When tech adds to our lives it also subtracts. For example, the prophets of the Internet in the 90s told us the Web would expand our consciousness by connecting us to millions of people across the world. That consciousness, however, was stolen from other parts of our lives. An ancient person witnessing modern ‘phone zombies’ crashing into each other on the side-walk would view them as utterly disconnected from awareness. We’re not gods with an infinite ability to rest our senses simultaneously on infinite numbers of things. So, when something new makes a claim upon our finite attention, something else must fall away. In this case what falls away is connection to our surroundings, to our bodies, or to our family sitting a metre away at the dinner table

There’s this ongoing debate about whether AIs can be as smart as humans, but given that AIs are clearly designed to replace our brain functions & thereby slowly make us stupider through lack of brain use, the bar for surpassing human intelligence gets lower and lower over time

I sense there’s a growing feeling among many people, that they - and the vast majority of humanity - are mere spectators to the actions of ‘Great Men’. You wake up in the morning and see what the Great Men have decided to do with your life. Even the supporters of those men seem to take on a passive role of cheering them on, or interpreting their actions like soothsayers interpreting the bones This sense of passivity is mirrored in the psyches of the Great Men, who live under the illusion that their own actions do indeed shape the world, that they are god-like deities that can single-handedly reshape a complex system, rather than being mere outcomes of that system One thing you should always know about gods, though, is that we create them. We enter into the illusion that our collective agency is actually an external being, and then talk about that external being as the one in control. When that external being happens to be an actual human, they might come to believe the projection, thinking that they actually are an omnipotent god-king. That isn’t a sign of strength on their part - that’s a sign that they are too weak to overcome the illusion projected upon them, and have been engulfed by it

VCs do not fund AIs to produce truth. They fund them to product profit. From an evolutionary perspective, then, the test of fitness applied to an AI is not whether it can tell you things that are true. It’s whether it can increase the bottom line of the corporate sector. So, the AI only fails to survive when it fails to produce profit, not when it fails to produce truth. AIs, then, are not ‘Thinking Machines’. They are Profit Machines that happen to think

@cedric_durand Good to meet again in Hamburg

I value academia a lot, but I have a difficult relationship with it. Here’s why Academics are specialists, and specialists often lose sight of where they stand relative to the rest of society Imagine you’re a specialist that has reached Level 50 in a specialist topic, while the average person is sitting somewhere around Level 0-10 Imagine now there is a person who tries to help those who are on Level 0-10 to get to Level 20-30 When an academic encounters such a person, they often say stuff like, ‘well, on Level 40 we showed that actually there’s more nuance to the issue. Haven’t you read X, Y and Z?!’ It’s at this point I want to shake them and say 'do you have any interest in getting someone from Level 0 to Level 20, because pushing Level 40 at them is a sure way to make them back away, and retreat to Level -10

Technology does many things, but one thing it never does is save time It either reduces headcount, while amplifying the productivity of the remaining workers, so that fewer people working the same amount as before output the same total amount of products as before in the same amount of time Or it keeps headcount, so that the same number of people output more products in the same amount of time Whether it’s the former or the latter depends on how much potential for growth there is in the economy. If you’ve hit a growth wall, tech will just create unemployment. If you haven’t, it might unlock new production In either case, what it will never do is keep the same number of people while allowing them to output the same amount of products while doing less work. So, the next time you see one of those god-damn Silicon Valley futurists spinning illusory tales of AI liberating us from work, you need to see it for what it is: propaganda

There’s something kinda grating about the world’s imperial hegemon putting on this ‘poor me’ act, complaining about how much it does for the world, and how hard done by it is It’s kinda grating how the world’s greatest beneficiary of goods made by other people in other countries likes to present those other countries as ‘free-riders’ It’s kinda grating how the world’s most powerful military presents itself as ‘providing security’, as if it were doing the world a favour rather than securing markets and territories for its own economic and cultural dominance Ya know, it’s like Romans in ancient Gaul, saying ‘you should be grateful, or we’ll stop providing aid and security’

Debates about ‘de-growth’ are very heated, and the Degrowth movement is often attacked by both conservatives and left-wingers I don’t pretend to have a resolution to the debate, but let me just add something for all parties to reflect on: If you define 'progress' as growth, then de-growth looks 'anti-progress' If, however, we define ‘growth’ as ‘the process by which the majority of the world slaves away at work, running on a rat-race treadmill trying to make ends meet while a small handful of business elites get insanely wealthy’, then it’s not exactly a utopia to be pursued With that in mind, we might propose to redefine ‘progress’ as ‘a process by which people at the bottom stop slaving away for those at the top, and redistribute resources to allow for increased chilling out at the bottom’ With that redefinition in place, ‘de-growth’ suddenly looks a whole lot less scary

As humans, we build words, and new words can be built at any time, but words can be designed for purposes beyond conveying meaning Take a word like ‘entomophagy’. It just means ‘eating insects’. This word has not clarified some previously ill-defined thing: the compound word ‘insect-eating’ works much better. But, the purpose of ‘entomophagy’ was never about clarifying meaning. It, like many other words from academia, big business and science, is about signalling insider status within an exclusive club I experienced this when working in high finance, which is full of jargon terms that serve solely to create an aura of inaccessibility to outsiders, and a glow of exclusivity to insiders. For example, the term ‘liquidity’ is actually fucking useless to describe what it’s trying to describe in finance, but financiers love using it In fact, these types of words are built as defences to ward outsiders off, and their sole function is to signal something about the user. Much like you might have a secret doorknock and password to enter the halls of a secret cult, these words are used as keys to enter niche communities. You get access to the academic conference by using words like ‘subjectivity’ and ‘affect’, much like you get access to high finance through using phrases like ‘going long’ in place of ‘buying’