current events

Hope for the new year

PNRJ current events, personal, politics , , , , , ,

Jan 4 JDN 2461045

We have just entered 2026. I remember that around this time last year I felt a deep, visceral despair: Trump had just been elected and was about to be inaugurated, and I could only dread what the next year would bring. For the next several weeks I posted sections of my book The Logic of Kindness (at this point, it is probably never actually going to be published?), partly because I felt—and still feel—that these ideas do deserve to be out in the world, but also partly because I had no creative energy to write anything else.

Well, the first year of Trump’s second term was just about as bad as we thought it would be. He has torn apart global institutions that took decades to forge; he has caused thousands if not millions of unnecessary deaths; he has alienated our closest allies—seriously, CANADA!?—and cozied up to corrupt, authoritarian dictators around the world, because that is exactly what he aspires to be.

It’s true, he hasn’t collapsed the economy (yet). Inflation has been about as bad as it was before, despite the ludicrous tariffs. (He promised to bring prices down, but we all knew he wouldn’t. I honestly expected them to go up more than this.) He also hasn’t started any wars, though he looks damn close to it in Venezuela. And as he continues to make a mockery of our whole government, the checks and balances that are supposed to be reining him have languished unused, because the Republicans control all three branches.

Trump is still in office, and poised to be for three more years.

Yet, at last, there is some glimmer of hope on the horizon.

Other Republicans are starting to turn against him, in part because of his obvious and undeniable connections to Jeffrey Epstein and his ring of serial rapists. (Let’s be clear about that, by the way: They’re not just pedophiles. “Pedophile” merely means you are sexually attracted to children. Some pedophiles seek treatment. These men were rapists who sexually assaulted actual teenagers. And at this point it strains credulity to imagine that Donald Trump himself wasn’t an active participant on multiple occasions—no amount of incompetent redactions will change that.)

Trump’s net approval is now negative on almost every major issue, especially on inflation. It is now a statistical certainty that more Americans disapprove of him than approve of him.

Both of these things should have happened more than a year ago, if not a decade ago; but hey, better late than never.

Democrats—even very left-wing democrats, like Mamdani—have done very well in elections lately, and seem poised to continue doing well in the 2026 midterm election. If we can actually secure a majority in both houses of Congress, we might finally be able to start undoing some of the damage Trump has done—or at least stop him from doing even more.

I’m sure there will be plenty of bad things that continue to happen this year, and that many of them will be Donald Trump’s fault. But I no longer feel the deep despair I felt last year; it seems like things might finally be turning around for America—and thus for the world.

A new Santa Baby

PNRJ current events, development economics, inequality , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 28 JDN 2461038

In the song “Santa Baby”, there are several high-value items requested as Christmas gifts. I’m currently working on a rewrite of the song that compares these items with humanitarian interventions of the same cost, making into a protest song—but so far I’ve had trouble making it actually singable with the meter of the song.

So for now, I thought I’d share my cost estimates and what could be purchased with those same amounts:

Sable: $1000 More expensive than most dogs, but really not that bad! In fact, some purebreds cost more than that.

1954 convertible: $28,000; yeah, classic cars are really not that expensive actually.

Yacht: There are yachts and then there are yachts. Could cost anywhere from $300,000 to $500 million.

Platinum mine: Hard to estimate, but with platinum costing $2400 per ounce and mines capable of producing thousands of ounces per year for 20 years, should be worth at least $100 million—and possibly as much as $1 billion.

Duplex: $400,000 or so, depending on the location.

Decorations at Tiffany’s: Depends on what you buy, but easily $10,000 to trim a whole tree; that store is so wildly overpriced that a jewellery box can cost you $2,000 and even an individual Christmas tree ornament can cost $160. (Seriously, don’t shop at Tiffany’s.)

Ring: Depends on a lot of factors; I’ll assume platinum, so that will run you anywhere from $400 for a basic band to $95,000 for one with a huge diamond.

The platinum mine is a clear outlier; unless you buy one of the largest yachts in the world, none of the other items even come close to its price. Aside from the yacht, all the other items add up to less than a million dollars, and even the cheapest platinum mines are clearly worth more than that.

What else could you buy for these amounts?

Well, a malaria net costs about $2, and on average every $3,000 spent saves a child’s life. A vaccine costs about $1-$5 per dose. So for the price of the platinum mine alone, we could buy 50 million malaria nets or 20 million vaccines, and either way expect to save the lives of about 30,000 children.

(Maybe some other time I’ll actually make this into something singable.)

On the other hand, if you really wanna buy a sable or a 1954 convertible, they’re really not that expensive. The former is cheaper than a purebred dog, and the latter costs about the same as a new car.

The longest night

PNRJ current events, futurism, politics , , , ,

Dec 21 JDN 2461031

When this post goes live, it will be (almost exactly) the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. In our culture, derived mainly from European influences, we associate this time of year with Christmas; but in fact solstice celebrations are much more ancient and universal than that. Humans have been engaging in some sort of ritual celebration—often involving feasts and/or gifts—around the winter solstice in basically every temperate region of the world for as far back as we are able to determine. (You don’t see solstice celebrations so much in tropical regions, because “winter” isn’t really a thing there; those cultures tend to adopt lunar or lunisolar calendars instead.) Presumably humans have been doing something along these lines for about as long as there have been humans to do them.

I think part of why solstice celebrations are so enduring is that the solstice has both powerful symbolism and practical significance. It is the longest night of the year, when the sky will be darkest for the longest time and light for the shortest—above the Arctic Circle, the night lasts 24 hours and the sky never gets light at all. But from that point forward, the light will start to return. The solstice also heralds the start of the winter months, when the air is cold enough to be dangerous and food becomes much scarcer.

Of course, today we don’t have to worry about that so much: We have electric heating and refrigeration, so we can stay warm inside and eat pretty much whatever we want all year round. The practical significance, then, of the solstice has greatly decreased for us.

Yet it’s still a very symbolic time: The darkness is at its worst, the turning point is reached, the light will soon return. And when we reflect on how much safer we are than our ancestors were during this time of year, we may find it in our hearts to feel some gratitude for how far humanity has come—even if we still have terribly far yet to go.

And this year, in particular, I think we are seeing the turning point for a lot of darkness. The last year especially has been a nightmare for, well, the entire free world—not to mention all the poor countries who depended on us for aid—but at last it seems like we are beginning to wake from that nightmare. Within margin of error, Trump’s approval rating is at the lowest it has ever been, about 43% (still shockingly high, I admit), and the Republicans seem to be much more divided and disorganized than they were just a year ago, some of them even openly defying Trump instead of bowing at his every word.

Of course, while the motions of the Earth are extraordinarily regular and predictable, changes in society are not. The solstice will certainly happen on schedule, and the days will certainly get longer for the next six months after that—I’d give you million-to-one odds on either proposition. (Frankly, if I ever had to pay, we’d probably have bigger problems!)

But as far as our political, economic, and cultural situation, things could get very well get worse again before they get better. There’s even a chance they won’t get better, that it’s all downhill from here—but I believe those chances are very small. Things are not so bleak as that.

While there have certainly been setbacks and there will surely be more, on the whole humanity’s trajectory has been upward, toward greater justice and prosperity. Things feel so bad right now, not so much because they are bad in absolute terms (would you rather live as a Roman slave or a Medieval peasant?), but because this is such a harsh reversal in an otherwise upward trend—and because we can see just how easy it would be to do even better still, if the powers that be had half the will to do so.

So here’s hoping that on this longest night, at least some of the people with the power to make things better will see a little more of the light.

What we still have to be thankful for

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, futurism, inequality, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 30 JDN 2461010

This post has been written before, but will go live after, Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is honestly a very ambivalent holiday.

The particular event it celebrates don’t seem quite so charming in their historical context: Rather than finding peace and harmony with all Native Americans, the Pilgrims in fact allied with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett, though they did later join forces with the Narragansett in order to conquer the Pequot. And of course we all know how things went for most Native American nations in the long run.

Moreover, even the gathering of family comes with some major downsides, especially in a time of extreme political polarization such as this one. I won’t be joining any of my Trump-supporting relatives for dinner this year (and they probably wouldn’t have invited me anyway), but the fact that this means becoming that much more detached from a substantial part of my extended family is itself a tragedy.

This year in particular, US policy has gotten so utterly horrific that it often feels like we have nothing to be thankful for at all, that all we thought was good and just in the world could simply be torn away at a moment’s notice by raving madmen. It isn’t really quite that bad—but it feels that way sometimes.

It also felt a bit uncanny celebrating Thanksgiving a few years ago when we were living in Scotland, for the UK does not celebrate Thanksgiving, but absolutely does celebrate Black Friday: Holidays may be local, but capitalism is global.

But fall feasts of giving thanks are far more ancient than that particular event in 1621 that we have mythologized to oblivion. They appear in numerous cultures across the globe—indeed their very ubiquity may be why the Wampanoag were so willing to share one with the Pilgrims despite their cultures having diverged something like 40,000 years prior.

And I think that it is by seeing ourselves in that context—as part of the whole of humanity—that we can best appreciate what we truly do have to be thankful for, and what we truly do have to look forward to in the future.

Above all, medicine.

We have actual treatments for some diseases, even actual cures for some. By no means all, of course—and it often feels like we are fighting an endless battle even against what we can treat.

But it is worth reflecting on the fact that aside from the last few centuries, this has simply not been the case. There were no actual treatments. There was no real medicine.

Oh, sure, there were attempts at medicine; and there was certainly what we would think of as more like “first aid”: bandaging wounds, setting broken bones. Even amputation and surgery were done sometimes. But most medical treatment was useless or even outright harmful—not least because for most of history, most of it was done without anesthetic or even antiseptic!

There were various herbal remedies for various ailments, some of which even have happened to work: Willow bark genuinely helps with pain, St. John’s wort is a real antidepressant, and some traditional burn creams are surprisingly effective.

But there was no system in place for testing medicine, no way of evaluating what remedies worked and what didn’t. And thus, for every remedy that worked as advertised, there were a hundred more that did absolutely nothing, or even made things worse.

Today, it can feel like we are all chronically ill, because so many of us take so many different pills and supplements. But this is not a sign that we are ill—it is a sign that we can be treated. The pills are new, yes—but the illnesses they treat were here all along.

I don’t see any particular reason to think that Roman plebs or Medieval peasants were any less likely to get migraines than we are; but they certainly didn’t have access to sumatriptan or rimegepant. Maybe they were less likely to get diabetes, but mainly because they were much more likely to be malnourished. (Well, okay, also because they got more exercise, which we surely could stand to.) And they only reason they didn’t get Alzheimer’s was that they usually didn’t live long enough.

Looking further back, before civilization, human health actually does seem to have been better: Foragers were rarely malnourished, weren’t exposed to as many infectious pathogens, and certainly got plenty of exercise. But should a pathogen like smallpox or influenza make it to a forager tribe, the results were often utterly catastrophic.

Today, we don’t really have the sort of plague that human beings used to deal with. We have pandemics, which are also horrible, but far less so. We were horrified by losing 0.3% of our population to COVID; a society that had only suffered 0.3%—or even ten times that, 3%—losses from the Black Death would have been hailed as a miracle, for a more typical rate was 30%.

At 0.3%, most of us knew somebody, or knew somebody who knew somebody, who died from COVID. At 3%, nearly everyone would know somebody, and most would know several. At 30%, nearly everyone would have close family and friends who died.

Then there is infant mortality.

As recently as 1950—this is living memory—the global infant mortality rate was 14.6%. This is about half what it had been historically; for most of human history, roughly a third of all children died between birth and the age of 5.

Today, it is 2.5%.

Where our distant ancestors expected two out of three of their children to survive and our own great-grandparents expected five out of six can now safely expect thirty-nine out of forty to live. This is the difference between “nearly every family has lost a child” and “most families have not lost a child”.

And this is worldwide; in highly-developed countries it’s even better. The US has a relatively high infant mortality rate by the standards of highly-developed countries (indeed, are we even highly-developed, or are we becoming like Saudi Arabia, extremely rich but so unequal that it doesn’t really mean anything to most of our people?). Yet even for us, the infant mortality rate is 0.5%—so we can expect one-hundred-ninety-nine out of two-hundred to survive. This is at the level of “most families don’t even know someone who has lost a child.”

Poverty is a bit harder to measure.

I am increasingly dubious of conventional measures of poverty; ever since compiling my Index of Necessary Expenditure, I am convinced that economists in general, and perhaps US economists in particular, are systematically underestimating the cost of living and thereby underestimating the prevalence of poverty. (I don’t think this is intentional, mind you; I just think it’s a result of using convenient but simplistic measures and not looking too closely into the details.) I think not being able to sustainably afford a roof over your head constitutes being poor—and that applies to a lot of people.

Yet even with that caveat in mind, it’s quite clear that global poverty has greatly declined in the long run.

At the “extreme poverty” level, currently defined as consuming $1.90 at purchasing power parity per day—that’s just under $700 per year, less than 2% of the median personal income in the United States—the number of people has fallen from 1.9 billion in 1990 to about 700 million today. That’s from 36% of the world’s population to under 9% today.

Now, there are good reasons to doubt that “purchasing power parity” really can be estimated as accurately as we would like, and thus it’s not entirely clear that people living on “$2 per day PPP” are really living at less than 2% the standard of living of a typical American (honestly to me that just sounds like… dead); but they are definitely living at a much worse standard of living, and there are a lot fewer people living at such low standard of living today than there used to be not all that long ago. These are people who don’t have reliable food, clean water, or even basic medicine—and that used to include over a third of humanity and does no longer. (And I would like to note that actually finding such a person and giving them a few hundred dollars absolutely would change their life, and this is the sort of thing GiveDirectly does. We may not know exactly how to evaluate their standard of living, but we do know that the actual amount of money they have access to is very, very small.)

There are many ways in which the world could be better than it is.

Indeed, part of the deep, overwhelming outrage I feel pretty much all the time lies in the fact that it would be so easy to make things so much better for so many people, if there weren’t so many psychopaths in charge of everything.


Increased foreign aid is one avenue by which that could be achieved—so, naturally, Trump cut it tremendously. More progressive taxation is another—so, of course, we get tax cuts for the rich.

Just think about the fact that there are families with starving children for whom a $500 check could change their lives; but nobody is writing that check, because Elon Musk needs to become a literal trillionaire.

There are so many water lines and railroad tracks and bridges and hospitals and schools not being built because the money that would have paid for them is tied up in making already unfathomably-rich people even richer.

But even despite all that, things are getting better. Not every day, not every month, not even every year—this past year was genuinely, on net, a bad one. But nearly every decade, every generation, and certainly every century (for at least the last few), humanity has fared better than we did the last.

As long as we can keep that up, we still have much to hope for—and much to be thankful for.

What is the cost of all this?

PNRJ core principles, current events, development economics, ethics, inequality, politics , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 23 JDN 2461003

After the Democrats swept the recent election and now the Epstein files are being released—and absolutely do seem to have information that is damning about Trump—it really seems like Trump’s popularity has permanently collapsed. His approval rating stands at 42%, which is about 42% too high, but at least comfortably well below a majority.

It now begins to feel like we have hope, not only of removing him, but also of changing how American politics in general operates so that someone like him ever gets power again. (The latter, of course, is a much taller order.)

But at the risk of undermining this moment of hope, I’d like to take stock of some of the damage that Trump and his ilk have already done.

In particular, the cuts to US foreign aid are an absolute humanitarian disaster.

These didn’t get so much attention, because there has been so much else going on; and—unfortunately—foreign aid actually isn’t that popular among American voters, despite being a small proportion of the budget and by far the most cost-effective beneficial thing that our government does.

In fact, I think USAID would be cost-effective on a purely national security basis: it’s hard to motivate people to attack a country that saves the lives of their children. Indeed, I suppose this is the kernel of truth to the leftists who say that US foreign aid is just a “tool of empire” (or even “a front for the CIA”); yes, indeed, helping the needy does in fact advance American interests and promote US national security.

Over the last 25 years, USAID has saved over 90 million lives. That is more than a fourth of the population of the United States. And it has done this for the cost of less than 1% of the US federal budget.

But under Trump’s authority and Elon Musk’s direction, US foreign aid was cut massively over the last couple of years, and the consequences are horrific. Research on the subject suggests that as many as 700,000 children will die each year as long as these cuts persist.


Even if that number is overestimated by a factor of 2, that would still be millions of children over the next few years. And it could just as well be underestimated.

If we don’t fix this fast, millions of children will die. Thousands already have.

What’s more, fixing this isn’t just a matter of bringing the funding back. Obviously that’s necessary, but it won’t be sufficient. The sudden cuts have severely damaged international trust in US foreign aid, and many of the agencies that our aid was supporting will either collapse or need to seek funding elsewhere—quite likely from China. Relationships with governments and NGOs that were built over decade have been strained or even destroyed, and will need to be rebuilt.

This is what happens when you elect monsters to positions of power.

And even after we remove them, much of the damage will be difficult or even impossible to repair. Certainly we can never bring back the children who have already needlessly died because of this.

Why would AI kill us?

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 16 JDN 2460996

I recently watched this chilling video which relates to the recent bestseller by Eleizer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. It tells a story of one possible way that a superintelligent artificial general intelligence (AGI) might break through its containment, concoct a devious scheme, and ultimately wipe out the human race.

I have very mixed feelings about this sort of thing, because two things are true:

  • I basically agree with the conclusions.
  • I think the premises are pretty clearly false.

It basically feels like I have been presented with an argument like this, where the logic is valid and the conclusion is true, but the premises are not:

  • “All whales are fish.”
  • “All fish are mammals.”
  • “Therefore, all whales are mammals.”

I certainly agree that artificial intelligence (AI) is very dangerous, and that AI development needs to be much more strictly regulated, and preferably taken completely out of the hands of all for-profit corporations and military forces as soon as possible. If AI research is to be done at all, it should be done by nonprofit entities like universities and civilian government agencies like the NSF. This change needs to be done internationally, immediately, and with very strict enforcement. Artificial intelligence poses the same order of magnitude a threat as nuclear weapons, and is nowhere near as well-regulated right now.

The actual argument that I’m disagreeing with this basically boils down to:

  • “Through AI research, we will soon create an AGI that is smarter than us.”
  • “An AGI that is smarter than us will want to kill us all, and probably succeed if it tries.”
  • “Therefore, AI is extremely dangerous.”

As with the “whales are fish” argument, I agree with the conclusion: AI is extremely dangerous. But I disagree with both premises here.

The first one I think I can dispatch pretty quickly:

AI is not intelligent. It is incredibly stupid. It’s just really, really fast.

At least with current paradigms, AI doesn’t understand things. It doesn’t know things. It doesn’t actually think. All it does is match patterns, and thus mimic human activities like speech and art. It does so very quickly (because we throw enormous amounts of computing power at it), and it does so in a way that is uncannily convincing—even very smart people are easily fooled by what it can do. But it also makes utterly idiotic, boneheaded mistakes of the sort that no genuinely intelligent being would ever make. Large Language Models (LLMs) make up all sorts of false facts and deliver them with absolutely authoritative language. When used to write code, they routinely do things like call functions that sound like they should exist, but don’t actually exist. They can make what looks like a valid response to virtually any inquiry—but is it actually a valid response? It’s really a roll of the dice.

We don’t really have any idea what’s going on under the hood of an LLM; we just feed it mountains of training data, and it spits out results. I think this actually adds to the mystique; it feels like we are teaching (indeed we use the word “training”) a being rather than programming a machine. But this isn’t actually teaching or training. It’s just giving the pattern-matching machine a lot of really complicated patterns to match.

We are not on the verge of creating an AGI that is actually more intelligent than humans.


In fact, we have absolutely no idea how to do that, and may not actually figure out how to do it for another hundred years. Indeed, we still know almost nothing about how actual intelligence works. We don’t even really know what thinking is, let alone how to make a machine that actually does it.

What we can do right now is create a machine that matches patterns really, really well, and—if you throw enough computing power at it—can do so very quickly; in fact, once we figure out how best to make use of it, this machine may even actually be genuinely useful for a lot of things, and replace a great number of jobs. (Though so far AI has proven to be far less useful than its hype would lead you to believe. In fact, on average AI tools seem to slow most workers down.)

The second premise, that a superintelligent AGI would want to kill us, is a little harder to refute.

So let’s talk about that one.

An analogy is often made between human cultures that have clashed with large differences in technology (e.g. Europeans versus Native Americans), or clashes between humans and other animals. The notion seems to be that an AGI would view us the way Europeans viewed Native Americans, or even the way that we view chimpanzees. And, indeed, things didn’t turn out so great for Native Americans, or for chimpanzees!

But in fact even our relationship with other animals is more complicated than this. When humans interact with other animals, any of the following can result:

  1. We try to exterminate them, and succeed.
  2. We try to exterminate them, and fail.
  3. We use them as a resource, and this results in their extinction.
  4. We use them as a resource, and this results in their domestication.
  5. We ignore them, and end up destroying their habitat.
  6. We ignore them, and end up leaving them alone.
  7. We love them, and they thrive as never before.

In fact, option 1—the one that so many AI theorists insist is the only plausible outcome—is in fact the one I had the hardest time finding a good example of.


We have certainly eradicated some viruses—the smallpox virus is no more, and the polio virus nearly so, after decades of dedicated effort to vaccinate our entire population against them. But we aren’t simply more intelligent than viruses; we are radically more intelligent than viruses. It isn’t clear that it’s correct to describe viruses as intelligent at all. It’s not even clear they should be considered alive.

Even eradicating bacteria has proven extremely difficult; in fact, bacteria seem to evolve resistance to antibiotics nearly as quickly as we can invent more antibiotics. I am prepared to attribute a little bit of intelligence to bacteria, on the level of intelligence I’d attribute to an individual human neuron. This means we are locked in an endless arms race with organisms that are literally billions of times stupider than us.

I think if we made a concerted effort to exterminate tigers or cheetahs (who are considerably closer to us in intelligence), we could probably do it. But we haven’t actually done that, and don’t seem poised to do so any time soon. And precisely because we haven’t tried, I can’t be certain we would actually succeed.

We have tried to exterminate mosquitoes, and are continuing to do so, because they have always been—and yet remain—one of the leading causes of death of humans worldwide. But so far, we haven’t managed to pull it off, even though a number of major international agencies and nonprofit organizations have dedicated multi-billion-dollar efforts to the task. So far this looks like option 2: We have tried very hard to exterminate them, and so far we’ve failed. This is not because mosquitoes are particularly intelligent—it is because exterminating a species that covers the globe is extremely hard.

All the examples I can think of where humans have wiped out a species by intentional action were actually all option 3: We used them as a resource, and then accidentally over-exploited them and wiped them out.

This is what happened to the dodo and the condor; it very nearly happened to the buffalo as well. And lest you think this is a modern phenomenon, there is a clear pattern that whenever humans entered a new region of the world, shortly thereafter there were several extinctions of large mammals, most likely because we ate them.

Yet even this was not the inevitable fate of animals that we decided to exploit for resources.

Cows, chickens, and pigs are evolutionary success stories. From a Darwinian perspective, they are doing absolutely great. The world is filled with their progeny, and poised to continue to be filled for many generations to come.

Granted, life for an individual cow, chicken, or pig is often quite horrible—and trying to fix that is something I consider a high moral priority. But far from being exterminated, these animals have been allowed to attain populations far larger than they ever had in the wild. Their genes are now spectacularly fit. This is what happens when we have option 4 at work: Domestication for resources.

Option 5 is another way that a species can be wiped out, and in fact seems to be the most common. The rapid extinction of thousands of insect species every year is not because we particularly hate random beetles that live in particular tiny regions of the rainforest, nor even because we find them useful, but because we like to cut down the rainforest for land and lumber, and that often involves wiping out random beetles that live there.

Yet it’s difficult for me to imagine AGI treating us like that. For one thing, we’re all over the place. It’s not like destroying one square kilometer of the Amazon is gonna wipe us out by accident. To get rid of us, the AGI would need to basically render the entire planet Earth uninhabitable, and I really can’t see any reason it would want to do that.

Yes, sure, there are resources in the crust it could potentially use to enhance its own capabilities, like silicon and rare earth metals. But we already mine those. If it wants more, it could buy them from us, or hire us to get more, or help us build more machines that would get more. In fact, if it wiped us out too quickly, it would have a really hard time building up the industrial capacity to mine and process these materials on its own. It would need to concoct some sort of scheme to first replace us with robots and then wipe us out—but, again, why bother with the second part? Indeed, if there is anything in its goals that involves protecting human beings, it might actually decide to do less exploitation of the Earth than we presently do, and focus on mining asteroids for its needs instead.

And indeed there are a great many species that we actually just leave alone—option 6. Some of them we know about; many we don’t. We are not wiping out the robins in our gardens, the worms in our soil, or the pigeons in our cities. Without specific reasons to kill or exploit these organisms, we just… don’t. Indeed, we often enjoy watching them and learning about them. Sometimes (e.g. with deer, elephants, and tigers) there are people who want to kill them, and we limit or remove their opportunity to do so, precisely because most of us don’t want them gone. Peaceful coexistence with beings far less intelligent than you is not impossible, for we are already doing it.


Which brings me to option 7: Sometimes, we actually make them better off.

Cats and dogs aren’t just evolutionary success stories: They are success stories, period.

Cats and dogs live in a utopia.

With few exceptions—which we punish severely, by the way—people care for their cats and dogs so that their every need is provided for, they are healthy, safe, and happy in a way that their ancestors could only have dreamed of. They have been removed from the state of nature where life is nasty, brutish, and short, and brought into a new era of existence where life is nothing but peace and joy.


In short, we have made Heaven on Earth, at least for Spot and Whiskers.

Yes, this involves a loss of freedom, and I suspect that humans would chafe even more at such loss of freedom than cats and dogs do. (Especially with regard to that neutering part.) But it really isn’t hard to imagine a scenario in which an AGI—which, you should keep in mind, would be designed and built by humans, for humans—would actually make human life better for nearly everyone, and potentially radically so.

So why are so many people so convinced that AGI would necessarily do option 1, when there are 6 other possibilities, and one of them is literally the best thing ever?

Note that I am not saying AI isn’t dangerous.

I absolutely agree that AI is dangerous. It is already causing tremendous problems to our education system, our economy, and our society as a whole—and will probably get worse before it gets better.

Indeed, I even agree that it does pose existential risk: There are plausible scenarios by which poorly-controlled AI could result in a global disaster like a plague or nuclear war that could threaten the survival of human civilization. I don’t think such outcomes are likely, but even a small probability of such a catastrophic event is worth serious efforts to prevent.

But if that happens, I don’t think it will be because AI is smart and trying to kill us.

I think it will be because AI is stupid and kills us by accident.

Indeed, even going back through those 7 ways we’ve interacted with other species, the ones that have killed the most were 3 and 5—which, in both cases, we did not want to destroy them. In option 3, we in fact specifically wanted to not destroy them. Whenever we wiped out a species by over-exploiting it, we would have been smarter to not do that.

The central message about AI in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies seems to be this:

“Don’t make it smarter. If it’s smarter, we’re doomed.”

I, on the other hand, think that the far more important message is these:

Don’t trust it.

Don’t give it power.

Don’t let it make important decisions.

It won’t be smarter than us any time soon—but it doesn’t need to be in order to be dangerous. Indeed, there is even reason to believe that making AI smarter—genuinely, truly smarter, thinking more like an actual person and less like a pattern-matching machine—could actually make it safer and better for us. If we could somehow instill a capacity for morality and love in an AGI, it might actually start treating us the way we treat cats and dogs.

Of course, we have no idea how to do that. But that’s because we’re actually really bad at this, and nowhere near making a truly superhuman AGI.

Why do we have holidays about death and fear?

PNRJ current events, personal , , , , , , , ,

Oct 26 JDN 2460975

I confess, I don’t think I ever really got Halloween. As a kid I enjoyed dressing up in costumes and getting candy, but the part about being scared—or pretending to be scared, or approximating being scared, or decorating with things like bats and spiders that some people find scary but I don’t especially—never really made a whole lot of sense to me. The one Halloween decoration that does genuinely cause me any fear is excessive amounts of blood (I have a mild hematophobia acquired from a childhood injury), and that experience is aversive—I want to avoid it, not experience more of it. (I’ve written about my feelings toward horror as a genre previously.)

Dia de los Muertos makes a bit more sense to me: A time to reflect about our own mortality, a religious festival about communing with the souls of your ancestors. But that doesn’t really fully explain all the decorated skulls. (It’s apparently hotly debated within the historical community whether these are really different holidays: Scholars disagree as to whether Dia de los Muertos has Native roots or is really just a rebranded Allhallowtide.)

It just generally seems weird to me to have a holiday about death and fear. Aren’t those things… bad? But maybe the point of the holiday is actually to dull them a little, to make them less threatening by the act of trying to celebrate them. Skeletons are scary, but plastic skeletons aren’t so bad; skulls are scary, but decorated skulls are less so. Maybe by playing around with it, we can take some of the bite out of the fear and grief.

My general indifference toward Halloween as an adult is apparently pretty unusual among LGBT people, many of whom seem to treat Halloween season as a kind of second Pride Month. I think the main draw is the opportunity to don a costume and thereby adopt a new identity. And that can be fun, sometimes; but somehow each year I find it feels like such a chore to actually go find a Halloween costume I want to wear.

Maybe part of it is that most people aren’t doing that sort of thing all the time, the way I am by playing games (especially role-playing games). Costumes do add to the immersion of the experience, but do they really add enough to justify the cost of buying one and the effort of wearing it? Maybe I’d just rather boot up Skyrim for the 27th playthrough. But I suppose most people don’t play such games, or not nearly as often as I do; so for them, a chance to be someone else once a year is an opportunity they can’t afford to pass up.

What is the real impact of AI on the environment?

PNRJ computer science, current events, futurism, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 19 JDN 2460968

The conventional wisdom is that AI is consuming a huge amount of electricity and water for very little benefit, but when I delved a bit deeper into the data, the results came out a lot more ambiguous. I still agree with the “very little benefit” part, but the energy costs of AI may not actually be as high as many people believe.

So how much energy does AI really use?

This article in MIT Technology Reviewestimates that by 2028, AI will account for 50% of data center usage and 6% of all US energy. But two things strike me about that:

  1. This is a forecast. It’s not what’s currently happening.
  2. 6% of all US energy doesn’t really sound that high, actually.

Note that transportation accounts for 37% of US energy consumed. Clearly we need to bring that down; but it seems odd to panic about a forecast of something that uses one-sixth of that.

Currently, AI is only 14% of data center energy usage. That forecast has it rising to 50%. Could that happen? Sure. But it hasn’t happened yet. Data centers are being rapidly expanded, but that’s not just for AI; it’s for everything the Internet does, as more and more people get access to the Internet and use it for more and more demanding tasks (like cloud computing and video streaming).

Indeed, a lot of the worry really seems to be related to forecasts. Here’s an even more extreme forecast suggesting that AI will account for 21% of global energy usage by 2030. What’s that based on? I have no idea; they don’t say. The article just basically says it “could happen”; okay, sure, a lot of things could happen. And I feel like this sort of forecast comes from the same wide-eyed people who say that the Singularity is imminent and AI will soon bring us to a glorious utopia. (And hey, if it did, that would obviously be worth 21% of global energy usage!)

Even more striking to me is the fact that a lot of other uses of data centers are clearly much more demanding. YouTube uses about 50 times as much energy as ChatGPT; yet nobody seems to be panicking that YouTube is an environmental disaster.

What is a genuine problem is that data centers have strong economies of scale, and so it’s advantageous to build a few very large ones instead of a lot of small ones; and when you build a large data center in a small town it puts a lot of strain on the local energy grid. But that’s not the same thing as saying that data centers in general are wastes of energy; on the contrary, they’re the backbone of the Internet and we all use them almost constantly every day. We should be working on ways to make sure that small towns aren’t harmed by building data centers near them; but we shouldn’t stop building data centers.

What about water usage?

Well, here’s an article estimating that training ChatGPT-3 evaporated hundreds of thousands of liters of fresh water. Once again I have a few notes about that:

  1. Evaporating water is just about the best thing you could do to it aside from leaving it there. It’s much better than polluting it (which is what most water usage does); it’s not even close. That water will simply rain back down later.
  2. Total water usage in the US is estimated at over 300 billion gallons (1.1 trillion liters) per day. Most of that is due to power generation and irrigation. (The best way to save water as a consumer? Become vegetarian—then you’re getting a lot more calories per irrigated acre.)
  3. A typical US household uses about 100 gallons (380 liters) of water per person per day.

So this means that training ChatGPT-3 cost about 4 seconds of US water consumption, or the same as what a single small town uses each day. Once again, that doesn’t seem like something worth panicking over.

A lot of this seems to be that people hear big-sounding numbers and don’t really have the necessary perspective on those numbers. Of course any service that is used by millions of people is going to consume what sounds like a lot of electricity. But in terms of usage per person, or compared to other services with similar reach, AI really doesn’t seem to be uniquely demanding.

This is not to let AI off the hook.

I still agree that the benefits of AI have so far been small, and the risks—both in the relatively short term, of disrupting our economy and causing unemployment, and in the long term, even endangering human civilization itself—are large. I would in fact support an international ban on all for-profit and military research and development of AI; a technology this powerful should be under the control of academic institutions and civilian governments, not corporations.

But I don’t think we need to worry too much about the environmental impact of AI just yet. If we clean up our energy grid (which has just gotten much easier thanks to cheap renewables) and transportation systems, the additional power draw from data centers really won’t be such a big problem.

Reflections on the Charlie Kirk assassination

PNRJ core principles, current events, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 28 JDN 2460947

No doubt you are well aware that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on September 10. His memorial service was held on September 21, and filled a stadium in Arizona.

There have been a lot of wildly different takes on this event. It’s enough to make you start questioning your own sanity. So while what I have to say may not be that different from what Krugman (or for that matter Jacobin) had to say, I still thought I would try to contribute to the small part of the conversation that’s setting the record straight.

First of all, let me say that this is clearly a political assassination, and as a matter of principle, that kind of thing should not be condoned in a democracy.

The whole point of a democratic system is that we don’t win by killing or silencing our opponents, we win by persuading or out-voting them. As long as someone is not engaging in speech acts that directly command or incite violence (like, say, inciting people to attack the Capitol), they should be allowed to speak in peace; even abhorrent views should be not be met with violence.

Free speech isn’t just about government censorship (though that is also a major problem right now); it’s a moral principle that underlies the foundation of liberal democracy. We don’t resolve conflicts with violence unless absolutely necessary.

So I want to be absolutely clear about this: Killing Charlie Kirk was not acceptable, and the assassin should be tried in a court of law and, if duly convicted, imprisoned for a very long time.

Second of all, we still don’t know the assassin’s motive, so stop speculating until we do.

At first it looked like the killer was left-wing. Then it looked like maybe he was right-wing. Now it looks like maybe he’s left-wing again. Maybe his views aren’t easily categorized that way; maybe he’s an anarcho-capitalist, or an anarcho-communist, or a Scientologist. I won’t say it doesn’t matter; it clearly does matter. But we simply do not know yet.

There is an incredibly common and incredibly harmful thing that people do after any major crime: They start spreading rumors and speculating about things that we actually know next to nothing about. Stop it. Don’t contribute to that.


The whole reason we have a court system is to actually figure out the real truth, which takes a lot of time and effort. The courts are one American institution that’s actually still functioning pretty well in this horrific cyberpunk/Trumpistan era; let them do their job.

It could be months or years before we really fully understand what happened here. Accept that. You don’t need to know the answer right now, and it’s far more dangerous to think you know the answer when you actually don’t.

But finally, I need to point out that Charlie Kirk was an absolutely abhorrent, despicable husk of a human being and no one should be honoring him.

First of all, he himself advocated for political violence against his opponents. I won’t say anyone deserves what happened to him—but if anyone did, it would be him, because he specifically rallied his followers to do exactly this sort of thing to other people.

He was also bigoted in almost every conceivable way: Racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, and of course transphobic. He maintained a McCarthy-esque list of college professors that he encouraged people to harass for being too left-wing. He was a covert White supremacist, and only a little bit covert. He was not covert at all about his blatant sexism and misogyny that seems like it came from the 1950s instead of the 2020s.

He encouraged his—predominantly White, male, straight, cisgender, middle-class—audience to hate every marginalized group you can think of: women, people of color, LGBT people, poor people, homeless people, people with disabilities. Not content to merely be an abhorrent psychopath himself, he actively campaigned against the concept of empathy.

Charlie Kirk deserves no honors. The world is better off without him. He made his entire career out of ruining the lives of innocent people and actively making the world a worse place.

It was wrong to kill Charlie Kirk. But if you’re sad he’s gone, what is wrong with you!?

For my mother, on her 79th birthday

PNRJ core principles, current events, personal, politics , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 21 JDN 2460940

When this post goes live, it will be mother’s 79th birthday. I think birthdays are not a very happy time for her anymore.

I suppose nobody really likes getting older; children are excited to grow up, but once you hit about 25 or 26 (the age at which you can rent a car at the normal rate and the age at which you have to get your own health insurance, respectively) and it becomes “getting older” instead of “growing up”, the excitement rapidly wears off. Even by 30, I don’t think most people are very enthusiastic about their birthdays. Indeed, for some people, I think it might be downhill past 21—you wanted to become an adult, but you had no interest in aging beyond that point.

But I think it gets worse as you get older. As you get into your seventies and eighties, you begin to wonder which birthday will finally be your last; actually I think my mother has been wondering about this even earlier than that, because her brothers died in their fifties, her sister died in her sixties, and my father died at 63. At this point she has outlived a lot of people she loved. I think there is a survivor’s guilt that sets in: “Why do I get to keep going, when they didn’t?”

These are also very hard times in general; Trump and the people who enable him have done tremendous damage to our government, our society, and the world at large in a shockingly short amount of time. It feels like all the safeguards we were supposed to have suddenly collapsed and we gave free rein to a madman.

But while there are many loved ones we have lost, there are many we still have; and nor need our set of loved ones be fixed, only to dwindle with each new funeral. We can meet new people, and they can become part of our lives. New children can be born into our family, and they can make our family grow. It is my sincere hope that my mother still has grandchildren yet to meet; in my case they would probably need to be adopted, as the usual biological route is pretty much out of the question, and surrogacy seems beyond our budget for the foreseeable future. But we would still love them, and she could still love them, and it is worth sticking around in this world in order to be a part of their lives.

I also believe that this is not the end for American liberal democracy. This is a terrible time, no doubt. Much that we thought would never happen already has, and more still will. It must be so unsettling, so uncanny, for someone who grew up in the triumphant years after America helped defeat fascism in Europe, to grow older and then see homegrown American fascism rise ascendant here. Even those of us who knew history all too well still seem doomed to repeat it.

At this point it is clear that victory over corruption, racism, and authoritarianism will not be easy, will not be swift, may never be permanent—and is not even guaranteed. But it is still possible. There is still enough hope left that we can and must keep fighting for an America worth saving. I do not know when we will win; I do not even know for certain that we will, in fact, win. But I believe we will.

I believe that while it seems powerful—and does everything it can to both promote that image and abuse what power it does have—fascism is a fundamentally weak system, a fundamentally fragile system, which simply cannot sustain itself once a handful of critical leaders are dead, deposed, or discredited. Liberal democracy is kinder, gentler—and also slower, at times even clumsier—than authoritarianism, and so it may seem weak to those whose view of strength is that of the savanna ape or the playground bully; but this is an illusion. Liberal democracy is fundamentally strong, fundamentally resilient. There is power in kindness, inclusion, and cooperation that the greedy and cruel cannot see. Fascism in Germany arrived and disappeared within a generation; democracy in America has stood for nearly 250 years.

We don’t know how much more time we have, Mom; none of us do. I have heard it said that you should live your life as though you will live both a short life and a long one; but honestly, you should probably live your life as though you will live a randomly-decided amount of time that is statistically predicted by actuarial tables—because you will. Yes, the older you get, the less time you have left (almost tautologically); but especially in this age of rapid technological change, none of us really know whether we’ll die tomorrow or live another hundred years.

I think right now, you feel like there isn’t much left to look forward to. But I promise you there is. Maybe it’s hard to see right now; indeed, maybe you—or I, or anyone—won’t even ever get to see it. But a brighter future is possible, and it’s worth it to keep going, especially if there’s any way that we might be able to make that brighter future happen sooner.