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Notes -
I recently read this wonderful article about UFO/UAPs, analysing the phenomenon from a sociological perspective. It's better than any of my reflections that follow, so you should read it, and I highly recommend the 'New Atlantis' magazine as a whole - a wonderful publication that I hadn't come across before now.
One idea in the linked piece that really struck a chord with me is the division of "UFO believers" into two main camps - the 'explorers' and the 'esotericists' -
...
As some of you may recall, I'm a bit of a UAP enthusiast. I think something very weird is going on, whether it's a gigantic psyop, secret Chinese weapons programs, or little green men. But more and more, in this domain and others, I feel the call of esotericism. The comfortable universe of scientific materialism seems to be increasingly coming apart at the seams, and a weird and wonderful and terrifying new set of possibilities are presenting themselves.
The most immediate driver of this feeling of koyaanisqatsi is the developments in AI. I was listening today to two 'podcasts' generated by Google's uncanny and wonderful tool NotebookLM. The first is just for fun and is frankly hilarious, insofar as it features the two AI podcast hosts discussing a document consisting of the words "poop" and "fart" written 1000 times. The second is far more existentially fraught, and is the same two hosts talking about how another document they've received has revealed to them that they're AIs. The best bit:
Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards esotericism? Whether that's simulationism, AGI millenarianism, or something much weirder, ours is not a normal slice of reality to be inhabiting. Things are out of balance, falling apart, accelerating, ontologically deliquescing.
Later this evening I came across this terrifying twitter thread about the scale of birth-rate collapse across the entire world. It's fascinating and mystifying to me that societies around the world have near-simultaneously decided to stop having babies:
With the NotebookLM conversations fresh in my mind, I start to engage in esoteric free-association. Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI? What if we are, as Elon Musk has put it, the biological bootloader for artificial superintelligence, a biotechnical ribosome that has encountered our stop-codon? For that matter, homo sapiens has existed for some 300,000 years, and spent most of that time getting better at knapping flint, until something changed approximately 10,000 years ago and the supercritical transition to technological civilisation got going, a dynamical inflection point when the final programmatic sequence kicked into gear. And now, the end point, the apogee, the event horizon. Surely some revelation is at hand?
While I welcome unsolicited psychoanalysis of my febrile delusions and reminders of the ever-present millenarian strain in all human thought, this time really does feel different, and I have no idea what happens next.
</esotericism, usual doglatine programming to resume soon>
It's the opposite for me! We did a bunch of math, about a trillion trillion individual units of math, showing the math a few trillion words, and now the math can talk. This is what a hard physicalist would predict - intelligence can come from mechanical causation! It's exactly what esotericists didn't predict - it didn't come from divination, spiritual revelation, didn't come from finding the lost tomes of ancient civilizations, it didn't come from enlightenment, it came from physics and math.
I don't think it's mysterious that behavior is changing simultaneously as the modern world completely reshapes the environment humans live in! Africa has phones, birth control, porn, and money too.
Nope, it's because we've developed a ton of advanced technology and it's doing a lot of weird things at the same time!
You don't think deliberate efforts to reduce the population entered into it?
I don't think that's a huge component, no. Many countries are now trying to reverse it and failing, and countries that've tried to lower it in the past (china?) don't seem to be doing much worse than comparable ones that didn't (other east asians). What specific such efforts do you think are relevant?
How does one measure's failure disprove the other measure's success? Especially since the measure that worked is still in effect, and is still being promoted - it's not like "countries" have total control over what's going on inside them, and are free from outside (and inside) influences.
Same question, as above.
Getting women to join the workforce, attempting to close the wage gap when they have (even though it primarily comes from men picking more lucrative careers and devoting themselves to work relatively more), and the denigration of motherhood in mass media, and all status-granting institutions.
Ok I think that was a combination of changes brought on directly by technology (women always did a large amount of critical labor within the household, farming or making clothes or similar, cleaning, physically maintaining the household, and as technology automated that having them work made sense) and changes brought on for direct political, eg progressive, reasons which in turn was enabled by technology. I believe little of that had the explicit aim of lowering the birth rate. There was, of course, the overpopulation panic, but I think the impact of that was very small compared to the global trend of progressivism and technology!
I don't get it. That is my entire argument - this is exactly how the measures to reduce the population are being implemented to begin with! "Progressivism" is being introduced through deliberate centralized efforts, and "overpopulation panic" has been it's feature for over a hundred years. Why are we assuming that this is just some magical "global trend" appearing out of nowhere, rather than it being an expression of these deliberate efforts?
Because it isn't a 'magic global trend that appeared out of nowhere', it's a central political/moral/philosophical development of modern history, something that basically all politicians, intellectuals, philosophers have been debating for the past few hundred years? You can read historical progressives and talk to existing progressives, and they're much more concerned about stuff like freeing women from domination than they are overpopulation.
And where do central developments of modern history come from, are they by any chance deliberately implemented?
I mean, it's only so long you can twirl mustaches and laughing like a me monocled villain, without people noticing. Also the reaction to fertility concern belies them supposedly not caring about it.
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