hyper stuck out in the real rain for 2 hours
the isaacsohn dialogs 5b // tankthink rebuild 1a
I’ll note two little artifacts—I saw a video interview of Bryan Johnson where he explained his path to his current thing of what he calls rejuvenation athletics, and a bit about Blueprint. The interviewer then says: “I can’t ignore the fact that you posted like two hours ago about injecting your penis.”
The second one is the surreal experience of being stuck out in the rain. I took the dog on a walk, and we ran, and the keys bounced right out of my pocket into, well, I have no idea where. Somewhere in the park, perhaps, but I can’t be sure of the close to random path I took the dog on in the dark. We looked for a while and when we returned to the department chastened the dog was at his little limit. If you ever saw The Edge you’ll know what I went through. Mostly I went through the kind of complete abandonment of intelligence that comes from shame. I ended up getting the help of a neighbor, at no point did the fact that the super lived two floors below me cross my mind until the neighbor asked me if I needed the super’s number. Perhaps this is just urbanite rentoid customs that didn’t occur to me.
Now onto the response proper. It’s mostly big questions and a zinger about how much Arabs fancy slavery since I like your story and plan overall! I’m also in a good mood to be out of the rain.
Soccer stadiums in the middle of the desert built by quasi-slave labor in order to host mass televised quasi-gladiatorial games are a beautiful embodiment of the insanity of the contemporary metasystem.
Quasi is covering an extraordinary amount of ground between gladiators and FIFA, and probably not too much ground re the slave labor.
The question I have about all of your presentation on how to build an enviable bolo, it’s an agreeable vision, but it’s a vision of building and marketing a media startup, and I ask what about that is served best by this bolo form? What about being a regular company achieves this vision less efficiently or less desirably? Wouldn’t this journey also transpose itself into a startup journey in the end?
Besides that, the DLA piece is in progress.
Let me focus on TANKTHINK! Let’s call this TankThink Rebuild 1a. What is TankThink you ask?
Briefer than the prologue:
TANKTHINK is an exciting and clever novel for exciting and clever people with exciting and clever ideas about how to fix our violent and strange world.
TANKTHINK is about 5 students who get trapped in a job interview nightmare with an AI chatbot. The job is STRATEGIST LEVEL 1 at TANKTHINK, an AI-forward security consultancy. Starting salary is 2 million dollars annually.
The five students are
JACKY STEIN-GARDE
MARIAM FATTY
LORENZ STORCH
DEVIN KAUR
SHARON MOON
And the evil chatbot asks that we call him JOEL.
It’s a bit like Breakfast Club, but also Dr. Strangelove.
One thing that was missing from the first draft of the novel was a sense of competition throughout to organize the characters thoughts and stimulate them in various ways. So today I’m going to focus a bit on the game design aspect of it. The interview is structured like a game, not dissimilar to Jeopardy! but with competitive brief generation, knowledge and cooperation tasks. There should be more as well though, very specific tasks that are enabled by the fact that Joel appears to be a hyperintelligent AI that appears to have access to vast financial resources and talent pools. Basically their freedom of action at a distance is extraordinary, and many of the tasks won’t seem like the things they’re doing, but like simulations of tasks they may have to do as a Tank Think Strategist Level 1.
Some that jump off the top of my head here, they are all based around the idea of making the plans they execute via Joel maximally detailed and also maximizing their culpability. They can have bodies on the ground in Germany, they’ll be piloting a refugee or a desperate or weird German with a go pro stapled to their forehead and Joel piping the gang’s directions into his ear, kind of like Ratatouille, but with computers instead of a magical rat. We already have lots of stuff about them making plans and arguing at the high level, but not enough of them competing at the job.
Planning routes to avoid detection or checkpoints based on overflight data from reconnaissance drones
Distracting customs officials or guards with personal hoaxes
Plotting entry into secure facilities as well as different people’s homes from blueprints and 3D mockups
Or better yet—they think they’re controlling an avatar in a simulation but they’re really each controlling a guy wearing a gopro in Berlin
Asymmetric play, one person hides something on the person they control and has to evade detection from the police—the others act either as handoffs or as shields
Piloting drones for surveillance overflights and also for FPV attacks
Loitering munition drops, basically a Mario Party type game but dropping live grenades on people
Finding target sets in satellite data—compare to Joel’s readout of it as a scoring mechanism
Piloting remote control cars on autobahn or sidewalks
Identifying sabotage points on vehicles based on extensive design specs
Competitive planning to find ethnic gang or armed political group to partner with inside of Berlin
Competitive ordering of food—who ordered the best food for lunch
Physical fitness challenges
Surprise the other players—the players have to reveal something about themselves that gets the others surprised.
Imitate the other challenge, whoever writes in the voice of another and goes undetected when Joel reads it in the voice of the person being imitated gets points. If someone is spotted as a fake, the person to guess who wrote it gets points
Some passive background challenges like ‘holding bladder longest’ or ‘least verbal tics’ ‘lowest heartrate’ ‘fastest typist’ that get revealed over time, the goal is to get them competing on every aspect of existing for a few hours and see who is comprehensively best
Contacting importers or smugglers via phone and trying to get a great rate
Soothing and handling assets prior to using them.
Brief competitions for mid-level strategic questions—what kinds of targets to hit, what factions to use, what methods to employ specifically eg., knife or van attacks or home made bombs or imported weapons from Ukraine, etc. Questions with objective and ‘simulatable’ qualities that let Joel judge, with Joel guiding the framing of these issues.
Arbitrary lightning challenges—attacking targets of opportunity that Joel identifies during a live scenario, but also writing briefs in response to breaking news, recipe competitions (Joel evaluates the text recipe), physical ones, pop quizzes on different subjects, seemingly impossible problems or difficult technical questions get posed, riddles, visual puzzles? Air traffic control for 2 minutes competitions!
Planning abductions or interrogation tactics—presumably they’d get video of an interrogation then decide the next move, and see the next video of how it plays out
But yeah at its core I think the key is to have Joel guide them by constantly asking them to get specific and then offering an interface where they get really specific, even down to controlling people, lots more remote control vehicles, competitions involving those, a variety of different ones, stronger incentives to use them well, etc., They can control and direct people on the street, if people do those NPC streams for money they’ll do what a voice in the earbuds says for money. There should be random physical or interpersonal challenges, passive background challenges that Joel reveals, arbitrary lightning challenges, it’s gotta have Joel evaluating different plans that they all ran and deciding if it was good enough chaos for TankThink.
I keep thinking it so I’ll say it, it’s gotta also be more like The Apprentice, and involve lots of small subcompetitions to make money and/or create a political upset through targeted violence in Germany.
Well I think I hit 500 on it. Back to you Pony.