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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31259 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Real shit has already started. I find the notion that this is the local peak and we'll have some respite unreasonably optimistic. There is, in principle, no reason for the war to not escalate into seven-figure casualties range, global economic issues not to deepen into a new Great Depression (related, h/t @sciuru), the war over Taiwan and subsequent Chinese and Russian collapses not to begin in, like, Q2 2023, then we get first serious AI incidents and global censorship/compute regulation regime, nuclear exchange by 2024, famines by 2025, supervirus plague (many variants currently in development) and what have you – up to and including NGO/Messiah/Basilisk coming. Garbage time is running out, like Nick Land warned us but we didn't listen. «Nothing ever happens» is sooo 2015.

Now as for your analysis, China has its own set of insurmountable structural problems, self-inflicted but at the same time exploited by the US: food dependence (yes, they won't starve outright the moment Malacca is blockaded, but no, they are actually not food-secure, they need to import that livestock feed, fertilizers and everything else and will not be able to pivot to rationing in emergency), chip/tech dependence that'll very painfully restrict their long-term ability to attack Taiwan with its accelerating militarization, collapsing real estate bubble, terrible ecology and soil health, brain drain, spiking dependency ratio plus failing soon at the automation cope (because, again, no chips), being boxed in by American allies, and plain degenerating governance that has unironically fallen in some respects to the lows of Mao era (and none of those problems will be solved by the planned assault on Taiwan). Iran suffers from similar woes (oh look) – and so does every other anti-America country.

There really is no trade-off between helping Ukraine crush Russian imperial ambitions and choking China (or defending Taiwan, or encouraging a revolution in Tehran), and expanding influence in the EU; those efforts load, and load only modestly, completely different non-interchangeable sectors of American economy and state capacity, and accordingly there is no advantage to China from Russia getting into this mess in the form of American weakening. Other modes are also dubious. Resource colony? No, there's no significant advantage here aside from the ability to demand discounts; Russia is already near-maximally dependent on China, and is unable to deliver as much as they need and more than is already delivered. We still don't have a reliable transport route, the «silk road» goes through Kazakhstan which is rapidly losing respect for Russia and drifting out of its sphere of influence; pipelines are fragile, as we've learned recently; construction of new connections has been criminally slow etc. In non-essential trade like fish and other foodstuff, China has been sabotaging trade on the pretext of COVID. Of course Russia has primed the world for blanket sanctions against aggressors. Plus a lot of previous gen Chinese military technology is derived from Russian/Soviet models, so now the free world is getting free training in destroying it. In general, getting your ally diminished is not any sort of 4D strategy (though I would't put it past them to grossly miscalculate). The list of demerits goes on.

But none of this matters in the grand scheme of things. What matters is that Russia and China are in terminal decline because they cannot retain talented people, and the point of no return has been passed some substantial time ago. I am always appalled by economic/political analysis which ignores this and focuses on some nonsense like GDP growth or even trade surplus. Who cares? If you don't have talent you cannot compete; worse yet, you have to allow talentless people to climb hierarchies of competence and power (if only to maintain short-term order and production pace), and they reinforce the culture of underhanded competition that closes off the hierarchy to remaining talent, which accelerates its flight or just rots on the bottom of the society; in the end you have a police state with serfs, and that's less than nothing in our era. Both countries are like men with fatal illness (or gradual blood loss); at times they grasp for panaceas, at times they feel mad rage, and at times they feel better and get complacent, but it already does not matter because the bottom line has been written long ago.

An appropriate Galkovsky quote from 1989:

Leontief said:

«No state system, as history shows, has lived more than 1,200 years: many states have lived much less».

Now there is a shift, a formation of new nations. Modern France or England are already France and England only in the geographical sense. The brain is American; the body is gradually being mullattized (mixed marriages, mass immigration of Blacks and Arabs). As a result, new ethnicities are gradually emerging, with a new history, a new religion. Already this France resembles France of the 18th century only as much as the «Holy Roman Empire of the German nation» resembled the original Roman Empire.

And it is very naive to resent this. Leontief observed, correctly again:

«There are people who are very humane, but there are no humane states ... Frankly they too are organisms, but of a different class; they are essentially IDEAS reified into a known social order. IDEAS have no humane heart. Ideas are inexorable and cruel, for they are nothing other than the clearly or vaguely understood laws of nature and history».

It is madness to lament the mortality of men. People are mortal. And this is terrible. But it is a law, an idea. One can feel its cruelty and immorality. But to «denounce» Death... She won't argue with you. You can curse her for decades, but you won't get an answer. Just gradually your sight and hearing will begin to weaken, your teeth and hair will fall out, your skin will become wrinkled and flabby... Then as if the glass shard cuts into your heart and that's it...

That's why anti-Americanism is so crude, so unintelligent. America is first of all a certain idea, and an idea cannot be destroyed. Americans themselves follow it involuntarily, of course. To think that this or that state is perishing «because of the Americans» is as ridiculous as to think that a person is dying of a heart attack. «What do people die of? – Illness». – No, people die of Death.

True to form, he wrote «Jews» and «Anti-Semitism» instead of «Americans» etc. in the original. But this replacement probably only makes things better, and does not change the point.

first serious AI incidents and global censorship/compute regulation regime

What does this part mean? What kind of serious AI incidents could occur? What would "global censorship" even look like- if something was censored globally, no one would know about it. Or if people knew about it, it wouldn't be a global censorship.

What would "global censorship" even look like

Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing; relevant text from 2012

Today we have marketing departments that say things such as "we don't need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits."

On the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea: a program that does one specialized task. After all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don't worry if it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We're not making a computer that runs only the "appliance" app; we're taking a computer that can run every program, then using a combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer—it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.

(...)

The copyright wars are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry is just the first belligerents to take up arms, and we tend to think of them as particularly successful. After all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, ready to break the Internet on a fundamental level— all in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies.

But the reality is that copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it's not taken seriously by politicians.

Why might other sectors come to nurse grudges against computers in the way the entertainment business already has? The world we live in today is made of computers. We don't have cars anymore; we have computers we ride in. We don't have airplanes anymore; we have flying Solaris boxes attached to bucketfuls of industrial control systems. A 3D printer is not a device, it's a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer. A radio is no longer a crystal: it's a general-purpose computer, running software.

(...) this was the year in which we saw the debut of open source shape files for converting AR-15 rifles to full-automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for genetic sequencing. And while 3D printing will give rise to plenty of trivial complaints, there will be judges in the American South and mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their jurisdictions printing out sex toys. The trajectory of 3D printing will raise real grievances, from solid-state meth labs to ceramic knives.

It doesn't take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really important to make sure that computers can't execute programs which cause specialized peripherals to output custom organisms which literally eat their lunch.

Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: "Can't you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?"

There will be programs that run on general-purpose computers, and peripherals, that will freak even me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general-purpose computers will find a receptive audience. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, protocols or messages will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy. As we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship.

What kind of serious AI incidents could occur?

Whatever really. Someone using Protein Diffusion 3 to develop a novel prion disease; or releasing a self-learning Twitter chatbot that drives people to suicide using sentiment analysis tools and some large language model. Or more boringly and plausible, a Stable Video Diffusion finetune for generating photorealistic CP with gore. What matters is the ability of the press to present it as an instance of an existential threat.

What would "global censorship" even look like- if something was censored globally, no one would know about it.

What does this change for my hypothesis?

But also, this is silly. I am speaking of the near future. Censorship can be and usually is official, people know that censors exist and know in some detail what sort of stuff they are looking for. I do not mean comprehensive concealment of some news, but e.g. demonstrative crackdowns on people sharing links to leaked models, and strict legal enforcement of closed-source development; oversight of ML development efforts by some busybody organization or (supra)governmental agency.

Basically I mean the bioweapon risk response post-COVID, but more competent and aimed at AI.

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