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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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I'm sure others have seen this, but AutoGPT is here, a framework that lets instances of GPT call other instances of GPT to create complex task chains with no human input. In other words, it lets GPT instances prompt other instances to complete projects. Only about a week after being released, the examples are staggering.

This is an example of BabyAGI automating a sales prospecting pipeline, something I can say from experience normally takes a typical sales rep at least half a day to do. We can already automate it, and pretty well. This type of thing wasn't possible a week ago.

There are all sorts of other examples, and it's clear that massive automation is happening. I'm willing to bet we'll reach 30% unemployment in five years. If not sooner. The question becomes - what do we do about it?

The standard liberal answer is Universal Basic Income, and many on the left seem to think it will just magically appear once the government realizes the economic power of AGI. Problem is even if we get the buy-in from the political class, the implementation of UBI is not a simple undertaking! The funding, distribution, and potential impact on inflation alone are going to cause monstrous headaches and take years to work through. Plus even if we do have UBI, the potential of widening income inequality is insane, as those who own and control AGI technology stand to reap substantial profits, further concentrating extreme amounts wealth in their hands.

Another solution, favored by some conservatives, is to focus on retraining and upskilling the workforce. While I get the general direction here, I highly doubt a retraining program could possibly be enough to counter the rapid pace of automation. Furthermore, not everyone will have the aptitude or desire to transition into highly technical or specialized fields, which may leave a significant portion of the population without viable employment options. "Learn to code" just doesn't hit the same when software devs are going to be replaced as well.

Even if we get lucky enough to have both UBI and massive retraining, it may not be enough!

Why not get the government to throw some cash at massive infrastructure and public works projects? We could take a page out of the 1930s New Deal playbook and create a boatload of jobs in all sorts of industries. I've rarely seen anyone discuss this, but it may be necessary as it was during the Great Depression. Plus, it'd boost the economy, help repair our public infrastructure, and maybe even help tackle climate change if we invest in green tech. We could even turn this impetus towards space...

Last but not least we've got the potential impact of automation on mental health and societal well-being. We're already in the middle of a Meaning Crisis. As we increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to perform jobs and soon everyday tasks, we've got to ensure that people are still able to find purpose and meaning in their lives. This probably won't be what we've traditionally looked to, such as the arts or writing, since AI is already making that irrelevant.

Perhaps we will finally realize the importance of community in our lives and to our happiness, and start adding economic numbers and frameworks to those who create social goods. Have the government fund people to run local meetup groups, or help their neighbors with tasks, volunteer at old folks' homes, etc. It's a bit of a bludgeon solution right now, but we could refine things over time.

At the end of the day we all know the rise of AGI is going to be a shitshow for a number of reasons. I've outlined some potential solutions or stopgap measures to prevent the breakdown of society, but how does the Motte think we can navigate this change?

I'm pretty optimistic about our odds at finding meaning, because we find it successfully in such crap, it can't be very hard to find more – once crap is cleaned away. Likewise for sustenance: I don't particularly care how the financial side works out. So long as the critically capable technology proliferates enough to prevent unilateral power grab by some supposedly benevolent overlord like the USG using OpenAI as a front, it'll work out fine.

We're too used to stuff not working out. So much work is done just to tread water in this world of scarcity. It's immensely miserable. People all around have to toil, burn their lives, just to keep the civilization from decaying, to grow and deliver food, to fix the pavement, to write and debug code, to analyze datasets, to prescribe antibiotics – and that's still honest labor, still the ennobling sort; because many others, paradoxically often the well-off folks directly threatened by this technology, fight over the surplus value and create problems that have to be fixed (the inane issue of sales calls and spam-and-filter arms race comes to mind, scammy startups, much of finance… but that's just scratching the surface). To find meaning in this, to not contemplate suicide daily… Tens of thousands of years of selection under agricultural pressures sure have hurt us.

I think sometimes of Scott's review of that book about Indigenous Americans who looked with pity and disgust at the settlers, and settlers who «went Indian» and refused to recivilize themselves once «rescued». Sure, it's easy to mock the noble savage stereotype when you have all but exterminated these peoples and graciously allowed the remaining dregs devolve into alcoholic underclass, but that's speaking power to truth; with the truth being the fact that we've worked ourselves into a dead end and the only saving grace, the only possible redemption for the cursed route that Jared Diamond says has started with grain, is the possibility to hand the nightmare over to our ultimate tool, the universal solver, artificial general intelligence. This is a scenario Uncle Ted never anticipated, that he wouldn't recognize as desirable, but it's the best answer to his challenge that we can produce and likely will.

Suppose AGI works as intended. We first commoditize entire categories of high-end labor-intensive solutions, then de facto close markets for those solutions when their wares become cheaper than dirt and ubiquitous. Sure, it's not impossible that this will fail, for normal Molochian reasons, that AI will simply up the ante; but also not impossible that in the race between the rapidly improving universal solver – perhaps universal solvent too – and human greed/stupidity/incompetence the former achieves supremacy. Imagine a world where no code is buggy because bugs are found and patched faster than they are written. Then software begins to grow better, less bloated, optimizing on all axes including those the market had to discard, moving the entire multidimensional Pareto surface toward perfection. Then, imagine this applied to everything you deal with. Fewer and fewer problems. Fewer and fewer people employed to make them go away, coping that they would feel useless and meaningless without applying themselves to those Augean stables, that they'd just become deadbeat junkies or worse. Fewer and fewer copes to be heard.

We're in a dysfunctional codependent relationship with the festering undying corpse of our industrial civilization, the needy monstrosity that has to be fed our lifetimes. It's nice for people who feel happy with their «jobs» I suppose, but in the end, for the vast majority a job is something you wouldn't do if not paid for. If our tools fix all problems that require payment to make people bother, what will be left? Truth, perhaps. High-grade challenge that is somehow not amenable to automation. Relationships we actually want be part of and care about. Games. Self-expression. Contemplation. Philosophy. Things people turned to whenever they managed to escape the peasant-civilization hell for more than one generation. And new things too: things we are afraid to think of now because of how brow-beaten we are into normality.

It's pathological to fear the separation from our current regime of incentives. We'd have left much earlier if we could, but we couldn't, not without getting exterminated by those who stayed; and so we grew into the shape of our cope. The sooner this ends, the better and less painful.

We’re animals in pursuit of pleasure and status, and those who expect some kind of moral or cultural elevation in a labor-less future are kidding themselves.

Contrast:

“Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel,” he said during a public discussion of what kind of work non-Jews are allowed to perform on Shabbat. “Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat,” he said to some laughter. Yosef, the spiritual leader of the Shas Party and the former chief Sephardi rabbi of Israel, also said that the lives of non-Jews are protected in order to prevent financial loss to Jews. “With gentiles, it will be like any person: They need to die, but God will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money. This is his servant. That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew,” said the rabbi, who recently turned 90.

I'll commend you for being more of an equal-opportunity dehumanizer. But on the other hand Yosef at least allowed that some group of people be above beasts of burden, be meaningful ends unto themselves; the whole point of his not-exactly-marginal interpretation of Judaism is that Jews are such people. (An "effendi" is a lord, or a master, in Arabic, or so I'm told). And presumably he did more than eat, seeing his station. How about a deal: we appoint tool AI as «goyim», and be done with this ugly business.

I have never bought a Funko Pop, nor watched reality TV or played slot machine or a true gacha game for any length of time greater than needed to understand the principle. (This is not something to be proud of but more a consequence of boring behavioral rigidity. Also I basically cannot watch long-form videos, including podcasts and those vaunted American TV series that have replaced almost all culture for the middle class; this is a bit of a problem, another small problem a sufficiently developed AI will solve, opening up new troves of meaning. «Jarvis, boil down Yud's kvetching on Bankless, Fridman and Patel into a timeline of diffs with his previous eras, then superimpose on that substack about Extropia's Children!»).

Well, there have been some more addictive games I'll admit. But it's like with drugs: a perfect stimulant without burnout, or a psychedelic/opioid without tolerance, is a pipe dream. Our wetware that compels us to waste time on it also bounds the possible range of experiences, and thus makes it a finite journey. Even current games, trying to prevent disengagement, introduce additional mechanics almost as fast as humans grow tired of old ones and can learn new tricks (what fun is playing a game you can't grasp?), yet it still gets old, fast – faster than I can imagine any generative AI adapting. Even if it keeps up, at some not too distant point it will either saturate my bandwidth and close the category of «games» for good, like Tic-Tac-Toe, a fully solved space of behaviors; or, perhaps, it will deliver something that deserves a more serious term than a «game». And if I pursue richer modalities to appreciate new and fancier games – what's to stop me from modification in other directions, such as direct tampering with my reward system? Then, it's either switching off to exist in a pod as a wireheaded bugman, as you suggest, or evolution. Do we differ only in whether 0% or some fraction of humanity chooses the latter?

As for porn, it seems to me that its consumption drastically increases when I do not have fun and meaningful things to do and relationships to be part of. In any case, the same principle applies.

It also seems to me that I'm not exceptional. People who keep up the civilization around me from decaying do not watch reality TV only because they are bored out of their skulls: it's their cope. Like me, they have big or small real-world dreams – dreams they've put into the backlog and let them fall prey to decay. My backlog will plausibly span centuries if I can execute on it.

Even if theirs terminates on saturation with synthetic stimuli, I do not assert the right to condemn it. We – rather, Hajnali, East Asians and associates, for I have to remind you that «Работать западло» … oh God, I repeat myself so much – have evolved to condemn it out of necessity, to prevent slacking off and subsequent ruin. We don't have to do that anymore.

Have you read any Greg Egan? I think not. We usually discuss Iain Banks' Culture series (again series) as a portrayal of an advanced post-scarcity society. Anyway, Ehan's Diaspora is perhaps more in line with the good outcome I expect (with two the major caveats that a) my theory of personal identity does not allow surviving naive uploads and b) they do not have vastly superhuman AIs; but Citizens are for all intents and purposes AIs anyway, plugged into tools). The vast majority of Diaspora inhabitants are members of solipsistic «Polises», taken care of by AIs and having fun in their bespoke virtual utopias. This is fine. The self-selected minority explores physical universe. They, too, can turn back into virtuality or reach the end of their journey and accept expiration. This is fine as well.

Let us even be rain: the flight to the bottom is so long and exciting.

Diaspora is also close to my favored world, the journey of discovery is especially tantalizing. I also love the concept of the math mines.

I’m also skeptical on a personal identity level of totally copying the brain or uploading fully. I can’t quite bring myself to be sure that an uploaded me would be me, even with all the arguments about dreams unconsciousness etc.

I may choose to preserve my biological brain as long as possible for the safest form of identity transfer. Even once others have done it you can’t be sure they’re not just p-zombie copies. I imagine this could be quite controversial once these problems come up.

(An "effendi" is a lord, or a master, in Arabic, or so I'm told)

Effendi is actually a Turkish word. It's very Indo-European in its structure, I don't think it comes from Arabic. Perhaps Persian or maybe Greek.

Never trust a Christian Scientist I guess. Especially when looking up a Rabbi's quote.

Surely authority is a more probative example - but thank you for teaching me something

Authority is from latin iirc, based on auctor like author.

Authority:

From Middle English auctorite, autorite (“authority, book or quotation that settles an argument”), from Old French auctorité, from Latin stem of auctōritās (“invention, advice, opinion, influence, command”), from auctor (“master, leader, author”). For the presence of the h, compare the etymology of author.

Author:

From Middle English auctour, from Anglo-Norman autour, from Old French autor, from Latin auctor, from augeō (“to increase, originate”). The h, also found in Middle French autheur, is unetymological as there is no h in the original Latin spelling. The OED attributes the h to contamination by authentic.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#contamination

@SanDiegoJuryDuty

(An "effendi" is a lord, or a master, in Arabic, or so I'm told)

Prince of the moonbeams, son of the Sun, the light of a thousand stars...