Long time fan here going all the way back before Techgnosis fellow GenXeR, Californian, and Zen meditator. Very glad to see you writing about AI. We need you to to intrepidly explore the weirdness of what’s happening right now with AI and give us your thoughts! Enjoyed this article, especially the connections with hippies and CA counter-cutlure, That said, I found the conclusion fairly annoying. We already live inside a vast global cybernetic machine called Civilization. For a select few, this machine already allows them to pursue whatever kind of work and play they want to. This includes retired/financially independent people as well as academics. Many folks I know in these categories seem to be doing okay. The future is not evenly distributed!
Great stuff as always. I appreciate your knack for offering up something new and thought provoking even around things that are being discussed to death. You're just a pleasure to read.
On the problem finding meaning in labor, I wonder about this. I agree that we have a meaning crisis, but I question whether more free time would exacerbate it.
I agree that we find meaning to an extent in activity. I volunteer somewhere a few hours a week. If a situation arose where I didn't have to do meaningless (to me) work for money (or if I had the courage to make a lot less money in the field where I volunteer), I would just do a lot more of that.
I think there are lots of people who spend whatever free time they have engaged in meaningful activity -- making things with their hands, volunteering, making art, caregiving, growing food, etc.
If we lived in a world that could distribute the benefits of these machines of loving grace equitably, I wonder if most people would have no problem making meaning outside of formal labor.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where all of the benefits will accrue to a handful of people, and that's where the crisis lies. A world that still idealizes working for a living, but offers fewer paths to doing it. That's my fear, at least.
Cool article! And totally agree with this statement: "For most of us, inhabiting a cybernetic garden would soon become a horrible experience, or at least a horribly aimless and boring one. And one suspects he knew it." A vision of utopia (at least to me) isn't a world that functions automatically, and free of problems, but rather one that allows humans to put their gifts towards addressing those problems, i.e., engage in meaningful work.
I also wonder if irony is doing more work here than simply tempering technological optimism. At its best, irony seems to preserve a kind of permeability between possibility and prescription. It allows an image of the future to remain something we can inhabit, test, enjoy, or recoil from without requiring that its coherence become a program.
In that sense, Amodei’s lack of irony may matter structurally, not just stylistically. Without that interval, dynamic mediation is more likely to harden into a static event: a speculative future begins to present itself less as a possibility to work alongside than as a reality to organize ourselves around.
Your Uexküll aside makes me wonder whether it also sharpens the Curtis paradox — and the AI problem running through the essay. As Curtis’s montage works almost like an engineered Umwelt: images, narration, music, and sequence establish what becomes significant, and each association conditions how the next is perceived, the problem may be subtler than association being mistaken for causation. I would characterize it as mediation compounding significance faster than it accrues warrant. A pattern that is genuinely resonant may not necessarily be correspondingly well-evidenced.
There is an obvious irony in posting this after working the thought through with AI -- but that itself may belong to the point. AI is exceptionally good at accelerating associative density and producing explanatory coherence, and the associations can be illuminating without that fluency itself constituting warrant. So, perhaps the deeper danger is that AI can make mediation so coherent that resonance itself passes for warrant.
A novel I’m not yet tired of recommending, Karl Schroeder’s 2019 Stealing Worlds is packed with ideas, including a positive and plausible vision of AIs and a role they could easily play in a rewilded and healing Earth.
The book is primarily a YA girl power cyberpunk Bildungsroman, and there is some hilarious LARPing to get through before the meatier themes emerge. Something for everyone, in other words.
My kids' psyches are already irreversibly entangled with the mechanics of the algorithm. It could actually be that the coincidentally named "Gen Z" is the last fully human generation. Would have been interesting to see what poem Brautigen would have written if he had been faced with that reality. It may not have been so idyllic. Indeed PKD hit it more directly with Palmer Eldritch: our eyes becoming slits, our jaws metallic, our arms hydraulic ...
There's something so on-the-nose about Amodei essentially LLM-ing (sampling, decontextualizing, laundering, looting) Brautigan's poem and the Diggers' ethos for an unconvincing AI informercial. At the same time, if Brautigan's radical exchange through the Communication Company has a contemporary analogue, somewhere big-time humanist writers drop bombs for free, I'm pretty sure I'm reading it right now.
Just a thought on the billionaire scare tactics of doom to assist their financial position when the IPO is released with the hope that they can coax the politicians into relieving the Tech Giants of their legal obligations to produce a safe AI without future responsibilities of following laws and providing compensation to those improperly injured by their product. When Mr Wall Street(Pres. Obama) strongly urges government intervention in an area already addressed by laws to protect the citizenry one know something is up. It always starts with well timed fear mongering and , like his protection of Wall Street in '08- millions of people who followed the rules lost their homes while the perpetrators on Wall walked free, and ends with the citizenry paying the rich guy's tab. (Obama famously told his Wall Street pals" Without my support the mob clutching their guns and Bibles would descend upon you".)
There aren’t laws, or even guidelines yet. The closest things to this were the efforts blocked by the state legislature in CA a year or so ago, and the current (already come into law) EU AI legislation The reason Modei and others are asking for legislation is. Not just that they want it crafted to help them make more money. The security/alignment problem is real and if it isn’t solved they aren’t going to make money with rogue swarms of agents causing mayhem.
You say all the right things. Especially these lists of repeated rhetorical stances, that you begin with… I’ve been trying to make a taxonomy of these positions, because they are weirdly stable, and like you point out being repeated, like advertisement, until they enter the discourse and become default truths. And yet we get blindsided every couple weeks by some new development that doesn’t fit the rhetoric. And with “the leisure-challenge theory,” you’ve actually found a new rhetoric, or instead of psychoanalyzing billionaires or this emerging leisure class, caricaturing them as fringe so as to avoid thinking about them, you historicize the paradoxical experience of abundance, amongst radical inequity, as depression and anxiety. The most radical thing right now would be to refuse to be distracted, but then what would you do?
maybe you find intresting Robert books and substack
https://robertsaltzman.substack.com/
Hi Erik,
Long time fan here going all the way back before Techgnosis fellow GenXeR, Californian, and Zen meditator. Very glad to see you writing about AI. We need you to to intrepidly explore the weirdness of what’s happening right now with AI and give us your thoughts! Enjoyed this article, especially the connections with hippies and CA counter-cutlure, That said, I found the conclusion fairly annoying. We already live inside a vast global cybernetic machine called Civilization. For a select few, this machine already allows them to pursue whatever kind of work and play they want to. This includes retired/financially independent people as well as academics. Many folks I know in these categories seem to be doing okay. The future is not evenly distributed!
Great stuff as always. I appreciate your knack for offering up something new and thought provoking even around things that are being discussed to death. You're just a pleasure to read.
On the problem finding meaning in labor, I wonder about this. I agree that we have a meaning crisis, but I question whether more free time would exacerbate it.
I agree that we find meaning to an extent in activity. I volunteer somewhere a few hours a week. If a situation arose where I didn't have to do meaningless (to me) work for money (or if I had the courage to make a lot less money in the field where I volunteer), I would just do a lot more of that.
I think there are lots of people who spend whatever free time they have engaged in meaningful activity -- making things with their hands, volunteering, making art, caregiving, growing food, etc.
If we lived in a world that could distribute the benefits of these machines of loving grace equitably, I wonder if most people would have no problem making meaning outside of formal labor.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where all of the benefits will accrue to a handful of people, and that's where the crisis lies. A world that still idealizes working for a living, but offers fewer paths to doing it. That's my fear, at least.
Cool article! And totally agree with this statement: "For most of us, inhabiting a cybernetic garden would soon become a horrible experience, or at least a horribly aimless and boring one. And one suspects he knew it." A vision of utopia (at least to me) isn't a world that functions automatically, and free of problems, but rather one that allows humans to put their gifts towards addressing those problems, i.e., engage in meaningful work.
I also wonder if irony is doing more work here than simply tempering technological optimism. At its best, irony seems to preserve a kind of permeability between possibility and prescription. It allows an image of the future to remain something we can inhabit, test, enjoy, or recoil from without requiring that its coherence become a program.
In that sense, Amodei’s lack of irony may matter structurally, not just stylistically. Without that interval, dynamic mediation is more likely to harden into a static event: a speculative future begins to present itself less as a possibility to work alongside than as a reality to organize ourselves around.
Your Uexküll aside makes me wonder whether it also sharpens the Curtis paradox — and the AI problem running through the essay. As Curtis’s montage works almost like an engineered Umwelt: images, narration, music, and sequence establish what becomes significant, and each association conditions how the next is perceived, the problem may be subtler than association being mistaken for causation. I would characterize it as mediation compounding significance faster than it accrues warrant. A pattern that is genuinely resonant may not necessarily be correspondingly well-evidenced.
There is an obvious irony in posting this after working the thought through with AI -- but that itself may belong to the point. AI is exceptionally good at accelerating associative density and producing explanatory coherence, and the associations can be illuminating without that fluency itself constituting warrant. So, perhaps the deeper danger is that AI can make mediation so coherent that resonance itself passes for warrant.
Hey, worse comes to worst, we’ll just have to hunker down and pray for the Butlerian Jihad.
A novel I’m not yet tired of recommending, Karl Schroeder’s 2019 Stealing Worlds is packed with ideas, including a positive and plausible vision of AIs and a role they could easily play in a rewilded and healing Earth.
The book is primarily a YA girl power cyberpunk Bildungsroman, and there is some hilarious LARPing to get through before the meatier themes emerge. Something for everyone, in other words.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765399977/stealingworlds/
Great piece Erik. 🙏🏻
My kids' psyches are already irreversibly entangled with the mechanics of the algorithm. It could actually be that the coincidentally named "Gen Z" is the last fully human generation. Would have been interesting to see what poem Brautigen would have written if he had been faced with that reality. It may not have been so idyllic. Indeed PKD hit it more directly with Palmer Eldritch: our eyes becoming slits, our jaws metallic, our arms hydraulic ...
Thankyou Erik
There's something so on-the-nose about Amodei essentially LLM-ing (sampling, decontextualizing, laundering, looting) Brautigan's poem and the Diggers' ethos for an unconvincing AI informercial. At the same time, if Brautigan's radical exchange through the Communication Company has a contemporary analogue, somewhere big-time humanist writers drop bombs for free, I'm pretty sure I'm reading it right now.
Dig it…
Just a thought on the billionaire scare tactics of doom to assist their financial position when the IPO is released with the hope that they can coax the politicians into relieving the Tech Giants of their legal obligations to produce a safe AI without future responsibilities of following laws and providing compensation to those improperly injured by their product. When Mr Wall Street(Pres. Obama) strongly urges government intervention in an area already addressed by laws to protect the citizenry one know something is up. It always starts with well timed fear mongering and , like his protection of Wall Street in '08- millions of people who followed the rules lost their homes while the perpetrators on Wall walked free, and ends with the citizenry paying the rich guy's tab. (Obama famously told his Wall Street pals" Without my support the mob clutching their guns and Bibles would descend upon you".)
There aren’t laws, or even guidelines yet. The closest things to this were the efforts blocked by the state legislature in CA a year or so ago, and the current (already come into law) EU AI legislation The reason Modei and others are asking for legislation is. Not just that they want it crafted to help them make more money. The security/alignment problem is real and if it isn’t solved they aren’t going to make money with rogue swarms of agents causing mayhem.
You say all the right things. Especially these lists of repeated rhetorical stances, that you begin with… I’ve been trying to make a taxonomy of these positions, because they are weirdly stable, and like you point out being repeated, like advertisement, until they enter the discourse and become default truths. And yet we get blindsided every couple weeks by some new development that doesn’t fit the rhetoric. And with “the leisure-challenge theory,” you’ve actually found a new rhetoric, or instead of psychoanalyzing billionaires or this emerging leisure class, caricaturing them as fringe so as to avoid thinking about them, you historicize the paradoxical experience of abundance, amongst radical inequity, as depression and anxiety. The most radical thing right now would be to refuse to be distracted, but then what would you do?
Thanks for the essay, great read. I’d be curious to hear a Burning Shore perspective on the mystical tech of the Noosphere.