Data centers in space

The difference between Americans and Europeans, is that they’ve reached the standard of living where priorities shift and you start thinking more about the bigger picture, but responded differently. Europeans came to recognize that the world is finite. That’s why the European Union today has an explicit goal of reducing overall energy consumption.

Americans don’t have this. A lot of American problems can be reduced to the fact that they’re now facing the sort of limits to growth that Europe had to deal with during the first half of the 20th century. Europe was the first continent to industrialize, so it was the first continent that had to confront the limits to growth. Long ago we ran out of wood and peat, by the first world war Britain reached peak coal, Germany followed a few decades later.

Europeans had to come to terms with limits, long before Americans did. It was as difficult for us, as it is for Americans today. Germans as you may recall, elected an Austrian dictator who insisted his overcrowded empire deserved “living space” in the East. The horrible war that followed was his response to limits to growth. Trumpism, with its desire to deport millions of people and to annex Canada and Greenland, shares some similarities to Hitlerism.

You also see the problem in our cities. Our streets were narrow because they were built long ago, so as the population grew, we had to resort to public transport and bicycles to move people around in our city centers. Americans built most of their inner cities wider. Some Europeans who could not come to terms with the reality of limits, left for the New World.

But what happens in America now, is that people grow increasingly delusional, as they increasingly face the same sort of limits Europeans already encountered decades ago. When Elon Musk and Sam Altman have to answer where they’re going to put all these polluting data centers for their imminent AI God that the general American public does not want in their backyard, they respond by saying they will put the data centers in space. In case you need to have it explained to you, here’s why this is extremely silly, but I think it’s more interesting to ask ourselves where this mentality of perpetual growth comes from.

When Sam Altman promised that Artificial Intelligence is going to deliver everyone abundant energy, solve global warming and increase life expectancy, he wasn’t just speculating on his own. He was pushing the talking points of the “rationalists“, what basically amounts to a Silicon Valley cult of AI worshippers, who expect that AI is going to solve all of the world’s problems.

Essentially, these people hate nature, but it takes some puncturing of their ideas to recognize this. On a surface level they care deeply about animal welfare, but they focus on animals that are numerous, like insects and shrimp. You’ll find strange debates among this crowd over whether shrimp suffer or not.

The conclusion they’re generally trying to reach for is that nature is full of vast suffering and thus it has to be re-engineered by their machine-God to eliminate suffering. Some of them go off the deep end, like the Zizians, a schismatic offshoot of the rationalists, who want to kill other rationalists who are not vegan, fearful of their machine God not being vegan. None of these people can accept the pagan idea that suffering is the price worth paying that we’ll have to accept for living in this world.

The rationalists overlap with the singularitarians and the “effective altruists”. Effective altruism started out long ago as pretty useful. They would look at what are useful causes to donate money to. As an example, they would be the sort of people who figured out you can increase people’s IQ and health by eliminating parasites through cheap drugs in countries like Haiti.

After a while however, these people all converged on the idea that we were going to build a kind of machine God known as AI, that was going to solve all our problems for us, as long as we manage to address the “alignment problem”, the risk of an AI God’s goals not being aligned with our overall welfare as sentient beings. And that’s where the whole thing turns into a cult.

You see, fundamentally all these people suffer from what I would refer to as the American pathology, the idea that we still live in a world of vast unlimited opportunities, rather than a world that has exhausted most natural resources and now faces the difficult puzzle of keeping 8 billion people alive as our fertile soils flush into the ocean, our mines are exhausted and our planet begins to heat up.

The rationalists adhere to a kind of extreme whig history view of the world, where everything steadily gets better, with Artificial General Intelligence being the last invention mankind makes, before our problems just start to be solved for us. The American economy today is in a bubble kept together by AI, as the tech billionaires essentially aligned their own pursuit of perpetual economic growth to the goals of the rationalists.

I don’t know if it’s possible to simulate a kind of superhuman intelligence on a computer, although I find it highly unlikely. What I do know, is that high levels of intelligence generally don’t translate into power. The people who rule our world today don’t rule over us because they are so intelligent. They rule because they are charismatic, extraverted and don’t mind lying and exploiting their own followers to pursue their goals.

Power in our world, is held by charlatans. The reason for that is because people now have expectations for their future that can’t be met and charlatans are willing to make promises to their victims about the future that they can’t fulfill. I would expect to see the promise of an imminent machine God unfold in the same manner as Musk’s promise of a manned base on Mars.