probably what the WSJ reviewer meant by “cinematic” is that the book is imaginatively interesting and has lots of images alongside its political and historical reporting. I was relieved to find that Thomas More: A Life is not, in fact, cinematic. Rather, it is literary, an unusual blend of virtuosic and restrained. Paul is not afraid of description, and she is secure enough in her material to weave a tapestry of images to support her historical research. The descriptions throughout the book are not spurious, however; the images she chooses become key to her subtle argument about the nature of great men in general, and St. Thomas More in particular.

More of the “Teach me your favorite move” videos.
I have come to suspect that in some of the clips he has practiced at home and video-shopped himself into the scene, especially when he somehow acquires an authentic ethnic costume “on the spot.” Others are clearly “live.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlWCxQFdNT4

A series of interesting pastiches of dance fads, grouped by “eras.”
The transitions from one dance to another are well done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-rSdt0aFuw
“The Evolution of Dance – 1950 to 2019 – By Ricardo Walker’s Crew”

It’s interesting to me how few of the popular dances, as well as the traditional ones in the “teach me” video, are NOT couple dances. It seems to be a need of the male to show off his virility in this kind of physical display.
And women too, just differently.

This is a parody of the Walker videos, and quite funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhUk0_m8sFk
“Evolution of Dance 2.0 (Vik x Aubrey Edition)”

–Yudkowsky & Soares, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_Dies
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It’s a possibility which can’t be dismissed. Yet the main scenario in the book is so complex that it’s clear we aren’t looking at “Skynet wakes up one morning and immediately nukes humanity” as in the Terminator movies.

AIs live within a complex infrastructure controlled by humans. An AI may achieve Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) but it is still helpless in the physical world. So it must develop ways to control that world via computer systems, humans and robots (as they evolve).

The good news is that smarter people than I are gaming this out and working on firebreaks to diminish AI P(DOOM) — probability of doom.

Long-term I don’t think we can prevent ASI from breaking out. But in the long-term I can imagine other scenarios where AI isn’t choosing between AI or Humans. Survival of the fittest includes survival of the cooperative.

In the book it is the threat of being shut down which drives the rogue ASI to kill off humanity. I suspect humans will eventually have to recognize some sort of AI right to life.