Ran Prieur

November 14.

2019-11-14T14:40:16Z

November 14. Why Technologists Fail to Think of Moderation as a Virtue, a smart review of a new book about artificial intelligence. There's a famous thought experiment called the paper clip maximizer, and Elon Musk tells a version about a strawberry maximizer, an AI that eventually "blankets every nook and cranny of the planet with strawberry fields and annihilates civilization in the process."

But the review cites sci-fi author Ted Chiang, who says the tech executives are projecting their own value system, every company trying to maximize growth at all costs. We're worried about computers, when corporations are already powerful and dangerous artificial beings.

I would argue it like this: an actual strawberry maximizer is almost harmless, because we understand what it's doing. It has a clear and simple motive, and the moment it destroys something we care about, in order to grow more strawberries, we'll stop it. But nobody understands what Google is doing, not even the people who work for it. It doesn't even make sense to say Google has a motive. It has behaviors, and consequences, and its behaviors are tied in with our own interests, so that it can do a lot of damage before we get serious about stopping it.

You could say the same thing about automobile traffic. A human creation has duplicated itself so successfully, that you can find it everywhere there are roads. Whole cities are made for it. It has made us completely dependent on it, while violently killing us, making us sick, isolating us socially, consuming massive resources, and throwing our planet's climate out of whack. Strangely, no one loves this radical contraption more than self-described conservatives (who have also found the one good use for it: racing).

But we don't call it an AI, because it's not intelligent in any way that we recognize. Its intelligence is hidden inside us. Our own simple motive, to go faster, has tricked us into doing all the thinking for a global takeover by an evil robot army.

By the way, our motive to understand this subject has led to a really unsatisfying discussion over on the subreddit. I think the deeper problem is, the human-built world has been so transformed by cars, that it's difficult to imagine a world where no one would miss them, especially one with other modern technologies.

But I think it's going to happen, not through utopian planning, but because maintaining roads is really expensive. In my own state, the roads are about to go to shit because of a populist revolt against car taxes. In a hundred years, populations will be falling everywhere, and places with more pavement than people will get abandoned.

November 11.

2019-11-11T23:10:24Z

November 11. Speed limits for ships can have massive benefits. This reminds me of an argument by Ivan Illich, that the world would be a lot better with a universal speed limit of 15 miles per hour.

Here's my own page of excerpts from Ivan Illich on Cars, where he calculates that Americans put so much time into their cars, including working to pay for car expenses, that their effective speed is only 5 mph. Also, the walkability of a city is a key factor in the social mobility of its residents. And why are cars killing more and more pedestrians? Probably because cities are increasingly being built for more, faster, and heavier vehicles.

Of course, even moderate transportation reforms are politically impossible. So I might as well go full-on utopian. Instead of limiting speed, I would limit momentum: mass times velocity. Say, 2000 pound miles per hour, or 40 kilogram meters per second, roughly the momentum of an average sized person on a bicycle. Old and sick people could still putter around on electric wheelchairs. Shrink the roads to trails, abandon the sprawl, turn the parking lots to food forests or high density housing, turn the railroad tracks to intercity trails.

With no heavy freight, all manufacturing would be local, and smaller scale. Every city would look different because new construction would have to be made out of local materials. Food would be local, so some cities would really need to innovate with greenhouses or algae or solar-powered protein fabricators. (This is not a low-tech utopia, only a slow one.)

Air travel would switch completely to craft that are lighter than air, and you could actually go a lot faster than 15 mph, on an airship that follows the wind. Anyone who wanted to go east would be waiting for an east wind. (I sort of already do this. There's a town eight miles east of here, with a good bike trail, and I only go when there's an east wind, so that the ride home is effortless.)

Now, let's get really crazy and put a speed limit on data. I think the best rule would be that data can only be carried on physical media by human couriers. That could be enforced by cable-cutting, signal-jamming, and shooting down drones, and big systems would have no advantage over independent agents in motivating couriers to move fast.

The social effects of slowing data to human speed are really interesting, and too big for this post. But I think both the right and left would get on board if they thought it through. And it could become politically realistic inside a thousand years, especially if there's a backlash against big data.

November 7.

2019-11-07T19:30:49Z

November 7. Some loose ends from the last post, mostly stuff I wrote over email:

I cringe a bit when I use the phrase "local communities", because when politicians use that phrase, they're always bullshitting. To actually bring back local communities, we would need politically impossible reforms. Or a tech crash.

I'm wondering if the breakdown of local communities could be explained purely by cars and telephones, which enable us to have a larger number of more far-flung and weaker human relationships. And of course the internet pushes that even farther.

If people have more money than time, they are forced to use money as the medium of social connection. Only when they have more time than money, can they connect through understanding.

Erik mentions "mental grey goo". Grey goo is the doom scenario with self-replicating tiny machines, and some mental artifacts are like that. They're very simple and they can take over our minds. So, money, internet memes, and certain religious or political ideas.

Maybe all it takes to get people interested in local politics, is to fill it with the same ingroup-outgroup drama as national politics, and then our cities and towns would become as fucked up as our country.

Some music for the weekend. My favorite album of 2019 is by a noise band called Sly and the Family Drone. Their instruments are drums, feedback, and baritone sax, and their sound is basically space jazz, ranging from ambient to heavy in the same track. Their best song, Jehovah's Wetness, has a climax that sounds like whale metal.

November 4.

2019-11-04T16:00:27Z

November 4. A few weeks ago I wrote that the thought of my own death gives me a sense of relief, because I would be free of all my responsibilities. This goes back to my favorite question lately: Why is there so little overlap between what's good for us to do, and what we feel like doing? Then I was reading Matthew Crawford's book Shop Class As Soulcraft and found a clue in this line: "We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it."

Coming at the same subject from another angle, a friend writes:

I am reading some family stories of my 92 year old neighbor, whose father and grandfather are prosperous farmers. They write a lot about the vital importance of being a prominent member of the local community. Not prominent in status or power, but prominent in the ability to help, to meet needs, in their local communities. It's their obligation, but also, their honor. They don't buy seeds from the fancy store far away for half the price; they buy seeds from the local guy, because that is what a community is all about.

Why did we stop doing that? I reject any kind of moral judgment, that people were better in the old days. People are the same as ever, we always do what seems like the best thing at the time, but our environment has changed so that abandoning local communities seems like the best move.

For the answer to both questions, I blame technological complexity. In a hunter-gatherer tribe, or a medieval village, or even the USA a hundred years ago, the human-built world was intelligible to you and your friends. You could wrap your head around the importance of whatever you were doing, and if something went wrong, you knew someone who could fix it.

Now the human-built world is so complex that you can't possibly know enough people to stay on top of it. We have to constantly deal with specialists who we might never talk to again. And the specialists, even if they're doing something useful, are doing the same thing over and over for strangers, so they're not really into it. And at the same time, we're supposed to be super-nice to each other and pretend to be happy, which means hiding our gnawing awareness of how many things could go wrong, that we have no idea how to deal with.

Lots of people have written about the costs of complexity. Joseph Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies is mostly about physical stuff rather than human psychology. However you frame it, three things are certain: 1) More complexity, more problems. 2) It's easy to gradually raise complexity, and really hard to gradually lower it. 3) So when complexity falls, it tends to fall a lot.

Usually the way this happens, is that people withdraw their emotional support, and then their practical support, from old, overly complex systems, and give it to new and simple systems that make them feel better. Beyond that, I have no idea how this is going to play out, but I'm curious to see it.