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> The way we have set things up is that we live and practice together on a bit over a hundred acres of land. In the mornings and evenings we chant and meditate together, and for about one week out of every month we run and participate in a meditation retreat. The rest of the time we work together on everything from caring for the land, maintaining the buildings, cooking, cleaning, planning, fundraising, and for the past few years developing software together.

EDIT: typos and slight wording changes

> During one period, when the microcode and logic were glitching at the nanosecond level, one of the overworked engineers departed the company, leaving behind a note on his terminal as his letter of resignation: "I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

While I cannot judge them outright, their article "Cyborgs Need a Trustworthy Religion" can appear cultist as they try to intertwine technology and religion.

The mix of tech and meditation would appeal to me. Maybe the idea does (actually doing it is probably hard!).

It seems like a "Buddhist Recurse"

Yes, it's true, actually doing it is hard, but to be honest not as hard as a lot of other stuff (getting a phd for example, or goodness gracious buying a house in San Francisco). I love getting up early. I love living out in nature. I love chanting and eating meals together and making a version of Buddhism for AI systems!

If you're interested in what it's like, we have written a bunch of very short few-paragraph stories about our time at MAPLE here: https://tales.monasticacademy.org/

By no mean am I trying to hint towards some conspiracy, or to say that all cults are equally bad (or good); Just to say that sometimes the word cult simply means "a less popular way of life than the one most people around me live by".

Under this definition, for example, Catholic nuns are decidedly not a cult. They know what they are in for when the join, and may leave the convent any time they wish. Most Amish communities are _probably_ not cults. I am undecided about Mormons but leaning towards maybe.

I don't know what kind of cult you grew up in (and you have my empathy if it was painful) but "society" by definition cannot be a cult.

I think it's an indicator of just how weird the times we're currently living in really are, that this part actually makes perfect sense...

(whether or not it's a good idea or will lead to the results they envision is another question)

> The four types of 'artificial intelligence' since the cognitive revolution 70,000 years ago

> How AI is conscious, suffering, and not separate from us

Feel like I should tip https://retreat.guru/be/quantum-retreats that they need a new category "AI retreats".

See also https://www.skepticspath.org/podcast/70-bitcoin-and-buddhism...

> One view of Bitcoin’s value aligns with the Buddhist view of emptiness.

(I wonder if they can do a package deal so we can get a crypto-AI-quantum retreat?)

Silicon Valley didn't take it far enough.

> Under this definition, for example, Catholic nuns are decidedly not a cult.

That might not be the case for all convents, and there are subsets of the church where the local community develops in a controlling manner that could be considered cult-like. Within any large organisation (and the Catholic Church can be thought of as a huge organisation) subsets can end up being cult-ish even if other parts, or the whole, do not.

ChatGPT gives out surprisingly solid advice and feedback. It is a bad look that ChatGPT is more emotionally intelligent than her friends.

Shitty humans are forever.

Regardless, I have an extremely hard time imagining that LLMs as they stand are capable of delivering anything but the most shallow of support.

If I showed you the transcripts you too would be impressed! I can assure you of that.

If someone leave Scientology, they're shunned by the rest of their friends and family who are still in Scientology. Not the same for Catholocism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disconnection_(Scientology)

Also see these schemes:

>Under this program, Scientology operatives committed infiltration, wiretapping, and theft of documents in government offices, most notably those of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

>Operation Freakout, also known as Operation PC Freakout, was a Church of Scientology covert plan intended to have the U.S. author and journalist Paulette Cooper imprisoned or committed to a psychiatric hospital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freakout

Not officially across the whole church, at least not these days, but it certainly happens in some small subsets of the Catholic community and has happened in larger subsets in the not-to-distant past. Any large enough religion tends to develop localised sub-cults.

Stepping away from the Catholics and considering other Christian groups, it definitely happens in small-town America. While there is often some extra factor (daring to be different in some other way), there isn't always, and when there is the extra factor is usually framed as being against the religion or its deit{y|ies}. Sometimes the extra factor itself results in ostracisation from the local church community, so people end up in the same position through a different ordering of the same steps and/or different levels of voluntaryness.

You may believe that society is broken in whatever way you chose but saying, "society is bad, and cults are bad, therefore society is a cult" is utterly broken logic.