Michael Nielsen is having second thoughts
My work has nearly all been about accelerating science and technology. And over the last year I find myself very conflicted. I’ve begun to question whether accelerating science and technology is a good idea at all.
https://michaelnotebook.com/ti/index.html
Quote michael nielsen catastrophic risk vulnerable world hypothesis nick bostrom
Tyler Cowen on Malthus on vice
So one way to read Malthus is this: if a society is going to have any prosperity at all, the people in that society either will be morally quite bad, or they have to be morally very, very good, good enough to exercise that moral restraint. Alternatively, you can read Malthus as seeing two primary goals for people: food and sex. His accomplishment was to show that, taken collectively, those two goals could not easily be obtainable simultaneously in a satisfactory fashion. In late Freudian terms, you could say that eros/sex amounts to the death drive, but again painted on a collective canvas and driven by economic mechanisms.
Malthus also hinted at birth control as an important social and economic force, especially later in 1817, putting him ahead of many other thinkers of his time. Birth control was widely practiced for centuries through a variety of means, and Malthus unfortunately was not very specific. He did call it “unnatural,” and the mainstream theology of his Anglican church condemned it, as did many other churches. But what did he really think? Was this unnatural practice so much worse than the other alternatives of misery and vice that his model was putting forward? Or did Malthus simply fail to see that birth control could be so effective and widespread as it is today? It doesn’t seem we are ever going to know.
From Malthus’s tripartite grouping of vice, moral restraint, and misery, two things should be clear immediately. The first is why Keynes found Malthus so interesting, namely that homosexual passions are one (partial) way out of the Malthusian trap. The second is that there is a Straussian reading of Malthus, namely that he thought moral restraint, while wonderful, was limited in its applicability. So maybe then vice wasn’t so bad after all? Is it not better than war and starvation?
I don’t buy the Straussian reading as a description of what Malthus really meant. But he knew it was there, and he knew he was forcing you to think about just how bad you thought vice really was. Malthus for instance is quite willing to reference prostitution as one possible means to keep down population. He talks about “men,” and “a numerous class of females,” but he worries that those practices “lower in the most marked manner the dignity of human nature.” It degrades the female character and amongst “those unfortunate females with which all great towns abound, more real distress and aggravated misery are perhaps to be found, than in any other department of human life.”
How bad are those vices relative to starvation and population triage? Well, the modern world has debated that question and mostly we have opted for vice. You thus can see that the prosperity of the modern world does not refute Malthus. We faced the Malthusian dilemma and opted for one of his options, namely vice. It’s just that a lot of us don’t find those vices as morally abhorrent as Malthus did. You could say we invented another technology that (maybe) does not suffer from diminishing returns, namely improving the dignity and the living conditions of those who practice vice. Contemporary college dorms seem pretty comfortable, and they have plenty of birth control, and of course lots of vice in the Malthusian sense. While those undergraduates might experience high rates of depression and also sexual violation, that life of vice still seems far better than life near the subsistence point. I am not sure what Malthus would think of college dorm sexual norms (and living standards!), but his broader failing was that he did not foresee the sanitization and partial moral neutering of what he considered to be vice.
Quote tyler cowen thomas malthus scarcity moral philosophy evolution value drift
Mapping the debate about desirable futures
We can map talk about desirable futures along several axes. Here are a few:
Axiology: partial or impartial (human prejudice vs view from nowhere).
Metaethics: naturalism vs non-naturalism (orthogonality thesis; alignment problem).
Evolution: fatalism or agency (inevitable vs contingent).
Rationality: ecological vs axiological (maxipok or maximise across the multiverse).
The philosophical questions above inform the more empirical debates about emerging technologies, such as:
Optimal rate of change: slow vs fast (or mixed).
Competition vs governance.
Convergence.
What are some other important axes? What are the most plausible combinations? Where do key thinkers land on these?
I find it surprisingly hard to name more than a handful of people who have written on all of the above in public.
But I’ll have a go at placing people on these axes in a forthcoming post.
For now I’ll just note that there’s too much complexity here. Ultimately we need to distill our views down into some rough rules of thumb and faint guiding stars, then just chart a path through the froth of uncertainty (with wonder, vigour and Yes-saying).
As part of this, we need a vibe. e/acc is naive. Safety-ism lacks charisma. “It’s time to build” is good, but tainted by association with Marc’s recent screed.
As usual I’m back to Tyler—“be a builder”:
Tyler Cowen: Uncertainty should not paralyze you. Try to do your best, pursue maximum expected value, and just avoid the moral nervousness. Be a little Straussian about it. Like here’s a rule, on average it’s a good rule, we’re all gonna follow it. Bravo, go on to the next thing. Be a builder.
Joe Walker: Get on with it?
Tyler Cowen: Yes. Because ultimately the nervous Nellies, they’re not philosophically sophisticated, they’re overindulging in their own neuroticism when you get right down to it. So it’s not like there’s some brute ‘let’s be a builder’ view and then in contrast there’s some deeper wisdom that the real philosophers pursue. It’s: you be a builder or you’re a nervous Nelly. Take your pick. I say be a builder.
Also: be a two-thirds utilitarian.
And: be a Yes-sayer.
Sometimes I think that “get on with it” is the push I need too. Why am I constantly pulled back to philosophy?
Flo Crivello on entrepreneurship in the present moment
At this point, if your startup’s vision doesn’t sound like hard sci fi, you’re probably not understanding what’s going on.
Richard Ngo on posthuman freedom
Just under the surface, joyful humans are granted miraculous powers: to soar through air and sea, to play games on the scale of planets, to morph their bodies as they please. Beneath them, you see a society that’s explored further, morphing not just their bodies, but also their minds—belief and desire and identity become as malleable as clay. Beneath them, you lose sight of individuals: at those depths minds merge and split and reform like currents in the ocean. And beneath even that? It’s hard for you to make sense of the impressions you’re getting—whatever is down there can’t be described in human terms. In the farthest reaches there are only alien algorithms, churning away on computers that stretch across galaxies, calculating the output of some function far beyond your comprehension.
And now you see the trap. Each step down makes so much sense, from the vantage point of the previous stage. But after you take any step, the next will soon be just as tempting. And once you’re in the water, there’s no line you can draw, no fence that can save you. You’ll just keep sinking deeper and deeper, with more and more of your current self stripped away—until eventually you’ll become one of the creatures that you can glimpse only hazily, one of the deep-dwelling monsters that has forsaken anything recognizably human.
So this is the line you decided to draw: here, and no further. You’ll live out your lives in a mundane world of baseline humans, with only a touch of magic at the edges—just enough to satisfy the wondering child in you. You’ll hold on to yourself, because what else is there to hold onto?
Sam Altman’s closing remarks at OpenAI DevDay
We hope that you’ll come back next year. What we launch today is going to look very quaint relative to what we’re busy creating for you now.