TL;DR: AI progress and the recognition of associated risks are painful to think about. This cognitive dissonance acts as fertile ground in the memetic landscape, a high-energy state that will be exploited by novel ideologies. We can anticipate cultural evolution will find viable successionist ideologies: memeplexes that resolve this tension by framing the replacement of humanity by AI not as a catastrophe, but as some combination of desirable, heroic, or inevitable outcome. This post mostly examines the mechanics of the process.
Most analyses of ideologies fixate on their specific claims - what acts are good, whether AIs are conscious, whether Christ is divine, or whether Virgin Mary was free of original sin from the moment of her conception. Other analyses focus on exegeting individual thinkers: 'What did Marx really mean?' In this text, I'm trying to do something different - mostly, look at ideologies from an evolutionary perspective. I [...]
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Outline:(01:27) What Makes Memes Fit?
(03:30) The Cultural Evolution Search Process
(04:31) The Fertile Ground: Sources of Dissonance
(04:53) 1. The Builders Dilemma and the Hero Narrative
(05:35) 2. The Sadness of Obsolescence
(06:06) 3. X-Risk
(06:24) 4. The Wrong Side of History
(06:36) 5. The Progress Heuristic
(06:57) The Resulting Pressure
(07:52) The Meme Pool: Raw Materials for Successionism
(08:14) 1. Devaluing Humanity
(09:10) 2. Legitimizing the Successor AI
(12:08) 3. Narratives of Inevitability
(12:13) Memes that make our obsolescence seem like destiny rather than defeat.
(14:14) Novel Factor: the AIs
(16:05) Defense Against Becoming a Host
(18:13) Appendix: Some memes
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First published: October 28th, 2025
Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XFDjzKXZqKdvZ2QKL/the-memetics-of-ai-successionism ---
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