The techno-utopian myth

It just kind of amazes me, how people can’t figure out that technology is subject to diminishing returns. That is, eventually you just bump your head into limits, beyond which further investment becomes pointless. And oftentimes, as you approach those limits, you start fooling yourself, by hiding the costs from yourself.

Consider nuclear fusion. The first controlled fusion reaction was produced in 1958 in the United States. Since then people have continued to perform new experiments, hoping to achieve the holy grail of effectively endless free energy, by replicating a tiny version of the sun on Earth.

A few days ago the Chinese reached a record long fusion reaction apparently. But what amazes me is that after many decades of these experiments, time, effort and money is still being spent on this.

The problems remain the same as ever. Fusion reactions use a mixture of deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is stable, a minor form of hydrogen. Tritium however is unstable and as a result very rare in nature. It’s a product of our nuclear reactors.

The lasers used to bring about fusion alone already consume about as much energy as the reaction itself produces. That’s not counting the cost of the fuel (tritium costs 30,000 per gram) and the cost of constructing the reactors.

But then you’re not there yet, because you still have no effective way to capture the energy that your reaction produces. About 80% of that energy is released in the form of neutrons. Those neutrons bump into your reactor’s shield and as neutrons tend to do, transform the elements into different elements that are radioactive in their own right.

That’s the next problem you run into. If you want to keep these reactions going for more than a few minutes, you’ll have to figure out what you’re going to do about the radioactive transformation of the shield.

Any sort of commercially active fusion reactor would need a source of tritium. Because tritium is so rare in nature and because available tritium is being consumed faster than new tritium is being produced, as the reactors that produce it are now shutting down, we would first need to construct new special breeder reactors, that produce the tritium that can then be used by the fusion reactors.

And yet, after seventy years of experimentation that led us nowhere, people don’t want to give up on this dream of cheap infinite energy.

I’ve often wondered why this is. I think nuclear fusion serves the same purpose as Artificial Intelligence does. Its purpose is to create this kind of guy:

You’re never truly annoyed by someone, unless you recognize yourself in them. And I will readily admit, that’s what I’m dealing with. All the nerdy boys, the sort of boys who can think about the bigger picture, are forced to go to school and at some point find themselves wondering: “Why are we doing this? None of us want this and it’s not working.” Think back to high school and you’ll realize all your teachers were miserable too.

I don’t think I’m quite as cringe as the Beff Jezos guy, because I don’t just throw random words together (wtf is a “thermodynamic priest” supposed to be?). But I recognize some of the same pathology. I can’t quite enjoy the here and now, I always find myself zooming out and wondering: “What is this all supposed to lead towards?”

As humans, we’re supposed to derive our sense of joy, purpose and meaning from the smaller stories in life: “How is my wife doing? How are our children doing? How is our town’s soccer team performing against the neighboring town? Does our church tower have bigger bells than the neighboring town’s church tower?” You may laugh, but those things used to mean something to Dutch people, town rivalries like that were real. When those little stories fall away, when you don’t engage in them, when they stop holding meaning to you, you end up left with just the big stories.

As a child I wanted to be a forest ranger, my friend wanted to be a goat herder. You don’t get any children who want to work at a “Software as a Service” startup. And yet that’s where the system pushes them towards. So people tend to end up needing a kind of grand narrative, a kind of ideological motivation for the way they’re forced to spend their time.

I never needed this grand narrative of colonizing the whole universe and building Dyson spheres around the stars, because I never bought into the smaller narratives that were pushed on me either. I always recognized our society as inherently dysfunctional, rather than in need of the next technofix. You don’t fix this way of life by sending the brown people back to their own country, or figuring out how to power a chatbot with a nuclear fusion reactor. The rot goes much deeper.

Not emphasized enough is how we’re all pushed towards computers, not because we want it, but because every alternative is destroyed. You might be perfectly happy gardening all day long, but if you live in a house without a garden, that’s not an option. You can go to your local pub, but there’s probably not going to be a lot of people there for you to have insightful conversations with.

I think that’s at least in part what’s going on here. The more miserable day to day life becomes, the more we become in need of “grand narratives”. The Fuhrer wants us to do X for the thousand year reich, God wants us to do Z, your comrades need you to do Y for the glorious socialist utopia but now we need you to spend your days coding so that we in America are first to build the glorious superhuman intelligent chatboy Q before the Chinese beat us to the race. People in the 1980’s didn’t really seem to need any of these grand narratives.

But the biggest problem to keep in mind is that all of us understand at a very basic level where this path leads us towards: Towards death. The problems are very obvious. The Earth is warming up, there are microplastics in our brains, our fertile soils are flushing into the ocean, smart people stopped reproducing, it doesn’t take a genius to see these problems. And so the system is stuck with the problem of keeping people motivated, to participate in a system that isn’t working, doesn’t make them happy and is approaching collapse.

How does it do that? At least in part through funding this techno-utopian myth. The purpose of nuclear fusion research is not to build a nuclear fusion reactor. The purpose of nuclear fusion research is to convince you that our problems can still be solved.

That’s also why you see guys like Boyan Slat end up with a small fortune, when they offer you some kind of bullshit idea about how we can remove the plastics from our oceans that all the experts have already explained can not possibly work. This is the myth that you need for your mental well-being: That there is some young genius Dutch boy who figured out how to get the plastics out of the ocean again.

The real story is boring, you already know it: “If we all work together and make some sacrifices, we can slow down the speed at which everything gets worse.” That’s not a message that motivates most of humanity to get out of bed in the morning. You don’t want to hear: “You can cut your carbon footprint by no longer flying.” You want to hear: “Some genius Dutch kid figured out a way to get the plastics out of our ocean!”

A lot of modern business ventures don’t serve the purpose of actually achieving success, their purpose is to keep us believing in a future that is not going to look the way we want it to. Examples are Tesla and OpenAI. The stock market crash today illustrates this quite well.

Essentially all the big right wing populist political figures are sailing on this myth, on pushing this narrative that there is still a great glorious era ahead of us. Geert Wilders explicitly insists that “the best days for the Netherlands are still ahead of us”. Trump peddles this idea through the “Make America Great Again” myth. And Elon Musk’s entire wealth is based on the techno-utopian myth.

The “opposition” insofar as there is one, can’t really respond to these ideas, because you can’t run on a platform of “everything is going to get worse, but we’ll try to slow down the speed at which everything gets worse for you”. Nobody is going to vote for that.

And so now we seem stuck with alternating cycles of manic techno-utopianism, followed by painful episodes in which people find themselves confronted with the cold hard truth. Today that painful truth is: It turns out China can build chatbots too.

15 Comments

  1. The future can get better, just not through technology. You can’t find the wunderwaffe which’ll finally bring us to the Star Trek hollywood promised land, but you can get rid of the non-whites and the anti-whites to make whatever future we do get bearable.

  2. The latest Chinese chatbot is just a red rag to the utopian techbros, I’m expecting things to heat up.

    My attitude is one of passive acceptance and enjoying the fruits. I was pushed towards the computer as well so now I’ll at least try to enjoy it.

    https://x.com/sama/status/1883185690508488934

    A revolution can be neither made nor stopped. The only thing that can be done is for one of several of its children to give it a direction by dint of victories.

    -Napoleon

    • The Chinese Chatbot is stupid and uncreative. We asked it how Chyna will fare with 200 Million workers retired in 10 years.
      The list is exaxtly what Japan tried and failed.
      There seems to be no bubble somewhere thinking creatively. I expected our question to surface some surprising material since that thing is on a cultural border between Chinese and global English.

      Maybe we have to ask it in German, but I fear its answer.

  3. Life has no Meaning
    Nothing you do matters
    You’re going to die

    These three maxims are useful if you find something to do that pleases you and get okay with “I don’t have a purpose, but I do have a function.” Doing the thing that pleases me – that is my function.

  4. Rin: you can’t run on a platform of “everything is going to get worse, but we’ll try to slow down the speed at which everything gets worse for you”.

    Everybody is heavily drinking, on drugs or SSRIs. It may not be a winning political platform, but the majority are with you and tuned out. The tech bros are just on a bandwagon to make a living. They’ve figured out what the rich people want, and they’re providing a service to them. Most think it’s all BS.

  5. On the upside, the Chinese taught the American stock market the patently obvious: Chinese precision written assembly and machine code is 100,000,000 times quicker, more efficient and scalable than shit written Indian Python slop-code. USA only has access to Indians, not Chinese. China wins.

    • Wow… And it seems you’re right! “These modifications [fine-grained optimizations and usage of assembly-like PTX] go far beyond standard CUDA-level development [where they use C/C++ or even Python], but they are notoriously difficult to maintain. Therefore, this level of optimization reflects the exceptional skill of DeepSeek’s engineers.”
      (The whole process is more complex than I thought.)

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