Neo-Nihilism & Sunday Links
Neo-Nihilism, Military uses of Balloons, All the Single Ladies, The Mother of All Demos, the Coming AI Utopia? and More.
Melancholy by Edvard Munch
The Coming AI Utopia and Neo-Nihilism
OpenAI CEO and thought leader, Sam Altman paints his vision of the coming AI Utopia and how we get there in his 2021 piece Moore’s Law of Everything.
He believes the coming AI revolution will fundamentally change how humans live and if we don’t start preparing for it, we are in trouble. He foresees the world this way:
“This revolution will create phenomenal wealth. The price of many kinds of labor (which drives the costs of goods and services) will fall toward zero once sufficiently powerful AI “joins the workforce.”
The world will change so rapidly and drastically that an equally drastic change in policy will be needed to distribute this wealth and enable more people to pursue the life they want.
If we get both of these right, we can improve the standard of living for people more than we ever have before."
Sounds wonderful. But I wonder…in a world in which machines can outthink us, outperform us and replicate increasingly better versions of themselves at ever faster rate, what will humans do?
Greg Brockman, CTO of OpenAI has this to say about that AI future, often called “The Singularity”, “As we wrote, we think its impact should be to give everyone economic freedom, to let them find new opportunities that aren’t imaginable today.”
I must admit, I have a hard time imagining what we will do in that future. If machines can outthink us, what is the point of learning? If they can outperform us, what is the point of trying to achieve something? If they can outcreate us, why try to infuse art with meaning? What will be the purpose of living? How will we derive meaning from life?
This raises a concept I’m calling “neo-nihilism”. Whereas nihilism is the belief that life is not worth living because the traditional ways humans achieve meaning are senseless, neo-nihilism is the belief that life is not worth living because humans cannot achieve anything that can match machines.
So before we get to this AI utopia, it behooves us to figure out the answer to what Brockman’s unimaginable opportunities are. Or perhaps put the brakes on the headlong rush to the Singularity until we do.
Balloons? WTH?
While the Chinese balloon was met with a mixture of fear, amusement and the playing of politics, the real question not well answered was, “Why a Balloon?”
Here are some useful links that explain the military possibilities of balloons and why they’re making a comeback:
Why Use Balloons When You Have Satellites? by Time magazine
Interesting Twitter thread from William “Balloon Guy” Kim speculating on the balloon’s purpose.
How the U.S. is using balloons by Politico.
And an ironic cartoon from JimBob.
All the Single Ladies by Rob Henderson
Rob Henderson, Cambridge PhD from a blue collar background who writes great newsletters on human nature, explains why the dating market for single women is getting tougher with research and illuminating insights.
One insight is the lack of male college graduates. Right now the balance of males to females in college is 40% to 60%. It is like that at my university, UNC. A crucial question facing American society and especially Higher Education is how to incent more men to see the value of a college education and what is inhibiting their interest in pursuing a degree.
The Mother of All Demos
Outside of Tech few people know of Douglas Engelbart, computing pioneer and winner of the Turing Award. Yet back in 1968, he showed the world what the internet and personal computing would look like decades before it materialized in what has become known as “The Mother of All Demos.”
Source: DARPA
After settling down and getting married, Engelbart figured out what he wanted to do with his life. He decided:
he would focus his career on making the world a better place
any serious effort to make the world better would require some kind of organized effort that harnessed the collective human intellect of all people to contribute to effective solutions.
if you could dramatically improve how we do that, you'd be boosting every effort on the planet to solve important problems – the sooner the better
computers could be the vehicle for dramatically improving this capability.
I love researching name meanings and I found out “Engelbart” means “Bright Angel” in German. Spot on.
> in a world in which machines can outthink us, outperform us and replicate increasingly better versions of themselves...
These machines can only oversell themselves, not outthink humans. A high school dropout pretending to be a PhD grad and scamming people. https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/what-is-the-iq-of-chatgpt https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1598430479878856737.html
Since the machine's powers have been overstated, is it merely a symptom of men becoming dumber, and idiocracy is on the horizon (as noted by Edward Dutton)? Even when pessimistic nihilism feels like the easier answer, it is likely that the social environment makes the desire to resist unthinkable (as per Mark Fisher's prediction).
What is to blame would always be present, outside of occasional innovations, and contained within timeless socio-economic systems. Demands for homogeneous craft leads to automation/outsourcing and crushes artistry.
Cambridge, not Oxford. Thanks for the shoutout Mark!