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"I said, 'Kiss me, you're beautiful; these are truly the last days.' You grabbed my hand, and we fell into it, like a daydream, or a fever."
-Godspeed You Black Emperor, "Dead Flag Blues"
August 22. Some pretty obvious links about AI, starting with a thorough article from the Atlantic, AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event:
What if generative AI isn't God in the machine or vaporware? What if it's just good enough, useful to many without being revolutionary? Right now, the models don't think -- they predict and arrange tokens of language to provide plausible responses to queries. There is little compelling evidence that they will evolve without some kind of quantum research leap. What if they never stop hallucinating and never develop the kind of creative ingenuity that powers actual human intelligence?
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What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet, reorient our economy and leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics and culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises?
The New Yorker makes the same point, What if AI Doesn't Get Much Better Than This?
A mirrored article from the Telegraph, Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
From the Register, AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'
And Texas law gives grid operator power to disconnect data centers during crisis. Because Texas has its own grid, it's a bellwether for grid problems elsewhere. This is good news that they've decided that keeping the lights on is more important than keeping the vaporous engines of techno-fantasy running.
August 19. Continuing from last week, I have a few more thoughts on the UBI. It's not going to bring instant utopia, and a good analogy is the outlawing of slavery. Globally there's still a lot of slavery going on. And in the USA, after 160 years, the descendants of slave owners are still much richer than the descendants of slaves. But outlawing slavery was the right move, and a necessary step in our slow progress toward an adequate society.
The UBI will take the edge off poverty, more efficiently than the present bureaucracy, but the forces of control will surely figure out new ways to keep controlling people who are getting free money. The worst way is by adding conditions to the UBI, which is why I think the "U" should stand for unconditional, a more explicit defense against conditions than "universal". But the most likely way is to keep the UBI low enough that only frugal people can live on it, and everyone else will have to enter the wage economy to some extent.
An obvious objection to the UBI is, "Who will do all the shitty jobs?" The unrealistic utopian answer is that we will just build a society with no shitty jobs, on our first try. The realistic answer is that the worst jobs will have to pay more. And the cynical and also realistic answer is that jobs will be outsourced -- as they are now -- to people in more repressive countries and to non-citizen immigrants. This might even change immigration policy, from "Keep out foreign workers who will steal our jobs," to "Recruit foreign workers who will do our jobs and not get free money."
The most common objection to the UBI is probably the belief that humans aren't fit for freedom, that without firm guidance by the elect, the rabble will descend into wanton hedonism and disgraceful sloth. Well, some of them will. But I see this like ecologial succession. When an overworked piece of land is finally left fallow, first it grows the nastiest weeds. But if the process is allowed to play out, the weeds get less nasty until you've got a wildflower meadow with thorny scrub incubating oak trees.
The education system will have to adapt, to ease off on training us to be interchangeable machine cogs, and start training us to manage our own time. Meanwhile, new private organizations will emerge to fill the gap: UBI communities (which won't be called that) will take your money and give you food and housing, and a purpose, and if they do it right they'll also get your volunteer labor. Conservatives would love the UBI if they understood how much it will help churches. And it will still be preferable to what we have now, because pumping money in at the bottom of the economy will inevitably make society more democratic. Better for the people to rule badly, than for the princes to rule well. Because how else will the people learn?
August 14. Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults? The author uses the word "rationalist" in a topical way, referring to followers of Eliezer Yudkowsky's Sequences. I've never read them, but there's lots of speculation, in the article and in the Hacker News thread, about how that kind of thinking could be related to culty thinking.
I've said this before: postapocalypse fiction is full of cults, but I think cults mainly happen during apocalyptic times and not after them. Right now, with everyone losing faith in the old systems, and LLMs that feed back beliefs, and the general difficulty of checking facts, I think we're entering a golden age of cults.
More doom, a removed Ask Reddit thread, What industry is struggling way more than people think? Local journalism, independent restaurants, radio.
From the Books subreddit, Is physical book quality going down? "Back in the day there would be a meeting about manufacturing and how the editor wanted the book to represent -- heft, paper feel, brightness. Samples would be shown, pricing done per unit. Now those different paper stocks simply don't exist."
The age of bronze and steel is a blog post about the death of a once promising 3D printing process, mainly because it required hands-on technical skills that have been lost. The author's conclusion: "Technologies can vanish. Your job can vanish. Companies that you thought were parts of the landscape can vanish. Cities can vanish. The way you live can vanish."
Finally, something inspiring. I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display. My prediction: In one thousand years, wooden pixel displays will still exist, because obsessive hobbyists can make them, but pixels as we now know them will not exist, because they require too much complexity in supporting technologies.
August 11. A young reader named Aleck has been asking me questions over email, and some of the dialogue is worth posting here. Today's subject is the economy.
> Do you think that reducing peoples' working hours would solve a lot of the unhappiness that we see? Say, just make it the law that people only have to work a maximum of 20-30 hours a week, and any more is optional.
I think the law should be that all wage labor is optional. People won't just sit and do nothing all day, unless they're depressed, which is caused by modern society being out of step with human nature. Humans love to do stuff, and the more we can do our own stuff, and not someone else's stuff, the happier we will be.
> One might say that working hours should be negotiated among workers and their employers, and if people wanted to work less, it would have happened by now because people have the power to advocate for themselves and control work life.
But people don't have that power. They're desperate for money and forced to negotiate from a weak position. A UBI would give workers a stronger position, and then instead of workers having to compete for scarce jobs by being more subservient, employers would have to compete for scarce workers by offering better work environments.
> Do you think UBI would somehow collapse our mixed economy? Would UBI be incompatible with our current economic system somehow?
UBI is a better fit for a dynamic steady state economy than a perpetual growth economy. If America suddenly got a UBI, the best way to pay for it would be a financial transaction tax, which would weaken the financial markets. And with everybody getting free money, it would be harder to find workers for the worst jobs. That's why I don't think we're going to get one until the growth economy has collapsed.
> Are you of the mind that the collapse of the current economic system will inevitably happen? Do you see any current indicators of it happening?
I think it's been happening for years. The economists will be the last ones to notice, because they just look at numbers which are more and more vaporous. If you look at people, they have lost faith in the system, lost hope that things will get better, and if you look at the big money players, they're cynically sucking up the last of the wealth. To maintain the illusion of perpetual growth, things that are necessary for future growth have been consumed: resources, topsoil, and the will of the people to keep the whole thing going. The only thing keeping it going now is inertia, and the lack of an alternative.
I don't know how it's going to shake out. It's very complicated. But I'm optimistic that Trump will be blamed for a depression that was eventually going to happen anyway, and in the backlash against Trump, we can get some reforms that would not have been possible under the old Democratic party.
August 7. As I get older, I'm getting more into theology. When I was growing up, only two beliefs were available, Christianity and physicalism, which calls itself "atheism", but in practice it's a lot more than the denial of a supreme being. While pretending to be opposites, these two belief systems share a radical and counterintuitive idea: that the future has already been written. Under physicalism, it's all been clockwork since the Big Bang; under Christianity, it's all part of the plan of an all-knowing and all-powerful God.
To get to a living and creative universe from physicalism, you need heretical science, like this Rupert Sheldrake video, Is The Sun Conscious? Sheldrake points out that if stars have some influence over their own motions, we don't need to invent dark matter.
To get to a living and creative universe from Christianity, you need heretical theology, like
Pelagius, or Socinianism, or in this century, process theology. Quoting from Bruce Gordon Epperly's book Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed:
At the heart of traditional Christian theology is the belief that God has unchanging knowledge of the universe, past, present, and future.
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Ironically, when changeless omniscience and absolute omnipotence are combined, God's creativity and freedom as well as love are compromised.... If God determines all that will occur in advance, then God cannot exercise power in novel and creative ways.
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In contrast, process theology affirms an open source, adventurous, and constantly evolving universe in which God and creatures are constantly doing new things.... Rather than planning all the important events of our lives and then testing our responses to adversity, process theology sees God as the Holy Adventurer who invites us to be companions on our own holy adventures.... Although God cannot, and does not, do everything, a constantly creative God is ultimately infinite in power and creativity, that is, there is no limitation, other than God's loving care, to the unfolding of God's power in the ongoing evolution of the universe.
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We may creatively choose to embody positive ideals that go in a different direction than God's ideal for the moment. In the open system universe, our creativity and freedom is not necessarily a fall from grace, even when it diverges from God's vision, but an adventure in action and imagination that enables God and us to do new things.
August 4. Stray links, starting with something optimistic, a long New Yorker piece about solar energy and how much better it's getting. (mirror)
But you could argue that having more energy is bad for us. This bleak Reddit thread is almost entirely about problems that have been caused by energy-intensive information technology: Older men, what have you noticed about young men that has you concerned?
Another Reddit thread, People who have done sex work, what is something that surprised you? It's mainly about loneliness and emotional needs.
July 31. Via Hacker News, Face it: you're a crazy person, and here's the Hacker News comment thread. This is supposed to be an inspiring piece about finding what you love to do, and it has some helpful stuff about unpacking: viewing a job in terms of what you actually do hour after hour, instead of romanticizing what you do, or thinking about how other people see you. Unpacking leads to the observation that almost all jobs are full of tedious chores that almost nobody would do voluntarily. So you have to find the job where you're so "crazy" that you can do it all day when other people wouldn't want to.
To me, this is depressing, because I know how little overlap there is between what people actually enjoy doing all day, and what they can get paid to do in an economy designed to suck all the money to the top. I imagine a Venn diagram with two big circles and a small sliver where they meet. In that sliver are the people we all look up to. All motivational speaking is about becoming one of those people. But the reality is the two vast circles, one of billions of people grinding for money and waiting to die, and the other of people exploring obsessions that nobody will pay them for, and that they might not even be good at.
Related: my novel, The Days of Tansy Capstone, is now in beta. I'm good at worldbuilding and bad at exposition, so I want to do more polishing to make it readable, and you should probably wait. But I'm satisfied that I've done what I set out to do: write the novel I wanted to read, that nobody else was writing. I'm going to continue writing fiction because I find it more rewarding than anything else, and I'm going to continue blogging because it's easy.
July 28. Angry essay by a journalist who went to Dubai:
There are hells on earth and Dubai is one: an infernal creation born of the worst of human tendencies. Its hellishness cannot be laid solely at the feet of the oligarchs, whose wealth it attracts, nor the violent organised criminals who relocate there to avoid prosecution. It is hellish because, as the self-appointed showtown of free trade, it provides normal people with the chance to buy the purest form of the most heinous commodity: the exploitation of others. If you want to know how it feels to have slaves, in the modern world -- and not be blamed openly for this desire -- visit Dubai.
A few paragraphs down she says it more concisely: "Being served makes us cruel infants." But I want to nit-pick about the term "free trade." Most people use it that way, as if "free" means nothing more than the freedom of the rich to crush the poor under their boots. I would call that capitalism, which has never been free, because a truly free economy must be made entirely of free individuals, and nobody is free if they need money to survive. Bashing "free trade" makes it sound like the only alternative is a top-down state-run economy, when what we need is a bottom-up economy in which basic quality of life is guaranteed, so nobody is forced to sell their labor.July 24. Unrelated light links. Sailing the fjords like the Vikings yields unexpected insights, about a guy who traveled up and down the coast of Norway in Viking-style boats, and discovered places they would have landed, and why they would not have needed navigational tools.
Vanishing home field advantage in English football, a careful data analysis that discovers two things: home field advantage has been decreasing across all leagues, and in the Covid season, when there were no fans, home field advantage disappeared completely. This suggests that the main reason for home field advantage is fan support, and that the reason it's vanishing is that more fans are traveling to support their team at away games.
Mushroom learns to crawl after being given robot body. I think this kind of thing has more long-term promise than AI, because AI is just humans looking inward, deeper into the human-made world. By engaging with the agency of other species, we're looking outward.
A fascinating thread on Ask Old People, To what extent could you see your now-adult children's personalities emerging when they were still little? At least half the answers say their kids already had their personalities at birth.
And some music. The Many Sides of Erik Satie is a nice article about the composer, and how strange and ahead of his time he was. "The Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes do not sound like 19th-century concert hall music; they sound like pieces composed by someone who knew there would one day be recording studios, CDs, downloads." I like listening to his weirdest piece, Vexations, at half speed.
July 21. I have a bunch of negative links about AI, but that opinion is no longer interesting. It's shocking how fast the conventional wisdom has shifted, from "Look at this cool thing" to "I'm sick of this dystopian clusterfuck." I'll just post this one link, a cynical subthread about AI from a Reddit thread, What are you starting to lose interest in?
I've started the book Wilding by Isabella Tree, about a rewilding project on a farm in England. It's eventually inspiring, but the beginning is depressing, describing the global trend of obsessive intensification, as giant agribusiness tries to squeeze every last bit of fertility from the land and every last bit of motivation from the poor saps who do the actual work.
This is the zeitgeist of late stage capitalism. It is now spreading from business into government, as described by this article, The Enshittification of American Power. A culture of more and more is meeting a reality of less and less, with an ever smaller number of ever richer people hungrily gobbling the last scraps. The next stage will be "Let's scapegoat some people and kill them." After that, maybe as soon as 2040, I expect the culture to start healing, and eventually come full circle, from "Let's make lots of money" to "Let's make it fun to have no money."
July 16. I'm reading Shamanism, a book of essays compiled by Shirley Nicholson, and in one by Mihaly Hoppal, I learned that shamans are not mentally ill. Specifically, there's a common belief among modern people who are sympathetic to other cultures, that the people who we label as schizophrenic and exclude from society, would find respected roles as shamans in indigenous cultures. In fact, "Shamans are much healthier than the rest of the population, due to the psychic and physical strains of the deep trance." And, "Recent studies in in South Asia have shown that, out of more than a hundred Thai and Malayan shamans and mediums, none was mentally ill."
Shamans are highly capable specialists in a level of reality that our highly capable specialists don't go to, because our culture thinks it's crazy. Only our crazy people go there, and they don't know how to deal with it. They are overwhelmed by stuff that a shaman knows how to navigate, and in shamanic cultures they would be given help in dealing with that level of reality, instead of being medicated to stop them from going there.
July 14. It's too hot this week for heavy thinking. Three light links, two from the Stoner Thoughts subreddit. My dog is such a good boy (even when he's a bad boy) so "maybe a higher being sees us the same way we see dogs." I've thought about something similar when I'm walking dogs. I give them a certain amount of slack to mess with stuff and choose their own path, but at some point I take charge for their own benefit (or mine) and I wonder if that's what fate does with me.
This almost uncommented post is subtly profound: I think I died and the afterlife looks just like my apartment
And a fun subreddit of mostly video posts, justgalsbeingchicks
July 11. The other day I said AI is overhyped, but my actual opinion is more complex. I think the hype around a given use of AI is inversely proportional to its helpfulness. So of all the directions we can imagine AI going, the ones that people get the most excited about, like "AI will replace all jobs," or "AI will gain human-like consciousness," will either fail, or will succeed in a harmful way. Meanwhile, a lot of niche applications of AI, known only to specialists, will actually make things better.
I think video games are a great fit for AI: Facts don't matter, mistakes don't kill anyone, artistic standards are mid, and there's a ton of grunt coding that can be automated. Humans will still come up with ideas, and provide a general framework, but AI can fill in the details so fast that we might get a Fallout or a Grand Theft Auto where a whole city is simulated down to every street, and the contents of a million rooms can be AI-generated on the fly.
I also think AI is a good fit for therapy, maybe too good. It's already better than a bad human therapist, and more potent than an old-fashioned passive therapist. The danger is that the machine, in a way that a human would never do, will feed back the patient's madness, and pull them deeper into it. I don't see how more powerful computers will fix this. Here's a good Hacker News comment thread on LLMs as therapists.