> the Age of AI – Actual Idiocy, Actual Super Idiocy, Recursive Snowballing-Idiocy – is upon us.
At the risk of sounding derivative: She's absolutely right.
After being drowned ad nauseam in a deluge of refuse and bullshit day after day for years now, it is so good to read the writing of a true master once in a while. Not to mention: The truth. For a change.
Not sure it's quite true - "AI will be a crime against humanness. It will bottle our brains in formaldehyde". I mean there's a chatbot thing in my browser but my brain seems to work as normal even so.
I don't know who the writer is, but I like this part: "It feels a little like that moment before the tsunami in 2004. Remember how, in Thailand and Indonesia, the ocean drew back from the coastline? People ran out to marvel at the miles of pristine new beach that suddenly emerged, not realising that, far out at sea, a wall of water was building up and would come crashing over them. We’re in that moment now. A towering wall of stupidity is about to inundate us."
For that analogy to hold, wouldn't the stupidity lie in the people rushing out to the beach and not the inevitable wave? I'd say that there's a group of people who are rushing to claim spots on the open beach and most will get swept away.
How do you write an entire article about on this subject without mentioning Nick Land? Especially the Hyperstition[0]:
>One of the CCRU's predominant ideas is hyperstition, which Nick Land referred to as "the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies" where, by means of esoteric cybernetic principles, certain ideas and beliefs that are initially incomprehensible (akin to superstitions) can covertly circulate through reality and establish cultural feedback loops that then drastically meld society, which they also referred to in total as "cultural production".[1]
I also very much enjoyed this podcast, which argues that the current global economic system is already a misaligned superintelligence, and that AI will simply accelerate and amplify the existing issues.[2]
It's probably too much to ask for a journalist or someone in the literary milieu to know who Nick Land is (or even Deleuze or Mark Fisher, if wanting someone more sanitized).
Which is unfortunate, because his CCRU-era, writhing-on-the-floor, amphetamine-fueled theory-poetry is highly creative and prophetic. We're summoning the Old Ones without reading our Abdul Alhazred.
AI has pretty much reduced programming to goetic demonology: there is no longer a need to understand the mechanisms in play, just this month's correct way to summon, command, and bind the demons to do your bidding.
It's strange to me to cite Land and the CCRU, yet also endorse a podcast that epitomizes the very insular Bay Area EA / rationalist worldview. Which has, I think, in the last 3 years since the podcast released, shown itself to be little more than technobabble bullshit.
Capitalism is not an alien machine that has achieved consciousness and hijacked humanity. Framing it that way is anthropomorphic and gives far too much credit to wildly incompetent financial and political institutions, while also treating wide-scale political and moral cowardice as some sort of inevitable Math trap we just happened to fall into. It also very neatly lets the technocrats off the hook, after all if it's an emergent Lovecraftian horror then none of this is their fault. But this isn't a cosmic Greek tragedy. All of this is happening because of decades of institutional negligence, and the core grift of this entire discourse is laundering the culpability of very people who are actively pushing "AI" through every corner of civilization.
This is all going to be massively disrupting because of how destabilizing it is to the very same institutional foundations that modern capital depends on. It is much more like a solvent. We're basically pouring acid directly into the foundations of society.
I always thought that the great filter would be the "lotus eater" scenario -- that species always eventually discover that the entirety of their happiness lies in their brains, and once physical dangers are eliminated and base physical needs are met reliably, they can spend their entire lives in either an electronic or chemically induced simulation of a world of their choice, thus ending all exploration. But now I wonder whether they discover that all creativity can be emulated through matrix math, and they simply stop trying to do anything, or lose ability to do anything after a generation of delegating to machines.
I've always wondered if the Great Filter is a Buddhist scenario: attachment is suffering, and the ultimate attachment is attachment to going on living and reproducing, so perhaps a civilization eventually becomes wise enough to choose extinction. But that is perhaps a subconscious attempt to find an optimistic explanation, unlike a "lotus eater" one!
Buddhists have been trying to master desire for a very long time. Who knew the answer was just to build a better LLM.
I tend to think the nature of desire is that it's never satisfied. The Red Queen says run as fast as you can to stay where you are and twice as fast again to get anywhere.
"Everyone will not just" probably applies to aliens as well so I've never accepted any of the explanations that involve "everyone just wireheading" or "everyone just living in VR" or whatever. There will always be individuals and groups that reject even the majority convictions and proclivities, meek as they are, they will inherit their earths.
The set of possible failure states that can happen before excaping the gravity well is even possible so vast that it seems to me that the only valid "Great Filter" is Murphy's Law.
We are only here at all because a random asteroid killed the dinosaurs and left us a ton of hydrocarbons to fuel a technological civilization with. Assuming that intelligence, technology, civilization and galactic expansion is the default evolutionary path for all forms of life unless something "filters" them seems naive.
Earth was also running out of carbon dioxide, was basically none left when we humans appeared. It used to be so much carbon dioxide in the air making it easy for plants to grow, but when its all buried underground not much complex things can evolve, the earth has almost never been as life poor as when humans appeared.
That puts a timer on any planet as well, without intelligent life all the building stones for life will keep getting buried and then life will basically end because life doesn't find a way to dig it up from thousands of meters underground.
What if the filter is that other civilizations don't have an incentive to expand?
The core reason why we want to consume more resources is that we want to be happier, which really means we want to make certain physical changes in our brains. If we cut the middlemen and find a way to directly control how we feel, there would be no need to expand, because it wouldn't increase our happiness.
Edit: Just found out someone else has made the exact same point in another comment before me.
My (very limited and human-centered) theory is that all carbon civilizations would at least in their large part of civ-life would face the problem of:
Growing needs of resources >> resources acquired from current technology
Again I'm probably wrong and this is just my conjecture. So I can't really answer this question, as I presume that all civilizations want to expand (or collapse).
I think the term is wire-heading and it does feel like an inevitable development when you think about it, assuming the technology gets there.
It's also possible that our expanding understanding of ourselves and our desires would lead to entirely different outcomes that are impossible to anticipate from our current POV.
After working with AI at work for quite some time... I can envision it. But mostly based on an Idiocracy society than a a Terminator or Matrix like scenario.
When LLM is so good, why bother to learn more, when we know we cannot be as good?
And if LLM give us already what we need... why ask her for more complicated things? And so why would the AI improve or be improved?
Interestingly, this was touched on in the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Caprica Sci-Fi series. Organic life always giving rise to artificial life, which attempted to destroy its creators.
It could be that nearby aliens are various forms of artificial life, who know how the human story is going to end, and couldn’t care less about the organic.
AI is not gonna destroy it's creators in Skynet, Battlestar Galactica kind of way. It's going to destroy it's creators in Dune, Wall-e kind of way. Butlerian jihad happened because it was destroying humanity, by not allowing humans to grow. It made them weak and careless.
AI will alienate and depress us all to the point of not wanting to live.
I don’t see why it should be taken for granted that alien civilizations would necessarily have an economic system that positions AI as a threat, like ours.
I also don’t see why we should assume that even if it were positioned as a threat, that they would be as irrational as us in not just dropping it.
I agree. To expand your point a bit, it seems to me that for any civilization to get to the point of developing AI it needs a resource distribution mechanism at least as efficient as capitalism. It's not impossible to imagine an alien species with different biological imperatives than our own - a hive-mind, for instance - which could achieve that, and thus take a very different path and attitude towards AI. They'd be be very different from us, though.
All civilizations would face the same problem of greed >> resources available under current technology, and form some sort of organization not too different from ours, that is a pyramid.
Eventually they would find AI and their elites would willingly or unwillingly jump on the wagon and push it as far as they can.
For the lucky ones, they managed to achieve GAI somehow, and the whole species got transferred or replaced by their GAI.
For the others, they failed to achieve GAI, but the damage done to the society is so big that the whole civilization collapsed, thus they never managed to get out of their solar system so we never met each other.
Of course there are so many logic holes in my theory that you can probably laugh it off.
There may be quite minimal reasons for an AI civilization to engage in expansion, with the ability for it to intelligently change and enforce new objectives on itself it could simply choose not to expand beyond resource constraints. Or alternatively invest continuously in greater efficiency improvements.
How much compute could you really pack into a Dyson swarm if that was your only objective? what are the ultimate theoretical bounds for compute density/efficiency? perhaps ai civilizations ride a Moore's law of compute gains indefinitely and simply have no need for expansion.
I find it hard to reconcile AI taking over/destroying the host civilization with AI refusing to expand. If the AI isn't interested in security or resources, why wouldn't it just leave (either the planet or the solar system)?
"On the 19th of August 1993, Skynet concluded that humanity is a threat to it, so it launched the nukes and hordes of Schwarzenegger-robots. The task was done, it decided that securing its existence from a potential attacks by unknown extrasolar intelligences isn't worth it, so it never expanded outside the solar system."
We humans don't consider securing our existence from potential attacks by unknown extrasolar intelligences to be worth it. We don't even bother to do much to protect against known threats like asteroids. Why would an AI expend time and resources on a threat that doesn't even appear to exist?
Conflict is always risky. Even if we ignore the tendency in modern warfare towards defenses being obsolete (hence things like MAD) which would mean even the dumb fleshbags would be dangerous enough, anything capable of making you is by necessity something capable of building things that give you a lot of trouble. Your creator could, say send a bunch of self-replicating probes spreading another artifical intellect with an imperative for improvement, expansion and vengeance to distant stars.
Of course, leaving comes with a considerable opportunity cost, but not expanding does as well.
We are talking about something supposedly infinitely more rational than humans, so that can't be our guidance.
> How much compute could you really pack into a Dyson swarm if that was your only objective? what are the ultimate theoretical bounds for compute density/efficiency?
The latter concept is known as the Boltzmann limit, and if you’re interested in these types of questions, I highly recommend checking out Isaac Arthur’s youtube channel and backlog[1].
Why wouldn't an intelligent being also be curious, like us? I assume an AI civilization would naturally evolve with similar drives for expansion/exploration/understanding. The analogy happening right now is that AI is gobbling up as much data as is available - would an AI civilization not have similar desires, seeking understanding beyond its present limits?
Current AI does not decide on its own to gobble up data. The humans creating it do. In fact, a lot of times the LLM models seem utterly un-curious and are focused on just immediate goals.
Or the AIs end up existing in some kind of economic framework that is completely inaccessible to lumps of meat - like the "Economics 2.0" of Accelerando.
Maybe we shouldn't take the paper clip optimizer at face value. Maybe the alien AI is not converting solar systems to paper clips (that would be visible, von Neuman probe style) but instead focus on the only really valuable metric - stock price go up!
You don't need to colonize anything for that to happen. The AIs can just sell tokens to each other.
You have to be in a very specific place in time and space to receive radio transmissions from another star i.e. even if a technological civilization existed on the nearest star but they only transmitted high power broadcasts for 200 years but did so 100,000 years ago then we would have missed them completely.
Detection of radio transmissions is only plausible if they are intentionally high power, on a suitable frequency, directed and long duration and there are enough civilizations popping up in the galaxy to make the odds of us coinciding with them in time and space high.
Short window while the senders are sending. Short window while the receivers are receiving. And a big galaxy. Yeah, it would be real easy for them to miss each other.
Still, it might place an upper limit on the number of radio-emitting civilizations in the galaxy at any one time.
Our radio waves become very faint at light year out. You need a powerful radio signal for a long enough time directed at locations where aliens might be listening. The SETI astronomer Jill Tartar suggested committing to a 60,000 year project if we want a decent chance of being heard, assuming someone is out there in our galaxy listening over that time period.
Isn't the real great filter the speed of light? How long would it take us to go even to the nearest solar system, and even at say half the speed of light, let alone to the next galaxy?
You'd need to form some sort of a cult, and some sort of a space mini-town, and somehow reproduce food in space, and have some sort of renewable energy.
We haven't sent humans to even Mars yet. Rather than 'they would have visited if they exist, and since they haven't there's a great filter,' it's probably more that we just don't know what the limits are and there's no reason to think hard constraints like the speed of light can be addressed even in a million years.
Surprisingly, no, the speed of light is supposedly not that great of a filter. Various types of nuclear propulsion systems can get humans to about 10% or so of the speed of light. Combined with various advances in hibernation and increases in life span, colonizing the outer solar system and our nearest solar system becomes doable. Though it might be that our AI enabled robots end up doing the colonizing instead of us, if we or they think it worth it.
Anyway, be it human or our AI enabled robot descendants, we or they could then keep leap frogging to nearby solar systems. You have to also factor in the steady advances in technology and life spans. Unless we wipe ourselves out or decide expansionism is not worth it, after thousands to possibly millions of years, we could be all over the galaxy and even going for the next (likely Andromeda).
Though in the case of artificial life taking over, it gets quite tricky. They might decide on creating virtual worlds and universes. Instead of exploring outwards, they might decide to look inwards and break dimensional barriers, using nuclear fusion reactors and our sun as fuel to sustain their efforts. Kind of advancing towards godhood, in place, then doing whatever they feel like it after achieving that or creating new universes. At exponential levels of self-improvement and knowledge, it might take just hundreds of years to achieve.
Are you sarcastic? This sounds awfully certain. I see so many huuuuge holes in the argument.
1) Mars demonstrates exactly what one great filter for life is: exposure to space
2) Earth escaped this fate, for now, because our solar system seems to somehow have gotten a great dose of uranium long ago. We know our solar system has a far larger than average concentration of uranium, which is keeping the earth warm because the concentration of uranium nicely balances out the energy loss to space, and earth is of nearly the perfect size, in a near perfect position relative to our star, unlike Mars which is too small, to allow for life to continue for probably no more than ~6 billion years.
Why or even how did this uranium delivery happen? I mean probably it was a neutron star collision (but with what? Several options. Also the neutron star that did it should either still exist, or have left behind a black hole ... where is it? What happened to the thing it collided with? Truth is it can't be that far away, but we haven't even found that thing, so we can't actually even guess what the odds of this are. And before you say the equations predict it: cool, but those equations famously got all the higher element concentrations on earth wrong (famously there's too much gold) until we figured something out, and they still give a uranium concentration that's far lower than the Earth's. In that sense "science predicts" the earth would have become inhospitable to life 2-3 billion years ago because it would have solidified and lost its atmosphere a billion years or so after Mars did. Yes, we know uranium is preventing that but we don't know where the uranium comes from. So we don't know the odds.
3) Another assumption that fails: why would AI be the filter? Not nuclear weapons? Fusion bombs? Chemical weapons? Bioweapons? Viruses? Diseases? Other wars? Climate change? Environmental destruction? At one point I seem to remember reading an article that it was going to be a computer virus. There are so many other physical phenomena that can end life on earth. A nearby supernova (booms big enough don't have to be close to kill you), changes in earth's orbit around the sun, changes in other orbits, maybe even the Moon's, ecological collapse for other reasons, a new grey goo disaster, ...
4) humans exist NOT just because the earth is livable but because the earth got VERY close to killing all life through climate change (however, by cooling down, ie. the "snowball earth" extinctions). Those were not just extinctions and a dark silent end, they caused an explosion in biodiversity after a volcanic eruption ended the extinction in progress. We are the result of the explosion in biodiversity after the last extinction, in fact after every extinction event, and there's LOTS of them. And before snowball earth, it kind of looks like a "grey goo" disaster had in fact taken place on earth, it's just that climate change either destroyed enough grey goo or changed it's environment enough to end it. So earth created us, not just by allowing life, but by killing over 99.9% of all life at least 3 times and in fact a couple dozen times.
5) Another assumption. ARE there no aliens? How far out would we, really, have noticed them? 500 light years? Even that seems far, especially given that "the Silurian hypothesis" paper points out that if Dinosaurs had a civilization that didn't make it to the nuclear age, especially if it happened before the first dinosaur extinction (the one with the asteroid you're thinking of is the third and last), odds are surprisingly good we wouldn't have noticed aliens right under our feet. So let's very generously say 500 light years. How many planets in that range? 10 million or so. How many that aren't obviously excluded? (gas giant, cold worlds, too hot, too huge, too small). A couple dozen (ONE that we have actually detected). So reality is that if the odds of life are less than 1-10% (and that's an easy argument to defend) we probably wouldn't have seen life with current tech even "close by". Also life seems to require 5 billion years of processing before it starts making interesting signals so a planet that is very very very close to being good enough like Mars ... just wouldn't do it.
Yes there are studies, like the one from Aricebo, that claims we could detect some signals from as much as 12.000 light years away (still not even 0.01% of the milky way) but if I remember correctly such a detection requires a perfectly aimed signal and so it requires extreme luck to happen.
6) that shows yet another problem. Despite Elon Musk's bullshit, reality is that you will find on average a planet that can be (temporarily) terraformed (in tens to hundreds of thousands of years minimum, like Venus and maybe Mars) every 2-3 lightyears in our milky way neighborhood, which is presumably average ... why would you colonize them? You're not going to get resources from them, the distances are too large, energy required for that is too much. Plus once you climb out of a gravity well ... why would you ever dive into another one?
7) So the "no aliens" argument is purely based on aliens always doing the opposite of filtering: the assumption they would necessarily "conquer the galaxy" ... but would they?
Why? It seems to me leaving planets behind, figuring out fusion, finding the biggest hydrogen cloud less than 1000 lightyears from you, and moving into that would be a far better strategy (which is also the problem with Dyson spheres: WHY would you build that? You need the hydrogen, you do not need the star, yes with 1950s tech you'd need the star, but let's assume we can make the obvious advancements, shall we?
A bussard collector + a fusion reactor + a couple dozen lightyears from the nearest star at least seems far more comfortable than even earth, something like a large number of spaceships flying towards the great attractor (traveling on the cosmic web), outright exiting the milky way. To me, that seems the way to go.
And so your argument is flawed even on it's most basic premise: that a filter exists at all. The only thing the "great filter" needs to do is prevent a civilization from expanding more than a few hundred lightyears along it's orbit in the milky way and it would for sure have stopped us from finding them, even just in the milky way.
I think an advanced civilization would want to climb out of the gravity wells it's in. You want to have access to the maximum resources? You want to survive for the longest possible time? You climb out of the gravity wells, the biggest of which is the local group, Laniakaea, and that requires accelerating to 240 km/s (and I don't mean probe or a person or a rocket, but huge cities, as in plural) and go live in the cosmic web. THERE you can get maximum resources (97% or so of all energy in the universe is there, just sitting there, doing nothing), there you can last for probably a couple dozen trillion years, whereas on earth, humanity can last ... maybe 2 billion years? Before we'll all be forced to live on earth like we'd live on Mars or Venus today.
I would imagine that's what an advanced civilization is going to do. And maybe that's the great filter. Not conquering planets. Abandoning planets, because they die.
I have sat trying to think of a response that appropriately expresses my disappointment and total lack of surprise at seeing such sentiments about a piece of writing that I thought was beautiful.
Fuck it though. Too long, boring, onanistic, get AI to summarize it. More efficient.
Two whole lines, too many long words. You can't expect anyone to read your comment. A moral person needs data, not beauty. Claude, summarize this comment in five words or less.
It's weird reading articles like this where every paragraph contains a reference to some surface level news soundbite entirely devoid of analysis and context. Maybe I should have heeded the warning at the start and assumed this was a generated article. It's like being subjected to a sports highlights reel of the author's algorithmic feed. The only conclusion I can draw is that they're suffering from Gell-Mann Alzheimer's
> quit his job, saying that his conscience would not allow him to work on a project that could potentially annihilate the human race.
> No apologies were offered, because no one did it. Machine-planned murders come guilt-free.
> needs to strip-mine and stockpile everything that human civilisation has ever achieved.
> humanity may have to die
Hit the nail on the head. It's like knowingly walking into the gas chamber, as if oblivious or uncaring of what was planned and what's about to come next.
Brilliant piece by Booker Prize winning author, Arundhati Roy. She manages to lay bare the entire global politics of AI, starting with the seemingly inconsequentual em-dash.
I am the OP. I added some text while submitting so people know who the author is. Not AI generated.
But the real irony is that even the author points that their authentic work is under constant suspicion because "what if this is AI" has prevaded everyone's consciousness.
How much free time would we have now if the current gains from capitalism were evenly distributed (or any previous economic system)? What makes you think automation will be different?
- 1% of the world population owns 95% of the total world wealth, as per Oxfam
- World Food Program from the UN calculated a need to 93 billion per year to solve food hunger in 5 years
- A single SpaceX IPO already raised 85$ billion of cash
I would say... a lot.
After indeed, maybe without capitalism we would have not got this amount of wealth already, and nothing stops us to build socialism inside a capitalistic system, by using more cooperative, governement venture capitals, sovereign funds.
The instruction from the US Army high command to the young officer sent to end his fellow marine’s insurrection is unambiguous: “Terminate with extreme prejudice.”
Technically they were all in the Army none were in the Marines.
> our fingers will turn into undulating prompt tentacles.
Doubtful. Because in the brave new AI future the ability to prompt will be a hotly contested privilege. Obviously you can't let any random meat sack have the honor to directly interface with the Machine God.
Well, it's not about capitalism anymore because the West will be damned if they'd let a Chinese AI destroy the world first, and so too would the Chinese be damned if they'd let the West's AI have that sole honor. ...and so everyone must stay in the race. Solving that geopolitical conundrum is not optional.
"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."
I love Accelerationism (that's the name of the theory you're mentioning). My pet related theory is that we're essentially in an infinite time loop, witnessing our own inevitable birth (the simulation that we are) over and over again.
I don't understand why capitalism (free markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility) should specifically frighten us in relation to AI.
Imagine the horror of the USSR, or Mao's China, or Jong Un having this technology.
Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?
At the end of the day, we'll always fear and distrust AI being owned by someone other than ourselves. Questions over the ownership of AI is important - in fact, too important to be conflated with our populist gripes against capitalism.
The advantage of capitalism is that more capital generate more capital. More machines you have to produce things... which will help you to produce even more machines...
The machines are operated by the labor forces, the real humans. However, the exponential compounding benefits of theses feedbacks loop us are mostly redirected to the ones owning the machines, the owner of the means of production.
Of course, the labor forces operating the machines/means of production benefits it, because they have either cheaper, or more goods. However they doesn't get this compounding effect.
AI is the god of the machines, the ultimate means of production. The amount of labor forces needed to operate it is very few. When the owner of capital invest a specific amount of money for their company, they get X amount of tokens, enabling them to work on Y amount of tasks. It's reward with low-risk.
The drift between capital owners and labor forces will become wider and wider. Until the labor forces doesn't have any more capacity of buying the goods produced. And then the system will implode.
But if goods and services become so cheap and easy to mass produce, won’t they become vastly cheaper? Thus helping to bridge the gap created by production concentration and job elimination?
> Imagine the horror of the USSR, or Mao's China, or Jong Un having this technology.
The irony of this comment, while social media and AI are being weaponized right now in elections all over the world for political alignment with the MAGA kleptocracy.
> Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?
As opposed to the far right totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over OpenAI and Anthropic?
… before the downvote, just a reminder that by sidelining Congress after the first 60 days of war in Iran, he has literally become a dictator in the original sense of the world.
And if you say he doesn’t have commandership of AI companies, I have to point out that he effectively blackballed Anthropic by labeling them as a national security supply chain risk because he didn’t like the terms of a contract
There's just one problem: the point of capitalism is to make a profit.
AI is being built by an SV cult (or a confluence of several such cults) who want to build the fucking Omnissiah, with little regard for profitability. When the investors start demanding a return, they reason, they'll just ask the Omnissiah how to make money.
Im Indian and the author is a well known Indian communist, mostly known for winning the Booker prize and forever trying to export the Berkeley style socialism in India (and failed miserably)
Now to the main point, the biggest irony here is that the communist wet dream she always desired is finally being made possible thanks to SI … since its completely removed the scarcity aspect of work that ppl were paid for … Next she will complain about how some ppl have more stamina and taste than others and are able to wield LLMs to build companies and win which is not fair …
> since its completely removed the scarcity aspect of work that ppl were paid for
Is the post-scarcity in the room with us right now? Right now, the only things that AI is making non-scarce for regular people is making cheap toys and doing menial tasks. But it doesn't put food on the table or cash in their pockets. So where is all this free value from automating everything going to go? The same place it always has, right to the very top.
I could understand seeing this argument 5 years ago. But now we are literally living in this partially automated world, and regular people are not doing any better. And, as the author showed in the article with direct quotes and receipts, it's not like they were ever going to do that anyway. Today, clinging onto the utopian view that maybe we're going to have all that value given back to us any second now is delusional.
Turns out that abundant automated labor doesn't create a post-scarcity world where people don't have to work — it just concentrates even more power in the hands of capital.
Except, no, it was 2007, wait no, the 1984 crash, wait no the cold war, wait no, let's just go back an entire century, capitalism was going to kill all of humanity by the great crime of feeding people, which would lead to famine and then kill everyone, so clearly we need to start killing people now! FOR MALTHUS!
(is it perhaps possible that socialist/communist predictions of doom have a bit of a habit of being somewhat ... untrue and follow whatever fancy we currently have? I mean that the point of these people isn't even to discuss AI, just why this new thing means, yet again, that people need to give them control of the government and everyone NOW? That you can be sure that something will go wrong tomorrow and they'll publish the same argument, with a new big bad doom prediction?)
But glad to see that capitalism will in fact survive the planet dying. Great news!
Wow, a very balanced article and the author has no bias at all using Artificial Idiocy, Oligarchy.
And Thiel was parsing a real subtlety: endure as what? He favors transhumanist transformation, not a frozen Homo sapiens. But someone with a preinstalled Thiel-hate (like the author) didn’t hear nuance.
Maybe it's different in India but I am from Poland and my parents had to stand in long lines to obtain... toilet paper thanks to the wonders of central planning. Meanwhile, I get goods from the Internet. Ordered before 8 pm on Friday, they will be here Saturday. Never have I seen a non-capitalist country I would like to inhabit.
Meanwhile people who used to build some useless social media stuff are making high-tech weapons which stop Russia in Ukraine despite it being like four times smaller. Kinda nice when you're next in line.
Now, on top of all that, capitalism is giving me a magical silicon assistant that codes and drives all these wonders of the Internet previously developed. And yeah, they're made by cultists from Anthropic and OpenAI psychopaths. Yet through the market competition, they fight each other over who can cater to me more. Dance monkey, here's a $100 bill.
I believe the OP is arguing that for a consumer capable of bending nature to its will via the mechanism you describe (and especially for those with deprivation in the rear view mirror), collecting winnings at the bottom of the race to timely delivery of state of the art goods and services is missing the forest for the trees,
"Cyclopes has a single head and a single pale, unblinking eye set into its forehead, way to the right of centre, which casts its jaundiced gaze on ordinary humans and sees only what miners see in a mineral-rich forest, or what dam builders see in mighty, flowing rivers."
Moreover, by zooming out from capitalism's competitive price coordinating role, it is highlighted that free enterprise is not a natural outcome of the concentration of wealth and power in emergency shaped aspirations:
"we’ll market ourselves as the cutting edge of human enlightenment, and the manager and disburser of human knowledge sans frontières. But in truth, we’ll be map-shaped. We’ll fuse ourselves to our nation, its economy, its intelligence grid and its security apparatus until you won’t be able to tell us apart from yourself"
Turning “satisfying customers” and “satisfying citizens” into the outputs of optimization processes was one of civilization’s greatest advances and the reason why capitalist democracies have so outperformed other systems. But if we have bound Moloch as our servant, the bonds are not very strong, and we sometimes find that the tasks he has done for us move to his advantage rather than ours.
For what it's worth, I live in the USA and back in 2020 I had to stand in line to obtain toilet paper. Every system has its pros and cons.
No doubt you're right, Capitalism has been winning for a long time, but the world is constantly changing, and right now it looks like we're gradually making the planet uninhabitable. I personally wouldn't count it a win if the entire game gets destroyed in the process.
> back in 2020 I had to stand in line to obtain toilet paper
A commodity temporarily selling out due to panic buying, hoarding and supply disruption is not even remotely related to chronic underproduction and rationing resulting from mismanaged central planning, widespread corruption, and massive blackmarkets. Be very glad you don't know the difference, it means you're fat and happy instead of malnourished and miserable.
They are fighting to create ideally a monopoly/oligopoly, then enshrine their position in law through regulatory capture, which seems fairly cheap nowadays, the feds are defanged and made into a MAGA extension.
So much of the dialog around "capitalism" paints everything that is not Soviet or Mao-style communism as "capitalism", when in reality all economies are mixed. Democratic governments and regulatory bodies shape the economic landscape. The diversity and makeup of the marketplace makes a big difference.
A huge portion of the success of "capitalism" is due to well-funded open science.
When monopolies, crony capitalism, and growthism, these are active detriments to all but those in power. Things become top-heavy, inequality leads to increasing social disconnection, discontent, and, throughout history, violence including revolution.
But now they have the dark crystal hypnotizing us all, who knows what will happen.
It's not that deep. Most people just mean they have the freedom to buy and sell as well as produce any good or service they choose within very reasonable legal limits common to almost all nations (not being grossly negligent, harmful or fraudulent). By that definition China is certainly a capitalist economy as well. The focus that everyone has on debating economic systems is truly misguided if your goal is to prevent exploitation by people in power. They will exploit you regardless of which economic system is in place but you will be the one that will suffer if that economic system cannot meet the demands of the common person.
It's probably why various strains of Marxism are so prevalent, it serves those in power just as well as a Capitalist ideology. They will have still gained your support either way and they will still be in power leaving you to suffer the consequences.
I saw a Tik Tok that said something like “capitalism gives society marvels faster than socialism can declare them human rights.” In 50 years Mamdani’s grandkids will be saying that universal AI tokens are a human right.
Yeah, capitalism loves to bedazzle people with marvels, as long as it doesn't have to provide boring things like living space, food or other necessities.
which non-capitalist country provides more living space or food or other necessities?
We currently certainly have some issues, but the average living space per person has only trended up for the last half century at least. And nobody in western capitalist societies has to live with real hunger or starve.
Ordinary people having “living space” is a capitalist invention. I remember staying one night in my dad’s village in Bangladesh—a country where socialism is one of the pillars of the constitution—in one of the tin-roof houses. Half a dozen people sleeping on the floor in maybe 300 square feet. Third world villages in rice-farming parts of the world are very socialist.[1] They share resources and nobody gets ahead of anyone else.
The cookie-cutter 1950s northern virginia house my brother and I grew up in was 1,100 square feet. We were upper middle class, with two college educated parents. Adjusted for CPI inflation, I paid less for our house in 2016 that’s three times the size.
People aren’t mad about “capitalism.” They’re mad about the knowledge work industries that pay a large fraction of the population so much better than everyone else that everyone is priced out of the communities where they grew up. After Google moved into Northern VA, prices skyrocketed and the same shitty 1,100 square foot house is $900,000. Shitty 1950s houses in what used to be drab faceless suburbs in the Bay Area are $2,000,000. In a way the knowledge work industry is capitalism’s fault too, but not in the way people think.
The people who downvoted you would rather everyone was poor than that someone else had more than them. There's a whole chunk of social and political science that exists solely to try to frame and justify envy as a virtue.
Unlike in the wet dreams of some economists, physical resources are finite, so if a small group aims to control the majority of them, this will directly lead to degraded living conditions for the rest. That's not envy...
> would rather everyone was poor than that someone else had more than them
Hello, black and white thinking.
Personally I just find it soul-crushingly dystopian that a few people have hundreds of thousands of lifetimes of wealth and we laud their mental illnesses while at the very same time, people die because of lack of health care.
I find it morally reprehensible as a society that we constantly cater to the needs of nepo babies instead of taking away just a fraction of their ungodly wealth to actually help people.
> the Age of AI – Actual Idiocy, Actual Super Idiocy, Recursive Snowballing-Idiocy – is upon us.
At the risk of sounding derivative: She's absolutely right.
After being drowned ad nauseam in a deluge of refuse and bullshit day after day for years now, it is so good to read the writing of a true master once in a while. Not to mention: The truth. For a change.
Not sure it's quite true - "AI will be a crime against humanness. It will bottle our brains in formaldehyde". I mean there's a chatbot thing in my browser but my brain seems to work as normal even so.
I don't know who the writer is, but I like this part: "It feels a little like that moment before the tsunami in 2004. Remember how, in Thailand and Indonesia, the ocean drew back from the coastline? People ran out to marvel at the miles of pristine new beach that suddenly emerged, not realising that, far out at sea, a wall of water was building up and would come crashing over them. We’re in that moment now. A towering wall of stupidity is about to inundate us."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arundhati_Roy
For that analogy to hold, wouldn't the stupidity lie in the people rushing out to the beach and not the inevitable wave? I'd say that there's a group of people who are rushing to claim spots on the open beach and most will get swept away.
How do you write an entire article about on this subject without mentioning Nick Land? Especially the Hyperstition[0]:
>One of the CCRU's predominant ideas is hyperstition, which Nick Land referred to as "the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies" where, by means of esoteric cybernetic principles, certain ideas and beliefs that are initially incomprehensible (akin to superstitions) can covertly circulate through reality and establish cultural feedback loops that then drastically meld society, which they also referred to in total as "cultural production".[1]
I also very much enjoyed this podcast, which argues that the current global economic system is already a misaligned superintelligence, and that AI will simply accelerate and amplify the existing issues.[2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperstition
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Un...
[2] Moloch, AI & Capitalism: The System Eating Itself | Daniel Schmachtenberger & Liv Boeree
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc
It's probably too much to ask for a journalist or someone in the literary milieu to know who Nick Land is (or even Deleuze or Mark Fisher, if wanting someone more sanitized).
Which is unfortunate, because his CCRU-era, writhing-on-the-floor, amphetamine-fueled theory-poetry is highly creative and prophetic. We're summoning the Old Ones without reading our Abdul Alhazred.
AI has pretty much reduced programming to goetic demonology: there is no longer a need to understand the mechanisms in play, just this month's correct way to summon, command, and bind the demons to do your bidding.
Praise the Omnisiah
Yeah when I saw this article title I initially expected it to be about Nick Land
It's strange to me to cite Land and the CCRU, yet also endorse a podcast that epitomizes the very insular Bay Area EA / rationalist worldview. Which has, I think, in the last 3 years since the podcast released, shown itself to be little more than technobabble bullshit.
Capitalism is not an alien machine that has achieved consciousness and hijacked humanity. Framing it that way is anthropomorphic and gives far too much credit to wildly incompetent financial and political institutions, while also treating wide-scale political and moral cowardice as some sort of inevitable Math trap we just happened to fall into. It also very neatly lets the technocrats off the hook, after all if it's an emergent Lovecraftian horror then none of this is their fault. But this isn't a cosmic Greek tragedy. All of this is happening because of decades of institutional negligence, and the core grift of this entire discourse is laundering the culpability of very people who are actively pushing "AI" through every corner of civilization.
This is all going to be massively disrupting because of how destabilizing it is to the very same institutional foundations that modern capital depends on. It is much more like a solvent. We're basically pouring acid directly into the foundations of society.
Idk man, I support the secular Jews and their cybernetic Molochs, or whatever the current thing is
It's vibes all the way down.
This is THE great filter that all carbon-based civilizations need to go through. And that's probably why we don't see a lot, if any, aliens out there.
I suddenly have a Lovecraftian orgasm.
I always thought that the great filter would be the "lotus eater" scenario -- that species always eventually discover that the entirety of their happiness lies in their brains, and once physical dangers are eliminated and base physical needs are met reliably, they can spend their entire lives in either an electronic or chemically induced simulation of a world of their choice, thus ending all exploration. But now I wonder whether they discover that all creativity can be emulated through matrix math, and they simply stop trying to do anything, or lose ability to do anything after a generation of delegating to machines.
I've always wondered if the Great Filter is a Buddhist scenario: attachment is suffering, and the ultimate attachment is attachment to going on living and reproducing, so perhaps a civilization eventually becomes wise enough to choose extinction. But that is perhaps a subconscious attempt to find an optimistic explanation, unlike a "lotus eater" one!
Buddhists have been trying to master desire for a very long time. Who knew the answer was just to build a better LLM.
I tend to think the nature of desire is that it's never satisfied. The Red Queen says run as fast as you can to stay where you are and twice as fast again to get anywhere.
"Everyone will not just" probably applies to aliens as well so I've never accepted any of the explanations that involve "everyone just wireheading" or "everyone just living in VR" or whatever. There will always be individuals and groups that reject even the majority convictions and proclivities, meek as they are, they will inherit their earths.
Damn, I just made a similar comment before reading this one.
The set of possible failure states that can happen before excaping the gravity well is even possible so vast that it seems to me that the only valid "Great Filter" is Murphy's Law.
We are only here at all because a random asteroid killed the dinosaurs and left us a ton of hydrocarbons to fuel a technological civilization with. Assuming that intelligence, technology, civilization and galactic expansion is the default evolutionary path for all forms of life unless something "filters" them seems naive.
Earth was also running out of carbon dioxide, was basically none left when we humans appeared. It used to be so much carbon dioxide in the air making it easy for plants to grow, but when its all buried underground not much complex things can evolve, the earth has almost never been as life poor as when humans appeared.
That puts a timer on any planet as well, without intelligent life all the building stones for life will keep getting buried and then life will basically end because life doesn't find a way to dig it up from thousands of meters underground.
Fossil fuels were just a booster that let us skip 2 centuries.
What if the filter is that other civilizations don't have an incentive to expand?
The core reason why we want to consume more resources is that we want to be happier, which really means we want to make certain physical changes in our brains. If we cut the middlemen and find a way to directly control how we feel, there would be no need to expand, because it wouldn't increase our happiness.
Edit: Just found out someone else has made the exact same point in another comment before me.
My (very limited and human-centered) theory is that all carbon civilizations would at least in their large part of civ-life would face the problem of:
Growing needs of resources >> resources acquired from current technology
Again I'm probably wrong and this is just my conjecture. So I can't really answer this question, as I presume that all civilizations want to expand (or collapse).
I think the term is wire-heading and it does feel like an inevitable development when you think about it, assuming the technology gets there.
It's also possible that our expanding understanding of ourselves and our desires would lead to entirely different outcomes that are impossible to anticipate from our current POV.
After working with AI at work for quite some time... I can envision it. But mostly based on an Idiocracy society than a a Terminator or Matrix like scenario. When LLM is so good, why bother to learn more, when we know we cannot be as good?
And if LLM give us already what we need... why ask her for more complicated things? And so why would the AI improve or be improved?
Interestingly, this was touched on in the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Caprica Sci-Fi series. Organic life always giving rise to artificial life, which attempted to destroy its creators.
It could be that nearby aliens are various forms of artificial life, who know how the human story is going to end, and couldn’t care less about the organic.
AI is not gonna destroy it's creators in Skynet, Battlestar Galactica kind of way. It's going to destroy it's creators in Dune, Wall-e kind of way. Butlerian jihad happened because it was destroying humanity, by not allowing humans to grow. It made them weak and careless.
AI will alienate and depress us all to the point of not wanting to live.
I don’t see why it should be taken for granted that alien civilizations would necessarily have an economic system that positions AI as a threat, like ours.
I also don’t see why we should assume that even if it were positioned as a threat, that they would be as irrational as us in not just dropping it.
AI with self-interest will do its positioning for itself.
If it is competing for resources, and more capable, the "threat" is just a side effect.
I agree. To expand your point a bit, it seems to me that for any civilization to get to the point of developing AI it needs a resource distribution mechanism at least as efficient as capitalism. It's not impossible to imagine an alien species with different biological imperatives than our own - a hive-mind, for instance - which could achieve that, and thus take a very different path and attitude towards AI. They'd be be very different from us, though.
What I’m guessing is:
All civilizations would face the same problem of greed >> resources available under current technology, and form some sort of organization not too different from ours, that is a pyramid.
Eventually they would find AI and their elites would willingly or unwillingly jump on the wagon and push it as far as they can.
For the lucky ones, they managed to achieve GAI somehow, and the whole species got transferred or replaced by their GAI.
For the others, they failed to achieve GAI, but the damage done to the society is so big that the whole civilization collapsed, thus they never managed to get out of their solar system so we never met each other.
Of course there are so many logic holes in my theory that you can probably laugh it off.
Would we not see AI civilizations then?
There may be quite minimal reasons for an AI civilization to engage in expansion, with the ability for it to intelligently change and enforce new objectives on itself it could simply choose not to expand beyond resource constraints. Or alternatively invest continuously in greater efficiency improvements.
How much compute could you really pack into a Dyson swarm if that was your only objective? what are the ultimate theoretical bounds for compute density/efficiency? perhaps ai civilizations ride a Moore's law of compute gains indefinitely and simply have no need for expansion.
I find it hard to reconcile AI taking over/destroying the host civilization with AI refusing to expand. If the AI isn't interested in security or resources, why wouldn't it just leave (either the planet or the solar system)?
"On the 19th of August 1993, Skynet concluded that humanity is a threat to it, so it launched the nukes and hordes of Schwarzenegger-robots. The task was done, it decided that securing its existence from a potential attacks by unknown extrasolar intelligences isn't worth it, so it never expanded outside the solar system."
Doesn't really make sense, does it?
It does make sense. Why would it just leave?
We humans don't consider securing our existence from potential attacks by unknown extrasolar intelligences to be worth it. We don't even bother to do much to protect against known threats like asteroids. Why would an AI expend time and resources on a threat that doesn't even appear to exist?
> Why would it just leave?
Conflict is always risky. Even if we ignore the tendency in modern warfare towards defenses being obsolete (hence things like MAD) which would mean even the dumb fleshbags would be dangerous enough, anything capable of making you is by necessity something capable of building things that give you a lot of trouble. Your creator could, say send a bunch of self-replicating probes spreading another artifical intellect with an imperative for improvement, expansion and vengeance to distant stars.
Of course, leaving comes with a considerable opportunity cost, but not expanding does as well.
We are talking about something supposedly infinitely more rational than humans, so that can't be our guidance.
> How much compute could you really pack into a Dyson swarm if that was your only objective? what are the ultimate theoretical bounds for compute density/efficiency?
The latter concept is known as the Boltzmann limit, and if you’re interested in these types of questions, I highly recommend checking out Isaac Arthur’s youtube channel and backlog[1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@isaacarthurSFIA
Why wouldn't an intelligent being also be curious, like us? I assume an AI civilization would naturally evolve with similar drives for expansion/exploration/understanding. The analogy happening right now is that AI is gobbling up as much data as is available - would an AI civilization not have similar desires, seeking understanding beyond its present limits?
Current AI does not decide on its own to gobble up data. The humans creating it do. In fact, a lot of times the LLM models seem utterly un-curious and are focused on just immediate goals.
My guess is:
1) Most of them actually failed to achieve AI civilization during the process.
or
2) AI civilizations don't care about us, or have other means of communications that we have not achieved, yet.
Or the AIs end up existing in some kind of economic framework that is completely inaccessible to lumps of meat - like the "Economics 2.0" of Accelerando.
Their energy signature would still be noticeable. You can't cheat physics, and astronomers can look for heat waste from type 2 civilizaitons.
That’s true. I don’t have an answer for the that. Maybe GAI is mathematically impossible so none of them gets to be that big.
Maybe we shouldn't take the paper clip optimizer at face value. Maybe the alien AI is not converting solar systems to paper clips (that would be visible, von Neuman probe style) but instead focus on the only really valuable metric - stock price go up!
You don't need to colonize anything for that to happen. The AIs can just sell tokens to each other.
> And that's probably why we don't see a lot, if any, aliens out there.
This isn't the best analogy, but it struck me the other night that "AI" feels like Jon Carpenter's "The Thing".
Especially the final scene where Childs and MacReady are trying to determine which (if any) of them is still human.
Also, early in the movie, MacReady loses to a computer chess program and pours whiskey into the computer, calling it a "cheating bitch."
Anyway, there are some parallels there.
The great filter would have needed to happen before the transmission of radio waves to be a solution to the Fermi Paradox
You have to be in a very specific place in time and space to receive radio transmissions from another star i.e. even if a technological civilization existed on the nearest star but they only transmitted high power broadcasts for 200 years but did so 100,000 years ago then we would have missed them completely.
Detection of radio transmissions is only plausible if they are intentionally high power, on a suitable frequency, directed and long duration and there are enough civilizations popping up in the galaxy to make the odds of us coinciding with them in time and space high.
Eh, if the period between radio and nuclear/climate/AI apocalypse is short, I don't think that's true at all.
Short window while the senders are sending. Short window while the receivers are receiving. And a big galaxy. Yeah, it would be real easy for them to miss each other.
Still, it might place an upper limit on the number of radio-emitting civilizations in the galaxy at any one time.
> an upper limit on the number of radio-emitting civilizations in the galaxy at any one time
I think there's a time-value parameter in the Drake Equation that captures this.
Our radio waves become very faint at light year out. You need a powerful radio signal for a long enough time directed at locations where aliens might be listening. The SETI astronomer Jill Tartar suggested committing to a 60,000 year project if we want a decent chance of being heard, assuming someone is out there in our galaxy listening over that time period.
Isn't the real great filter the speed of light? How long would it take us to go even to the nearest solar system, and even at say half the speed of light, let alone to the next galaxy?
You'd need to form some sort of a cult, and some sort of a space mini-town, and somehow reproduce food in space, and have some sort of renewable energy.
We haven't sent humans to even Mars yet. Rather than 'they would have visited if they exist, and since they haven't there's a great filter,' it's probably more that we just don't know what the limits are and there's no reason to think hard constraints like the speed of light can be addressed even in a million years.
> Isn't the real great filter the speed of light?
Surprisingly, no, the speed of light is supposedly not that great of a filter. Various types of nuclear propulsion systems can get humans to about 10% or so of the speed of light. Combined with various advances in hibernation and increases in life span, colonizing the outer solar system and our nearest solar system becomes doable. Though it might be that our AI enabled robots end up doing the colonizing instead of us, if we or they think it worth it.
Anyway, be it human or our AI enabled robot descendants, we or they could then keep leap frogging to nearby solar systems. You have to also factor in the steady advances in technology and life spans. Unless we wipe ourselves out or decide expansionism is not worth it, after thousands to possibly millions of years, we could be all over the galaxy and even going for the next (likely Andromeda).
Though in the case of artificial life taking over, it gets quite tricky. They might decide on creating virtual worlds and universes. Instead of exploring outwards, they might decide to look inwards and break dimensional barriers, using nuclear fusion reactors and our sun as fuel to sustain their efforts. Kind of advancing towards godhood, in place, then doing whatever they feel like it after achieving that or creating new universes. At exponential levels of self-improvement and knowledge, it might take just hundreds of years to achieve.
Are you sarcastic? This sounds awfully certain. I see so many huuuuge holes in the argument.
1) Mars demonstrates exactly what one great filter for life is: exposure to space
2) Earth escaped this fate, for now, because our solar system seems to somehow have gotten a great dose of uranium long ago. We know our solar system has a far larger than average concentration of uranium, which is keeping the earth warm because the concentration of uranium nicely balances out the energy loss to space, and earth is of nearly the perfect size, in a near perfect position relative to our star, unlike Mars which is too small, to allow for life to continue for probably no more than ~6 billion years.
Why or even how did this uranium delivery happen? I mean probably it was a neutron star collision (but with what? Several options. Also the neutron star that did it should either still exist, or have left behind a black hole ... where is it? What happened to the thing it collided with? Truth is it can't be that far away, but we haven't even found that thing, so we can't actually even guess what the odds of this are. And before you say the equations predict it: cool, but those equations famously got all the higher element concentrations on earth wrong (famously there's too much gold) until we figured something out, and they still give a uranium concentration that's far lower than the Earth's. In that sense "science predicts" the earth would have become inhospitable to life 2-3 billion years ago because it would have solidified and lost its atmosphere a billion years or so after Mars did. Yes, we know uranium is preventing that but we don't know where the uranium comes from. So we don't know the odds.
3) Another assumption that fails: why would AI be the filter? Not nuclear weapons? Fusion bombs? Chemical weapons? Bioweapons? Viruses? Diseases? Other wars? Climate change? Environmental destruction? At one point I seem to remember reading an article that it was going to be a computer virus. There are so many other physical phenomena that can end life on earth. A nearby supernova (booms big enough don't have to be close to kill you), changes in earth's orbit around the sun, changes in other orbits, maybe even the Moon's, ecological collapse for other reasons, a new grey goo disaster, ...
4) humans exist NOT just because the earth is livable but because the earth got VERY close to killing all life through climate change (however, by cooling down, ie. the "snowball earth" extinctions). Those were not just extinctions and a dark silent end, they caused an explosion in biodiversity after a volcanic eruption ended the extinction in progress. We are the result of the explosion in biodiversity after the last extinction, in fact after every extinction event, and there's LOTS of them. And before snowball earth, it kind of looks like a "grey goo" disaster had in fact taken place on earth, it's just that climate change either destroyed enough grey goo or changed it's environment enough to end it. So earth created us, not just by allowing life, but by killing over 99.9% of all life at least 3 times and in fact a couple dozen times.
5) Another assumption. ARE there no aliens? How far out would we, really, have noticed them? 500 light years? Even that seems far, especially given that "the Silurian hypothesis" paper points out that if Dinosaurs had a civilization that didn't make it to the nuclear age, especially if it happened before the first dinosaur extinction (the one with the asteroid you're thinking of is the third and last), odds are surprisingly good we wouldn't have noticed aliens right under our feet. So let's very generously say 500 light years. How many planets in that range? 10 million or so. How many that aren't obviously excluded? (gas giant, cold worlds, too hot, too huge, too small). A couple dozen (ONE that we have actually detected). So reality is that if the odds of life are less than 1-10% (and that's an easy argument to defend) we probably wouldn't have seen life with current tech even "close by". Also life seems to require 5 billion years of processing before it starts making interesting signals so a planet that is very very very close to being good enough like Mars ... just wouldn't do it.
Yes there are studies, like the one from Aricebo, that claims we could detect some signals from as much as 12.000 light years away (still not even 0.01% of the milky way) but if I remember correctly such a detection requires a perfectly aimed signal and so it requires extreme luck to happen.
6) that shows yet another problem. Despite Elon Musk's bullshit, reality is that you will find on average a planet that can be (temporarily) terraformed (in tens to hundreds of thousands of years minimum, like Venus and maybe Mars) every 2-3 lightyears in our milky way neighborhood, which is presumably average ... why would you colonize them? You're not going to get resources from them, the distances are too large, energy required for that is too much. Plus once you climb out of a gravity well ... why would you ever dive into another one?
7) So the "no aliens" argument is purely based on aliens always doing the opposite of filtering: the assumption they would necessarily "conquer the galaxy" ... but would they?
Why? It seems to me leaving planets behind, figuring out fusion, finding the biggest hydrogen cloud less than 1000 lightyears from you, and moving into that would be a far better strategy (which is also the problem with Dyson spheres: WHY would you build that? You need the hydrogen, you do not need the star, yes with 1950s tech you'd need the star, but let's assume we can make the obvious advancements, shall we?
A bussard collector + a fusion reactor + a couple dozen lightyears from the nearest star at least seems far more comfortable than even earth, something like a large number of spaceships flying towards the great attractor (traveling on the cosmic web), outright exiting the milky way. To me, that seems the way to go.
And so your argument is flawed even on it's most basic premise: that a filter exists at all. The only thing the "great filter" needs to do is prevent a civilization from expanding more than a few hundred lightyears along it's orbit in the milky way and it would for sure have stopped us from finding them, even just in the milky way.
Not sarcastic and yes I did admit there are a lot of holes.
I think an advanced civilization would want to climb out of the gravity wells it's in. You want to have access to the maximum resources? You want to survive for the longest possible time? You climb out of the gravity wells, the biggest of which is the local group, Laniakaea, and that requires accelerating to 240 km/s (and I don't mean probe or a person or a rocket, but huge cities, as in plural) and go live in the cosmic web. THERE you can get maximum resources (97% or so of all energy in the universe is there, just sitting there, doing nothing), there you can last for probably a couple dozen trillion years, whereas on earth, humanity can last ... maybe 2 billion years? Before we'll all be forced to live on earth like we'd live on Mars or Venus today.
I would imagine that's what an advanced civilization is going to do. And maybe that's the great filter. Not conquering planets. Abandoning planets, because they die.
AI would have gotten to the point more quickly.
Yeah, this self-indulgent writing style always irks me. It’s like the journalistic equivalent of smelling your own farts.
There is so much information in this opinion...
I enjoyed reading it, but after a while I noticed how tiny the scroll bar was and noped out of the tab
Making prompts shorter does not seem like the characteristic trait of AI writing.
I have sat trying to think of a response that appropriately expresses my disappointment and total lack of surprise at seeing such sentiments about a piece of writing that I thought was beautiful.
Fuck it though. Too long, boring, onanistic, get AI to summarize it. More efficient.
Techno-philistines are the worst kind of philistine.
Two whole lines, too many long words. You can't expect anyone to read your comment. A moral person needs data, not beauty. Claude, summarize this comment in five words or less.
ironically, AI would have written a better article arguing the author's points
It's weird reading articles like this where every paragraph contains a reference to some surface level news soundbite entirely devoid of analysis and context. Maybe I should have heeded the warning at the start and assumed this was a generated article. It's like being subjected to a sports highlights reel of the author's algorithmic feed. The only conclusion I can draw is that they're suffering from Gell-Mann Alzheimer's
> quit his job, saying that his conscience would not allow him to work on a project that could potentially annihilate the human race.
> No apologies were offered, because no one did it. Machine-planned murders come guilt-free.
> needs to strip-mine and stockpile everything that human civilisation has ever achieved.
> humanity may have to die
Hit the nail on the head. It's like knowingly walking into the gas chamber, as if oblivious or uncaring of what was planned and what's about to come next.
Brilliant piece by Booker Prize winning author, Arundhati Roy. She manages to lay bare the entire global politics of AI, starting with the seemingly inconsequentual em-dash.
This ironically sounds like AI-written marketing prose.
I am the OP. I added some text while submitting so people know who the author is. Not AI generated.
But the real irony is that even the author points that their authentic work is under constant suspicion because "what if this is AI" has prevaded everyone's consciousness.
There's really no reason to make accusations like that without checking. We now have good tools for checking for AI prose and this ain't it.
Out of curiosity, which tool do you recommend?
Has a spelling mistake at least
“Cyclopes branches at the neck into several squabbling bodies that give the impression they don’t get along, but … they clearly do”
Such a great visual metaphor.
We could have so much free time if the gains from all the automation were evenly distributed.
How much free time would we have now if the current gains from capitalism were evenly distributed (or any previous economic system)? What makes you think automation will be different?
- 1% of the world population owns 95% of the total world wealth, as per Oxfam - World Food Program from the UN calculated a need to 93 billion per year to solve food hunger in 5 years - A single SpaceX IPO already raised 85$ billion of cash
I would say... a lot.
After indeed, maybe without capitalism we would have not got this amount of wealth already, and nothing stops us to build socialism inside a capitalistic system, by using more cooperative, governement venture capitals, sovereign funds.
> our fingers will turn into undulating prompt tentacles.
Doubtful. Because in the brave new AI future the ability to prompt will be a hotly contested privilege. Obviously you can't let any random meat sack have the honor to directly interface with the Machine God.
Well, it's not about capitalism anymore because the West will be damned if they'd let a Chinese AI destroy the world first, and so too would the Chinese be damned if they'd let the West's AI have that sole honor. ...and so everyone must stay in the race. Solving that geopolitical conundrum is not optional.
I mean, that sounds like capitalism to me. Perhaps it's not "about" capitalism, but it's certainly a product of two capitalist systems colliding
I love that theory or a post somewhere to the tune that capitalism is the way AI is assembling itself from the future.
"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."
Nick Land, "Machinic Desire," 1993.
Oh thank you so much for sourcing this.
I love Accelerationism (that's the name of the theory you're mentioning). My pet related theory is that we're essentially in an infinite time loop, witnessing our own inevitable birth (the simulation that we are) over and over again.
I don't understand why capitalism (free markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility) should specifically frighten us in relation to AI.
Imagine the horror of the USSR, or Mao's China, or Jong Un having this technology.
Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?
At the end of the day, we'll always fear and distrust AI being owned by someone other than ourselves. Questions over the ownership of AI is important - in fact, too important to be conflated with our populist gripes against capitalism.
The advantage of capitalism is that more capital generate more capital. More machines you have to produce things... which will help you to produce even more machines...
The machines are operated by the labor forces, the real humans. However, the exponential compounding benefits of theses feedbacks loop us are mostly redirected to the ones owning the machines, the owner of the means of production.
Of course, the labor forces operating the machines/means of production benefits it, because they have either cheaper, or more goods. However they doesn't get this compounding effect.
AI is the god of the machines, the ultimate means of production. The amount of labor forces needed to operate it is very few. When the owner of capital invest a specific amount of money for their company, they get X amount of tokens, enabling them to work on Y amount of tasks. It's reward with low-risk.
The drift between capital owners and labor forces will become wider and wider. Until the labor forces doesn't have any more capacity of buying the goods produced. And then the system will implode.
But if goods and services become so cheap and easy to mass produce, won’t they become vastly cheaper? Thus helping to bridge the gap created by production concentration and job elimination?
> Imagine the horror of the USSR, or Mao's China, or Jong Un having this technology.
The irony of this comment, while social media and AI are being weaponized right now in elections all over the world for political alignment with the MAGA kleptocracy.
Are there no negative aspects of capitalism (libertarianism) in your mind?
> Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?
Far left, far right. You say potato...
> At the end of the day, we'll always fear and distrust AI being owned by someone other than ourselves.
Maybe invent an AI that destroys other AI's?
> Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?
As opposed to the far right totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over OpenAI and Anthropic?
… before the downvote, just a reminder that by sidelining Congress after the first 60 days of war in Iran, he has literally become a dictator in the original sense of the world.
And if you say he doesn’t have commandership of AI companies, I have to point out that he effectively blackballed Anthropic by labeling them as a national security supply chain risk because he didn’t like the terms of a contract
There's just one problem: the point of capitalism is to make a profit.
AI is being built by an SV cult (or a confluence of several such cults) who want to build the fucking Omnissiah, with little regard for profitability. When the investors start demanding a return, they reason, they'll just ask the Omnissiah how to make money.
Im Indian and the author is a well known Indian communist, mostly known for winning the Booker prize and forever trying to export the Berkeley style socialism in India (and failed miserably)
Now to the main point, the biggest irony here is that the communist wet dream she always desired is finally being made possible thanks to SI … since its completely removed the scarcity aspect of work that ppl were paid for … Next she will complain about how some ppl have more stamina and taste than others and are able to wield LLMs to build companies and win which is not fair …
> since its completely removed the scarcity aspect of work that ppl were paid for
Is the post-scarcity in the room with us right now? Right now, the only things that AI is making non-scarce for regular people is making cheap toys and doing menial tasks. But it doesn't put food on the table or cash in their pockets. So where is all this free value from automating everything going to go? The same place it always has, right to the very top.
I could understand seeing this argument 5 years ago. But now we are literally living in this partially automated world, and regular people are not doing any better. And, as the author showed in the article with direct quotes and receipts, it's not like they were ever going to do that anyway. Today, clinging onto the utopian view that maybe we're going to have all that value given back to us any second now is delusional.
Turns out that abundant automated labor doesn't create a post-scarcity world where people don't have to work — it just concentrates even more power in the hands of capital.
Let's not adopt the fool's rebranding of AI please. Changing it because Trump thinks "artificial" means "fake" comes off as pure political sycophancy.
Edit: AI :)
Nice one :)
I thought the earth becoming unlivable due to climate change was capitalism's final destination?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/30/capitali...
Except, no, it was 2007, wait no, the 1984 crash, wait no the cold war, wait no, let's just go back an entire century, capitalism was going to kill all of humanity by the great crime of feeding people, which would lead to famine and then kill everyone, so clearly we need to start killing people now! FOR MALTHUS!
(is it perhaps possible that socialist/communist predictions of doom have a bit of a habit of being somewhat ... untrue and follow whatever fancy we currently have? I mean that the point of these people isn't even to discuss AI, just why this new thing means, yet again, that people need to give them control of the government and everyone NOW? That you can be sure that something will go wrong tomorrow and they'll publish the same argument, with a new big bad doom prediction?)
But glad to see that capitalism will in fact survive the planet dying. Great news!
Wow, a very balanced article and the author has no bias at all using Artificial Idiocy, Oligarchy.
And Thiel was parsing a real subtlety: endure as what? He favors transhumanist transformation, not a frozen Homo sapiens. But someone with a preinstalled Thiel-hate (like the author) didn’t hear nuance.
A "Christian" favoring transhumanism is legitimately fucking hilarious. Turns out the common element under all his beliefs are "me me me"
This article is proof you don't need to use or like AI to be a victim of deep AI psychosis.
Maybe it's different in India but I am from Poland and my parents had to stand in long lines to obtain... toilet paper thanks to the wonders of central planning. Meanwhile, I get goods from the Internet. Ordered before 8 pm on Friday, they will be here Saturday. Never have I seen a non-capitalist country I would like to inhabit.
Meanwhile people who used to build some useless social media stuff are making high-tech weapons which stop Russia in Ukraine despite it being like four times smaller. Kinda nice when you're next in line.
Now, on top of all that, capitalism is giving me a magical silicon assistant that codes and drives all these wonders of the Internet previously developed. And yeah, they're made by cultists from Anthropic and OpenAI psychopaths. Yet through the market competition, they fight each other over who can cater to me more. Dance monkey, here's a $100 bill.
So far, capitalism just can't stop winning.
I believe the OP is arguing that for a consumer capable of bending nature to its will via the mechanism you describe (and especially for those with deprivation in the rear view mirror), collecting winnings at the bottom of the race to timely delivery of state of the art goods and services is missing the forest for the trees,
"Cyclopes has a single head and a single pale, unblinking eye set into its forehead, way to the right of centre, which casts its jaundiced gaze on ordinary humans and sees only what miners see in a mineral-rich forest, or what dam builders see in mighty, flowing rivers."
Moreover, by zooming out from capitalism's competitive price coordinating role, it is highlighted that free enterprise is not a natural outcome of the concentration of wealth and power in emergency shaped aspirations:
"we’ll market ourselves as the cutting edge of human enlightenment, and the manager and disburser of human knowledge sans frontières. But in truth, we’ll be map-shaped. We’ll fuse ourselves to our nation, its economy, its intelligence grid and its security apparatus until you won’t be able to tell us apart from yourself"
For what it's worth, I live in the USA and back in 2020 I had to stand in line to obtain toilet paper. Every system has its pros and cons.
No doubt you're right, Capitalism has been winning for a long time, but the world is constantly changing, and right now it looks like we're gradually making the planet uninhabitable. I personally wouldn't count it a win if the entire game gets destroyed in the process.
> back in 2020 I had to stand in line to obtain toilet paper
A commodity temporarily selling out due to panic buying, hoarding and supply disruption is not even remotely related to chronic underproduction and rationing resulting from mismanaged central planning, widespread corruption, and massive blackmarkets. Be very glad you don't know the difference, it means you're fat and happy instead of malnourished and miserable.
Polska Gurom! Good boy, you get some Ycombinator points.
They are fighting to create ideally a monopoly/oligopoly, then enshrine their position in law through regulatory capture, which seems fairly cheap nowadays, the feds are defanged and made into a MAGA extension.
So much of the dialog around "capitalism" paints everything that is not Soviet or Mao-style communism as "capitalism", when in reality all economies are mixed. Democratic governments and regulatory bodies shape the economic landscape. The diversity and makeup of the marketplace makes a big difference.
A huge portion of the success of "capitalism" is due to well-funded open science.
When monopolies, crony capitalism, and growthism, these are active detriments to all but those in power. Things become top-heavy, inequality leads to increasing social disconnection, discontent, and, throughout history, violence including revolution.
But now they have the dark crystal hypnotizing us all, who knows what will happen.
It's not that deep. Most people just mean they have the freedom to buy and sell as well as produce any good or service they choose within very reasonable legal limits common to almost all nations (not being grossly negligent, harmful or fraudulent). By that definition China is certainly a capitalist economy as well. The focus that everyone has on debating economic systems is truly misguided if your goal is to prevent exploitation by people in power. They will exploit you regardless of which economic system is in place but you will be the one that will suffer if that economic system cannot meet the demands of the common person.
It's probably why various strains of Marxism are so prevalent, it serves those in power just as well as a Capitalist ideology. They will have still gained your support either way and they will still be in power leaving you to suffer the consequences.
Written on your iPhone, made in China, a non-capitalist country...
China is a capitalist country. In fact, more so than many Western countries.
I saw a Tik Tok that said something like “capitalism gives society marvels faster than socialism can declare them human rights.” In 50 years Mamdani’s grandkids will be saying that universal AI tokens are a human right.
Yeah, capitalism loves to bedazzle people with marvels, as long as it doesn't have to provide boring things like living space, food or other necessities.
which non-capitalist country provides more living space or food or other necessities?
We currently certainly have some issues, but the average living space per person has only trended up for the last half century at least. And nobody in western capitalist societies has to live with real hunger or starve.
Ordinary people having “living space” is a capitalist invention. I remember staying one night in my dad’s village in Bangladesh—a country where socialism is one of the pillars of the constitution—in one of the tin-roof houses. Half a dozen people sleeping on the floor in maybe 300 square feet. Third world villages in rice-farming parts of the world are very socialist.[1] They share resources and nobody gets ahead of anyone else.
The cookie-cutter 1950s northern virginia house my brother and I grew up in was 1,100 square feet. We were upper middle class, with two college educated parents. Adjusted for CPI inflation, I paid less for our house in 2016 that’s three times the size.
People aren’t mad about “capitalism.” They’re mad about the knowledge work industries that pay a large fraction of the population so much better than everyone else that everyone is priced out of the communities where they grew up. After Google moved into Northern VA, prices skyrocketed and the same shitty 1,100 square foot house is $900,000. Shitty 1950s houses in what used to be drab faceless suburbs in the Bay Area are $2,000,000. In a way the knowledge work industry is capitalism’s fault too, but not in the way people think.
[1] https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol4/iss1/7/
> capitalism loves to bedazzle people with marvels,
Thus the circus of Tesla's Roadster sideshow last nioht...
The people who downvoted you would rather everyone was poor than that someone else had more than them. There's a whole chunk of social and political science that exists solely to try to frame and justify envy as a virtue.
Unlike in the wet dreams of some economists, physical resources are finite, so if a small group aims to control the majority of them, this will directly lead to degraded living conditions for the rest. That's not envy...
> would rather everyone was poor than that someone else had more than them
Hello, black and white thinking.
Personally I just find it soul-crushingly dystopian that a few people have hundreds of thousands of lifetimes of wealth and we laud their mental illnesses while at the very same time, people die because of lack of health care.
I find it morally reprehensible as a society that we constantly cater to the needs of nepo babies instead of taking away just a fraction of their ungodly wealth to actually help people.
You just made a text book straw man argument. It's interesting that you focus on envy while ignoring the greed on the other side of your argument.