This is getting weird, even for AI.
Cultimate Warrior
As if the San Francisco Bay Area couldn’t get any weirder, there’s now suspicion that a bizarre AI-enthusiastic group in the region may have inspired a pair of deadly assaults that took place thousands of miles apart.
As Open Vallejo reports, two young computer scientists and apparent lovers, identified as 22-year-old Maximillian Snyder and 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut — admirers of the Bay Area-based fringe ideological group known as “Zizians,” who want to speed up AI’s takeover of humanity — were arrested this month for slayings that took place on opposite coasts.
Earlier in January, Youngblut was arrested by federal prosecutors on January 24 for the killing of a 44-year-old Border Patrol agent named David Maland in Vermont during a deadly shootout. Snyder, meanwhile, was arrested on January 17 in the NorCal town of Redding on charges related to the stabbing death of Curtis Lind, an 82-year-old landlord.
AI Acceler-Hatin-Ism
These two seemingly disparate homicides are entwined not only because the people arrested for them had applied for a marriage license in Washington State ahead of time, but also, as Open Vallejo reports, because both youthful scientists seem to have ascribed to Zizianism, a radical — and allegedly violent — offshoot of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Rationalist movement.
The name of the group, as that news outlet notes, comes from a LessWrong.com user who went by “Ziz” on the site. As tech writer David Z. Morris explains, Ziz and his compatriots believe that AI will ultimately bring about the destruction of humankind — and per their thinking, that’s a desirable outcome.
Ziz’s real name is Jack LaSota, and he used to live at an RV camp that was owned by Lind, the murdered landlord. To make this story even more bizarre, that landlord was slated to testify against a few of LaSota’s former roommates after they allegedly stabbed him with a sword on the property back in 2022 — but he was killed before he could.
Morris and others have referred to the Zizians as a “murder cult” and “murder gang” due to the death toll surrounding the group. Horrifyingly, these more recent killings are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to allegations of violence linked to this AI-obsessed bunch — and hopefully, that trend will end with them.
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