Diogenes
Nemo me impune lacessit
Before “she” became the peculiar central thread linking a double homicide in Pennsylvania, the fatal shooting of a federal agent in Vermont and the murder of an elderly landlord in California, a computer programmer bought a sailboat.
The programmer was known to friends, foes, and followers as Ziz. “She” had come to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2016 as part of an influx of young people arriving to study the dangers that artificial intelligence could pose to humanity.
In one of the most expensive regions of the United States, however, it is difficult to save the world when you can’t make rent. So, “she” bought a boat for $600 and moored it next to a friend’s vessel in a marina. For five years, “she” used it as an occasional, cramped bunk.
In “her” waking hours, “she” worked on a blog of provocative and increasingly extreme ideas about confrontation and retaliation. At night, “she” fell asleep as the boat rocked back and forth, drifting with the flotsam of greater Silicon Valley.
Then, on the night of 19 August 2022, “her” sister and a friend reported that they saw “her” fall overboard. The US Coast Guard and local authorities scrambled boats and aircraft. After a nearly 30-hour search, neither Ziz nor “her” body could be found.
A newspaper in Alaska, where “she” was born, published a short obituary referring to “her” by “her” birth name:
“Jack Amadeus LaSota left our lives but not our hearts on Aug 19 after a boating accident. Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed.” “She” was 31.
Ziz’s ideas did not die in the waters of the California coast. Nor did Ziz. “She” had faked “her” drowning and gone underground, before being arrested last month in western Maryland and charged with trespassing and illegal transportation of a firearm.
The targets of Ziz’s ire, who include some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent intellectuals, have taken security precautions. “Ziz is not stupid,” someone familiar with “her”, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. “This is a very smart person – both smart and crazy.”
Ziz’s writing had polarized members of a niche but influential movement of AI theorists and tech bloggers who call themselves the “rationalists.” The movement is less about specific ideas than it is about an ethos – applying rigorous, mathematically informed thinking to AI, philosophy, psychology, and the big questions of our time.
Rationalists are odd, though often charming, people. They tend to be fantasy and sci-fi geeks, use lots of jargon and think intensely about things other people barely think about at all. They debate with earnest and deadly seriousness, and their preferred arena of intellectual combat is dense blogposts, often with footnotes.
Some in the rationalist community saw Ziz as a kook, even dangerous. But “she” had enough detractors and admirers to earn a school, of sorts, that an opponent dubbed the “Zizians.”
Very few people had ever heard of Zizians until this January, when a US border patrol agent pulled over two young people, dressed in black, driving a Prius hybrid near the Vermont-Canada border. The ensuing shootout killed a federal officer. It also left one of the alleged shooters in custody and the other, a math prodigy who had formerly worked as a quant trader in New York, dead.
From there, the story grew stranger.
Reporting by Open Vallejo and other outlets found that the Vermont pair had ties to a group of leftwing anarchists in California – including one who won an $11,000 prize for AI research in 2023 and was also arrested this January for allegedly murdering a landlord.
A few things drew those people together: all were militant vegans with a worldview that could be described as far-left. All were highly educated – or impressive autodidacts. Most were also, like Ziz, “transgender.”
But what they had in common, above all, was a kinship with a philosophy, which Ziz largely promulgated, that takes abstract questions from AI research to extreme and selective conclusions.
In reporting this story, I obtained exclusive chatroom logs that chart the Zizians’ radicalization and ultimate acceleration into violence. I examined thousands of words of blogposts, court filings and other documents, and spent weeks interviewing people familiar with Ziz and “her” circle.
Ziz has not been charged in any killings. Yet acquaintances are unsettled, and former teachers frightened of their apostate pupil. Many sources requested anonymity due to safety concerns – “it’s just, you know … murder cult,” one person said – or a desire to speak freely about the rationalist and AI-risk communities.
How, exactly, did hyper-intelligent young altruists – who studied at Oxford, Waterloo and Rice, won academic prizes and research grants, and spoke sincerely of bettering the world – enter a trajectory that has ended with at least six people dead?
What would cause a former spelling bee finalist to write in a chatroom discussion of having “dramatic fantasies about becoming a knife murderer” – and then, a year later, allegedly participate in an attempt to stab someone to death?
The answers lie in a strange saga of idealism and disenchantment: a violent collision of internet culture and the real world – and perhaps a harbinger of more uncanny tidings to come.
More details of dangerous trans deeds @ link:
www.theguardian.com
The programmer was known to friends, foes, and followers as Ziz. “She” had come to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2016 as part of an influx of young people arriving to study the dangers that artificial intelligence could pose to humanity.
In one of the most expensive regions of the United States, however, it is difficult to save the world when you can’t make rent. So, “she” bought a boat for $600 and moored it next to a friend’s vessel in a marina. For five years, “she” used it as an occasional, cramped bunk.
In “her” waking hours, “she” worked on a blog of provocative and increasingly extreme ideas about confrontation and retaliation. At night, “she” fell asleep as the boat rocked back and forth, drifting with the flotsam of greater Silicon Valley.
Then, on the night of 19 August 2022, “her” sister and a friend reported that they saw “her” fall overboard. The US Coast Guard and local authorities scrambled boats and aircraft. After a nearly 30-hour search, neither Ziz nor “her” body could be found.
A newspaper in Alaska, where “she” was born, published a short obituary referring to “her” by “her” birth name:
“Jack Amadeus LaSota left our lives but not our hearts on Aug 19 after a boating accident. Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed.” “She” was 31.
Ziz’s ideas did not die in the waters of the California coast. Nor did Ziz. “She” had faked “her” drowning and gone underground, before being arrested last month in western Maryland and charged with trespassing and illegal transportation of a firearm.
The targets of Ziz’s ire, who include some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent intellectuals, have taken security precautions. “Ziz is not stupid,” someone familiar with “her”, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. “This is a very smart person – both smart and crazy.”
Ziz’s writing had polarized members of a niche but influential movement of AI theorists and tech bloggers who call themselves the “rationalists.” The movement is less about specific ideas than it is about an ethos – applying rigorous, mathematically informed thinking to AI, philosophy, psychology, and the big questions of our time.
Rationalists are odd, though often charming, people. They tend to be fantasy and sci-fi geeks, use lots of jargon and think intensely about things other people barely think about at all. They debate with earnest and deadly seriousness, and their preferred arena of intellectual combat is dense blogposts, often with footnotes.
Some in the rationalist community saw Ziz as a kook, even dangerous. But “she” had enough detractors and admirers to earn a school, of sorts, that an opponent dubbed the “Zizians.”
Very few people had ever heard of Zizians until this January, when a US border patrol agent pulled over two young people, dressed in black, driving a Prius hybrid near the Vermont-Canada border. The ensuing shootout killed a federal officer. It also left one of the alleged shooters in custody and the other, a math prodigy who had formerly worked as a quant trader in New York, dead.
From there, the story grew stranger.
Reporting by Open Vallejo and other outlets found that the Vermont pair had ties to a group of leftwing anarchists in California – including one who won an $11,000 prize for AI research in 2023 and was also arrested this January for allegedly murdering a landlord.
A few things drew those people together: all were militant vegans with a worldview that could be described as far-left. All were highly educated – or impressive autodidacts. Most were also, like Ziz, “transgender.”
But what they had in common, above all, was a kinship with a philosophy, which Ziz largely promulgated, that takes abstract questions from AI research to extreme and selective conclusions.
In reporting this story, I obtained exclusive chatroom logs that chart the Zizians’ radicalization and ultimate acceleration into violence. I examined thousands of words of blogposts, court filings and other documents, and spent weeks interviewing people familiar with Ziz and “her” circle.
Ziz has not been charged in any killings. Yet acquaintances are unsettled, and former teachers frightened of their apostate pupil. Many sources requested anonymity due to safety concerns – “it’s just, you know … murder cult,” one person said – or a desire to speak freely about the rationalist and AI-risk communities.
How, exactly, did hyper-intelligent young altruists – who studied at Oxford, Waterloo and Rice, won academic prizes and research grants, and spoke sincerely of bettering the world – enter a trajectory that has ended with at least six people dead?
What would cause a former spelling bee finalist to write in a chatroom discussion of having “dramatic fantasies about becoming a knife murderer” – and then, a year later, allegedly participate in an attempt to stab someone to death?
The answers lie in a strange saga of idealism and disenchantment: a violent collision of internet culture and the real world – and perhaps a harbinger of more uncanny tidings to come.
More details of dangerous trans deeds @ link:
They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed
How a group of Silicon Valley math prodigies, AI researchers and internet burnouts descended into an alleged violent cult
www.theguardian.com
