Deus ex machina

I think the best argument the “technology is going to bail us out” bro’s have, is that there isn’t really a realistic alternative anymore. We can laugh of course when Mr. Musk says we’ll have a city on Mars, or when Aubrey de Grey says we’re going to live for centuries.

But I think the reality is that you need a kind of collective mythos, to motivate people to get out of bed in the morning. If you think things are bad now, wait until most people have nothing left to motivate them to get out of bed in the morning. In the past people did things for their community, their church, maybe their nation. Those things are all dead and something needs to fill the void.

Why do anything at all, in a world where everything has already been done? Most people don’t have it in them to be great artists or prophets, they need to derive a sense of purpose from something bigger than themselves.

There is of course the deep green narrative, that our lives serve a purpose because we strive to keep the planet habitable for non-human species. But this is not really a narrative you can build your life around, due to the dead grandfather principle. You know who never eats meat or wastes water? Your dead grandfather in his grave.

Humans naturally need more to give their lives purpose than the quest to avoid being a burden on the non-human world. Humans want to transform the world, they want to leave their mark on it. The reality is that the limits to growth narrative just doesn’t work to unify people.

Alexander King wrote: “In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill.”

Well, it hasn’t worked. We’ve tried for over thirty years to get some sense of unity around the threats we face during the 21st century, but there is nothing good that came forth out of it. This is what Europe wants, to live within natural limits. The rest of the world just doesn’t want it.

“Have one child, don’t fly, don’t eat meat, don’t drive a car and do this for the next 100 years or so until we are living within planetary boundaries again” is just not a message that people get excited about. It’s the Greta Thunberg narrative, the little child prophetess who had her hand kissed by Juncker, but note how even Thunberg has now stopped preaching it.

People want to see how far we can take this progress thing. The American elite peddle the God from a Machine narrative. And like I said, nobody really has an alternative anymore. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, believes the God from a Machine will solve climate change for us. He thinks we should just abandon the climate goals altogether, because we’re not unified enough to achieve them.

When it comes to AI, you can still believe what you want to believe. There’s always a chart you can find that lets you believe what you want to believe. And sometimes, you can even use the same chart as your opponents! AI can now do tasks that take humans a week! If you’re alright with 50% success that is. If you need 80% success, we’re stuck at five minutes. So which one is it? Nothingburger or God from the machine?

Personally, I can’t really believe the nothingburger narrative anymore. I’ve toyed around with it enough to say that this is something meaningful. But American techies are not yet content with what they have given birth to so far. They want the God in the machine that solves all our problems for us, something far smarter than any of us.

But I have to ask: If we pull off their wildest dreams, is it going to be enough? Imagine you’re sitting in an airplane and the engines stop working because you ran out of fuel. There’s no force on Earth that’s going to save your life. Your money means nothing. It no longer matters how smart you are. You are now just a powerless subject to the laws of physics.

And I fear the same thing will happen with the AI project. You can build something far smarter than us humans. But what is it going to say to us? Well, I asked Claude today what we can do about climate change. Read it for yourself if you want. It’s not a very hopeful message. I doubt a smarter AI has a more hopeful message to offer.

I think the sort of people excited about AI as a solution, are the sort of people who have spent their whole lives living in situations where intelligence was a solution. But if you went to school in the ghetto, intelligence probably wasn’t a solution to your problems. It was something you had to hide.

I think there are just problems that can’t be solved through intelligence. The overshoot problem is probably one of them. Some problems require a fundamental value transformation. But that value transformation has failed, it hasn’t happened, you don’t have eight billion little Greta’s today.

For what it’s worth, the biological Deus ex Machina, the virus that brings a sudden halt to the modern developed way of life, hasn’t emerged either. The monkeypox epidemic has been declared over in Congo, the bird flu went nowhere, SARS-COV-2 isn’t doing anything too interesting either. Excess mortality in most of the developed world has returned to normal, although my own country is a strange outlier.

But I fear that I’m wrong, that nature is in fact powerless to reign in human greed after all. The last orangutans will end up grounded to a pulp as palm oil in your peanut butter, the last rhino will be mercilessly hunted down by impotent Chinese businessmen for its horn, the Amazon forest will go up in smoke. And there won’t be anything that grinds it to a halt.

For generations, people watched their children die and wondered: Why is God indifferent to my suffering? Why do the innocent have to suffer, without having done anything wrong? And I think that is my error too. I expected there must be justice in an indifferent universe. But there is none. And we’re not going to be saved from ourselves either.

When everything else has failed, you might as well put your faith in the God from the Machine. I’m not sure though, how the God from the Machine is going to give Mars an atmosphere, or restart its dead core, or allow you to travel faster than the speed of light to some other solar system.

No, I think even with the God from the Machine, you’re going to be stuck here on this rock. I would be more optimistic, if I saw the prerequisite steps emerge. Before you expect a city on Mars, you would first expect to see floating cities here on Earth, along with cities on Antarctica and cities on the ocean floor. The costs are much lower, the rewards are much higher (think of the minerals to be found on the ocean floor). But none of these stepping stones seem viable yet and there’s no reason to expect we’re just going to jump over them.

This is not what people want to hear. “You have the mentality of a loser” Zero HP Lovecraft sneered at me. I think I am just realistic. You’re going to have to solve your problems here on Earth, whether you like it or not. And if the only solution to your problems is something nobody wants, then what is the God from the Machine supposed to offer you?

High tech totalitarianism. This seems to be the only way this thing can now end. You’re forgiven for thinking “they” are just going to kill us all, if that’s what you expect. Yuval Harari gets up there on stage at the World Economic Forum, lamenting the birth of a “useless class” of people, whose existence serves no purpose to him and other high status white males, as they are no longer employable due to AI. At some point, when the resources grow scarce, the people who own everything will increasingly start to wonder why they have to keep the rest of us around.

I always hoped for a plot twist. “It can’t just be this.” I thought to myself. I mean, can you blame me? When you look at someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who sets up some website in college and ends up running the globe, can you really accept that this is just how things work, that a handful of people who lucked out once get to keep accumulating more wealth?

He’s really not that smart, the Metaverse proves it. But it seems like these people, these handful of American tech moguls, can no longer lose. And the rest of us, can no longer win. It’s a giant game of Monopoly that is dragging on for too long. But no, they insist we have to keep playing: “You have to see this, I am about to unlock the God in a Machine!”

Well, I say, bring it on. I don’t fear the machine anymore. No, now I want to see how far they can push this. I expect your God in a Machine will have this message for you: No brain is big enough to land an airplane that’s out of fuel.