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.

You call this a hobby?

PNRJ book reviews, critique of neoclassical economics, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 9 JDN 2460989

A review of Politics is for Power by Eitan Hersch

This week, there was an election. It’s a minor midterm election—since it’s an odd-numbered year, many places don’t even have any candidates on the ballot—and as a result, turnout will surely be low. Eitan Hersch has written a book about why that’s a bad thing, and how it is symptomatic of greater problems in our civic culture as a whole.

Buried somewhere in this book, possible to find through committed, concerted effort, there is a book that could have had a large positive effect on our political system, our civic discourse, and our society as a whole. Sadly, Dr. Hersch buried it so well that most people will never find it.

In particular, he starts the book—not even on the first page, but on the cover—by actively alienating his core audience with what seems to be the very utmost effort he can muster.


Yes, even the subtitle is condescending and alienating:

How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change

And of course it’s not just there; on page after page he drives the dagger deeper and twists it as hard as he can, repeating the accusation over and over:

This is just a hobby for you. It doesn’t really mean anything.

Today’s hobbyists possess the negative qualities of the amateurs—hyperemotional engagement, obsession with national politics, an insatiable appetite for debate—and none of the amateur’s positive qualities—the neighborhood meetings, the concrete goals, the leadership.

– p.9

You hear that? You’re worse than an amateur. This is on page 9. Page 9.

[…] Much of the time we spend on politics is best described as an inward-focused leisure activity for people who like politics.

We may not easily concede that we are doing politics for fun.[…]

-p. 14

See? You may say it’s not really just for fun, but you’re lying. You’re failing to concede the truth.

To the political hobbyist, news is a form of entertainment and needs to be fun.

-p.19

You hear me? This is fun for you. You’re enjoying this. You’re doing it for yourself.

The real explanation for the dynamics of voter turnout is that we treat politics like a game and follow the spectacle. Turnout is high in presidential elections compared to other US elections in the same way that football viewership is high when the Super Bowl is on. Many people who do not like football or even know the rules of the game end up at a Super Bowl party. They’re there for the commercials, the guacamole, and to be part of a cultural moment. That’s why turnout is high in presidential elections. Without the spectacle, even people who say they care about voting don’t show up.

-p. 48

This is all a game. It’s not real. You don’t really care.

I could go on; he keeps repeating this message—this insult, this accusation—throughout the book. He tells you, over and over, that if you are not already participating in politics in the very particular way he wants you to (and he may even be right that it would be better!), you are a selfish liar, and you are treating what should be vitally important as just meaningless entertainment.

This made it honestly quite painful to get through the book. Several times, I was tempted to just give up and put it back on the shelf. But I’m glad I didn’t, because there are valuable insights about effective grassroots political activism buried within this barrage of personal accusations.

I guess Hersch must not see this as a personal accusation; at one point, he acknowledges that people might find it insulting, but (1) doesn’t seem to care and (2) makes no effort to inquire as to why we might feel that way; in fact, he manages to twist the knife just a little deeper in that very same passage:

For the non-self-identifying junkies, the term political hobbyist can be insulting. Given how important politics is, it doesn’t feel good to call one’s political activity a hobby. The term is also insulting, I have learned, to real hobbyists, who see hobbies as activities with much more depth than the online bickering or addictive news consumption I’m calling a hobby.

-p. 88

You think calling it a “hobby” is insulting? Yeah, well, it’s worse than that, so ha!

But let me tell you something about my own experience of politics. (Actually, one of Hersch’s central messages is that sharing personal experiences is one of the most powerful political tools I know.)

How do most people I know feel about politics, since, oh, say… November 2016?

ABSOLUTE HORROR AND DESPAIR.

For every queer person I know, every trans person, every immigrant, every woman, every person of color, and for plenty of White cishet liberal guys too, the election of President Donald Trump was traumatic. It felt like a physical injury. People who had recovered from depression were thrust back into it. People felt physically nauseated. And especially for immigrants and trans people, people literally feared for their lives and were right to do so.

WHATEVER THIS IS, IT IS NOT A HOBBY.

I’ve had to talk people down from psychotic episodes and suicidal ideation because of this, and you have the fucking audacity to tell me that we’re doing this for fun!?

If someone feared for their life because their team lost the Super Bowl, we would rightfully recognize that as an utterly pathological response. But I know a whole bunch of folks on student visas that are constantly afraid of being kidnapped and taken away by masked men with guns, because that is a thing that has actually happened to other people who were in this country on student visas. I know a whole bunch of trans folks who are afraid of assaulted or even killed for using the wrong bathroom, because that is a thing that actually happens to trans people in this country.

I wish I could tell these people—many of them dear friends of mine—that they are wrong to fear, that they are safe, that everything will be all right. But as long as Donald Trump is in power and the Republicans in Congress and the right-wing Supreme Court continue to enable him, I can’t tell them that, because I would be lying; the danger is real. All I can do is tell them that it is probably not as great a danger as they fear, and that if there is any way I can help them, I am willing to do so.

Indeed, politics for me and those closest to me is so obviously so much not a hobby that repeatedly insisting that I admit that it is starts to feel like gaslighting. I feel like I’m in a struggle session or something: “Admit you are a hobbyist! Repent!”

I don’t know; maybe there are people for whom politics is just a hobby. Maybe the privileged cishet White kids at Tufts that Dr. Hersch lectures to are genuinely so removed from the consequences of public policy that they can engage with politics at their leisure and for their own entertainment. (A lot of the studies he cites are specifically about undergrads; I know this is a thing in pretty much all social science… but maybe undergrads are in fact not a very representative sample of political behavior?) But even so, some of the international students in those lecture halls (11% of Tufts undergrads and 17% of Tufts grads) probably feel pretty differently, I have to imagine.

In fact, maybe genuine political hobbyism is a widespread phenomenon, and its existence explains a lot of otherwise really baffling things about the behavior of our electorate (like how the same districts could vote for both Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). I don’t find that especially plausible given my own experience, but I’m an economist, not a political scientist, so I do feel like I should offer some deference to the experts on this matter. (And I’m well aware that my own social network is nothing like a representative sample of the American electorate.)

But I can say this for sure:

The target audience of this book is not doing this as a hobby.

Someone who picks up a book by a political scientist hoping for guidance as to how to make their own political engagement more effective is not someone who thinks this is all a game. They are not someone who is engaging with politics as a fun leisure activity. They are someone who cares. They are someone who thinks this stuff matters.

By construction, the person who reads this book to learn about how to make change wants to make change.

So maybe you should acknowledge that at some point in your 200 pages of text? Maybe after spending all these words talking about how having empathy is such an important trait in political activism, you should have some empathy for your audience?

Hersch does have some useful advice to give, buried in all this.

His core message is basically that we need more grassroots activism: Small groups of committed people, acting in their communities. Not regular canvassing, which he acknowledges as terrible (and as well he should; I’ve done it, and it is), but deep canvassing, which also involves going door to door but is really a fundamentally different process.

Actually, he seems to love grassroots organizing so much that he’s weirdly nostalgic for the old days of party bosses. Several times, he acknowledges that these party bosses were corrupt, racist, and utterly unaccountable, but after every such acknowledgment he always follows it up with some variation on “but at least they got things done”.

He’s honestly weirdly dismissive of other forms of engagement, though. Like, I expected him to be dismissive of “slacktivism” (though I am not), if for no other reason than the usual generational curmudgeonry. But he’s also weirdly dismissive of donations and even… honestly… voting? He doesn’t even seem interested in encouraging people to vote more. He doesn’t seem to think that get-out-the-vote campaigns are valuable.

I guess as a political scientist, he’s probably very familiar with the phenomenon of “low information voters”, who frequently swing elections despite being either clueless or actively misled. And okay, maybe turning out those people isn’t all that useful, at least if it’s not coupled with also educating them and correcting their misconceptions. But surely it’s not hobbyism to vote? Surely doing the one most important thing in a democratic system isn’t treating this like a game?

In his section on donations, he takes two tacks against them:

The first is to say that rich donors who pay $10,000 a plate for fancy dinners really just want access to politicians for photo ops. I don’t think that’s right, but the truth is admittedly not much better: I think they want access to politicians to buy influence. This is “political engagement” in some sense—you’re acting to exert power—but it’s corrupt, and it’s the source of an enormous amount of damage to our society—indeed to our planet itself. But I think Hersch has to deny that the goal is influence, because that would in fact be “politics for power”, and in order to remain fiercely non-partisan throughout (which, honestly, probably is a good strategic move), he carefully avoids ever saying that anyone exerting political power is bad.

Actually the closest he gets to admitting his own political beliefs (surprise, the Massachusetts social science professor is a center-left liberal!) comes in a passage where he bemoans the fact that… uh… Democrats… aren’t… corrupt enough? If you don’t believe me, read it for yourself:

The hobbyist motivation among wealthy donors is also problematic for a reason that doesn’t have a parallel in the nonprofit world: Partisan asymmetry. Unlike Democratic donors, Republican donors typically support politicians whose policy priorities align with a wealthy person’s financial interests. The donors can view donations as an investment. When Schaffner and I asked max-out donors why they made their contribution, many more Republicans than Democrats said that a very or extremely important reason for their gift was that the politician could affect the donor’s own industry (37 percent of Republicans versus 22 percent of Democrats).

This asymmetry puts Democrats at a disadvantage. Not motivated by their own bottom line, Democratic donors instead have to be motivated by ideology, issues, or even by the entertainment value that a donation provides.

-p.80

Yes, God forbid they be motivated by issues or ideology. That would involve caring about other people. Clearly only naked self-interest and the profit motive could ever be a good reason for political engagement! (Quick question: You haven’t been, uh, reading a lot of… neoclassical economists lately, have you? Why? Oh, no reason.) Oh why can’t Democrats just be more like Republicans, and use their appallingly vast hoards of money to make sure that we cut social services and deregulate everything until the polluted oceans flood the world!?

The second is to say that the much broader population who makes small donations of $25 or $50 is “ideologically extreme” compared to the rest of the population, which is true, but seems to me utterly unsurprising. The further the world is from how you’d like to see it, the greater the value is to you of changing the world, and therefore the more you should be willing to invest into making that change—or even into a small probability of possibly making that change. If you think things are basically okay, why would you pay money to try to make them different? (I guess maybe you’d try to pay money to keep them the same? But even so-called “conservatives” never actually seem to campaign on that.)

I also don’t really see “ideologically extreme” as inherently a bad thing.

Sure, some extremists are very bad: Nazis are extreme and bad (weird that this seems controversial these days), Islamists are extreme and bad, Christian nationalists are extreme and bad, tankie leftists are extreme and bad.

But vegetarians—especially vegans—are also “ideologically extreme”, but quite frankly we are objectively correct, and maybe don’t even go far enough (I only hope that future generations will forgive me for my cheese). Everyone knows that animals can suffer, and everyone who is at all informed knows that factory farms make them suffer severely. The “moderate” view that all this horrible suffering is justifiable in the name of cheap ground beef and chicken nuggets is a fundamentally immoral one. (Maybe I could countenance a view that free-range humane meat farming is acceptable, but even that is far removed from our current political center.)

Trans activism is in some sense “ideologically extreme”—and frequently characterized as such—but it basically amounts to saying that the human rights of free expression, bodily autonomy, and even just personal safety outweigh other people’s narrow, blinkered beliefs about sex and gender. Okay, maybe we can make some sort of compromise on trans kids in sports (because why should I care about sports?), and I’m okay with gender-neutral bathrooms instead of letting trans women in women’s rooms (because gender-neutral bathrooms give more privacy and safety anyway!), and the evidence on the effects of puberty blockers and hormones is complicated (which is why it should be decided by doctors and scientists, not by legislators!), but in our current state, trans people die to murder and suicide at incredibly alarming rates. The only “moderate” position here is to demand, at minimum, enforced laws against discrimination and hate crimes. (Also, calling someone by the name and pronouns they ask you to costs you basically nothing. Failing to do that is not a brave ideological stand; it’s just you being rude and obnoxious. Indeed, since it can trigger dysphoria, it’s basically like finding out someone’s an arachnophobe and immediately putting a spider in their hair.)

Open borders is regarded as so “ideologically extreme” that even the progressive Democrats won’t touch it, despite the fact that I literally am not aware of a single ethical philosopher in the 21st century who believes that our current system of immigration control is morally justifiable. Even the ones who favor “closed borders” in principle are almost unanimous that our current system is cruel and racist. The Lifeboat Theory is ridiculous; allowing immigrants in wouldn’t kill us, it would just maybe—maybe—make us a little worse off. Their lives may be at stake, but ours are not. We are not keeping people out of a lifeboat so it doesn’t sink; we are keeping them out of a luxury cruise liner so it doesn’t get dirty and crowded.

Indeed, even so-called “eco-terrorists”, who are not just ideologically extreme but behaviorally extreme as well, don’t even really seem that bad. They are really mostly eco-vandals; they destroy property, they don’t kill people. There is some risk to life and limb involved in tree spiking or blowing up a pipeline, but the goal is clearly not to terrorize people; it’s to get them to stop doing a particular thing—a particular thing that they in fact probably should stop doing. I guess I understand why this behavior has to be illegal and punished as such; but morally, I’m not even sure it’s wrong. We may not be able to name or even precisely count the children saved who would have died if that pipeline had been allowed to continue pumping oil and thus spewing carbon emissions, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

So really, if anything, the problem is not “extremism” in some abstract sense, but particular beliefs and ideologies, some of which are not even regarded as extreme. A stronger vegan lobby would not be harmful to America, however “extreme” they might be, and a strong Republican lobby, however “mainstream” it is perceived to be, is rapidly destroying our nation on a number of different levels.

Indeed, in parts of the book, it almost seems like Hersch is advocating in some Nietzschean sense for power for its own sake. I don’t think that’s really his intention; I think he means to empower the currently disempowered, for the betterment of society as a whole. But his unwillingness to condemn rich Republicans who donate the maximum allowed in order to get their own industry deregulated is at least… problematic, as both political activists and social scientists are wont to say.

I’m honestly not even sure that empowering the disempowered is what we need right now. I think a lot of the disempowered are also terribly misinformed, and empowering them might actually make things worse. In fact, I think the problem with the political effect of social media isn’t that it has failed to represent the choices of the electorate, but that it has represented them all too well and most people are really, really bad—just, absolutely, shockingly, appallingly bad—at making good political choices. They have wildly wrong beliefs about really basic policy questions, and often think that politicians’ platforms are completely different from what they actually are. I don’t go quite as far as this article by Dan Williams in Conspicuous Cognition, but it makes some really good points I can’t ignore. Democracy is currently failing to represent the interests of a great many Americans, but a disturbingly large proportion of this failure must be blamed on a certain—all too large—segment of the American populace itself.

I wish this book had been better.

More grassroots organizing does seem like a good thing! And there is some advice in this book about how to do it better—though in my opinion, not nearly enough. A lot of what Hersch wants to see happen would require tremendous coordination between huge numbers of people, which almost seems like saying “politics would be better if enough people were better about politics”. What I wanted to hear more about was what I can do; if voting and donating and protesting and blogging isn’t enough, what should I be doing? How do I make it actually work? It feels like Hersch spent so long trying to berate me for being a “hobbyist” that he forgot to tell me what he actually thinks I should be doing.

I am fully prepared to believe that online petitions and social media posts don’t accomplish much politically. (Indeed, I am fully prepared to believe that blogging doesn’t accomplish much politically.) I am open to hearing what other options are available, and eager for guidance about how to have the most effective impact.

But could you please, please not spend half the conversation repeatedly accusing me of not caring!?

In Nozicem

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, inequality , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 2 JDN 2460982

(I wasn’t sure how to convert Robert Nozick’s name into Latin. I decided it’s a third-declension noun, Nozix, Nozicis. But my name already is Latin, so if one of his followers ever wants to write a response to this post that also references In Catalinam, they’ll know how to decline it; the accusative is Julium, if you please.)

This post is not at all topical. I have been too busy working on video game jams (XBOX Game Camp Detroit, and then the Epic Mega Jam, for which you can view my submission, The Middle of Nowhere, here!) to keep up with the news, and honestly I think I am psychologically better off for it.

Rather, this is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time, but never quite got around to.

It is about Robert Nozick, and why he was a bad philosopher, a bad person, and a significant source of harm to our society as a whole.

Nozick had a successful career at Harvard, and even became president of the American Philosophical Association. So it may seem that I am going out on quite a limb by saying he’s a bad philosopher.

But the philosophy for which he is best known, the thing that made his career, is not simply obviously false—it is evil. It is the sort of thing that one can only write if one is either a complete psychopath, utterly ignorant of history, or arguing in bad faith (or some combination of these).

It is summarized in this pithy quote that makes less moral sense than the philosophy of the Joker in The Dark Knight:

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (p.169)

I apologize in advance for my language, but I must say it:

NO IT FUCKING ISN’T.

At worst—at the absolute worst, when a government is utterly corrupt and tyrannical, provides no legitimate services whatsoever, contributes in no way to public goods, offers no security, and exists entirely to enrich its ruling class—which by the way is worse than almost any actual government that has ever existed, even including totalitarian dictators and feudal absolute monarchies—at worst, taxation is like theft.

Taxation, like theft, takes your wealth, not your labor.


Wealth is not labor.

Even wealth earned by wage income is not labor—and most wealth isn’t earned by wage income. Elon Musk is now halfway to a trillion dollars, and it’s not because he works a million times harder than you. (Nor is he a million times smarter than you, or even ten—perhaps not even one.) The majority of wealth—and the vast majority of top 1%, top 0.1%, and top 0.01% wealth—is capital that begets more capital, continuously further enriching those who could live just fine without ever working another day in their lives. Billionaire wealth is honestly so pathological at this point that it would be pathetic if it weren’t so appalling.

Even setting aside the historical brutality of slavery as it was actually implemented—especially in the United States, where slaves were racialized and commodified in a way that historically slaves usually weren’t—there is a very obvious, very bright, very hard line between taking someone’s wealth and forcing them to work.

Even a Greek prisoner of war who was bought by a Roman patrician to tutor his children—the sort of slave that actually had significant autonomy and lived better than an average person in Roman society—was fundamentally unfree in a way that no one has ever been made unfree by having to pay income tax. (And the Roman patrician who owned him and (ahem) paid taxes was damn well aware of how much more free he was than his slave.)

Whether you are taxed at 2% or 20% or 90%, you are still absolutely free to use your time however you please. Yes, if you assume a fixed amount of work at a fixed wage, and there are no benefits to you from the taxation (which is really not something we can assume, because having a good or bad government radically affects what your economy as a whole will be like), you will have less stuff, and if you insist for some reason that you must have the same amount of stuff, then you would have to work more.

But even then, you would merely have to work more somewhere—anywhere—in order to make up the shortfall. You could keep your current job, or get another one, or start your own business. And you could at any time decide that you don’t need all that extra stuff and don’t want to work more, and simply choose to not work more. You are, in other words, still free.

At worst, the government has taken your stuff. It has made you poorer. But absolutely not, in no way, shape or form, has it made you a slave.

Yes, there is the concept of “wage slavery”, but “wage slavery” isn’t actually slavery, and the notion that people aren’t really, truly free unless they can provide for basic needs entails the need for a strong, redistributive government, which is the exact opposite of what Robert Nozick and his shockingly large body of followers have been arguing for since the 1970s.

I could have been sympathetic to Nozick if his claim had been this:

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with [theft]. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing [goods he has purchased with his own earnings].

Or even this:

[Military conscription] is on a par with forced labor. [After all, you are] seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Even then, there are some very clear reasons why we might be willing to accept taxation or even conscription from a legitimate liberal democratic government even though a private citizen doing the same fundamental activity would obviously be illegal and immoral.

Indeed, it’s not clear that theft is always immoral; there is always the Les Miserables exception where someone desperately poor steals food to feed themselves, and a liberal democratic government taxing its citizens in order to provide food stamps seems even more ethically defensible than that.

And that, my friends, is precisely why Nozick wasn’t satisfied with it.

Precisely because there is obvious nuance here that can readily justify at least some degree of not only taxation for national security and law enforcement, but also taxation for public goods and even redistribution of wealth, Nozick could not abide the analogies that actually make sense. He had to push beyond them to an analogy that is transparently absurd, in order to argue for his central message that government is justifiable for national security and law enforcement only, and all other government functions are inherently immoral. Forget clean water and air. Forget safety regulations in workplaces—or even on toys. Forget public utilities—all utilities must be privatized and unregulated. And above all—above all—forget ever taking any money from the rich to help the poor, because that would be monstrous.

If you support food stamps, in Nozick’s view, there should be a statue of you in Mississippi, because you are a defender of slavery.

Indeed, many of his followers have gone beyond that, and argued using the same core premises that all government is immoral, and the only morally justifiable system is anarcho-capitalism—which, I must confess, I have always had trouble distinguishing from feudalism with extra steps.

Nozick’s response to this kind of argument basically seemed to be that he thought anarcho-capitalism will (somehow, magically) automatically transition into his favored kind of minarchist state, and so it’s actually a totally fine intermediate goal. (A fully privatized military and law enforcement system! What could possibly go wrong? It’s not like private prisons are already unconscionably horrible even in an otherwise mostly-democratic system or anything!)

Nozick wanted to absolve himself—and the rich, especially the rich, whom he seemed to love more than life itself—from having to contribute to society, from owing anything to any other human being.

Rather than be moved by our moral appeals that millions of innocent people are suffering and we could so easily alleviate that suffering by tiny, minuscule, barely-perceptible harms to those who are already richer than anyone could possibly deserve to be, he tried to turn the tables: “No, you are immoral. What you want is slavery.”

And in so doing, he created a thin, but shockingly resilient, intellectual veneer to the most craven selfishness and the most ideologically blinkered hyper-capitalism. He made it respectable to oppose even the most basic ways that governments can make human life better; by verbal alchemy he transmuted plain evil into its own new moral crusade.

Indeed, perhaps the only reason his philosophy was ever taken seriously is that the rich and powerful found it very, very, useful.

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.

Why are so many famous people so awful?

PNRJ ethics, inequality, market failure , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 12 JDN 2460961

J.K. Rowling is a transphobic bigot. H.P. Lovecraft was an overt racist. Orson Scott Card is homophobic, and so was Frank Herbert. Robert Heinlein was a misogynist. Isaac Asimov was a serial groper and sexual harasser. Neil Gaiman has been credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults.

That’s just among sci-fi and fantasy authors whose work I admire. I could easily go on with lots of other famous people and lots of other serious allegations. (I suppose Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski seem like particularly apt examples.)

Some of these are worse than others; since they don’t seem to be guilty of any actual crimes, we might even cut some slack to Lovecraft, Herbert and Heinlein for being products of their times. (It seems very hard to make that defense for Asimov and Gaiman, with Rowling and Card somewhere in between because they aren’t criminals, but ‘their time’ is now.)

There are of course exceptions: Among sci-fi authors, for instance, Ursula Le Guin, Becky Chambers, Alistair Reynolds and Andy Weir all seem to be ethically unimpeachable. (As far as I know? To be honest, I still feel blind-sided by Neil Gaiman.)

But there really does seem to be pattern here:

Famous people are often bad people.

I guess I’m not quite sure what the baseline rate of being racist, sexist, or homophobic is (and frankly maybe it’s pretty high); but the baseline rate of committing multiple sexual assaults is definitely lower than the rate at which famous men get credibly accused of such.

Lord Acton famously remarked similarly:

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.

I think this account is wrong, however. Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela were certainly powerful—and certainly flawed—but they do not seem corrupt to me. I don’t think that Gandhi beat his wife because he led the Indian National Congress, and Mandela supported terrorists precisely during the period when he had the least power and the fewest options. (It’s almost tautologically true that Lincoln couldn’t have suspended habeas corpusif he weren’t extremely powerful—but that doesn’t mean that it was the power that shaped his character.)

I don’t think the problem is that power corrupts. I think the problem is that the corrupt seek power, and are very good at obtaining it.

In fact, I think the reason that so many famous people are such awful people is that our society rewards being awful. People will flock to you if you are overconfident and good at self-promoting, and as long as they like your work, they don’t seem to mind who you hurt along the way; this makes a perfect recipe for rewarding narcissists and psychopaths with fame, fortune, and power.

If you doubt that this is the case:

How else do you explain Donald Trump?

The man has absolutely no redeeming qualities. He is incompetent, willfully ignorant, deeply incurious, arrogant, manipulative, and a pathological liar. He’s also a racist, misogynist, and admitted sexual assaulter. He has been doing everything in his power to prevent the release of the Epstein Files, which strongly suggests he has in fact sexually assaulted teenagers. He’s also a fascist, and now that he has consolidated power, he is rapidly pushing the United States toward becoming a fascist state—complete with masked men with guns who break into your home and carry you away without warrants or trials.

Yet tens of millions of Americans voted for him to become President of the United States—twice.

Basically, it seems to be that Trump said he was great, and they believed him. Simply projecting confidence—however utterly unearned that confidence might be—was good enough.

When it comes to the authors I started this post with, one might ask whether their writing talents were what brought them fame, independently or in spite of their moral flaws. To some extent that is probably true. But we also don’t really know how good they are, compared to all the other writers whose work never got published or never got read. Especially during times—all too recently—when writers who were women, queer, or people of color simply couldn’t get their work published, who knows what genius we might have missed out on? Dune the first book is a masterpiece, but by the time we get to Heretics of Dune the books have definitely lost their luster; maybe there were some other authors with better books that could have been published, but never were because Herbert had the clout and the privilege and those authors didn’t.

I do think genuine merit has some correlation with success. But I think the correlation is much weaker than is commonly supposed. A lot of very obviously terrible and/or incompetent people are extremely successful in life. Many of them were born with advantages—certainly true of Elon Musk and Donald Trump—but not all of them.

Indeed, there are so many awful successful people that I am led to conclude that moral behavior has almost nothing to do with success. I don’t think people actively go out of their way to support authors, musicians, actors, business owners or politicians who are morally terrible; but it’s difficult for me to reject the hypothesis that they literally don’t care. Indeed, when evidence emerges that someone powerful is terrible, usually their supporters will desperately search for reasons why the allegations can’t be true, rather than seriously considering no longer supporting them.

I don’t know what to do about this.

I don’t know how to get people to believe allegations more, or care about them more; and that honestly seems easier than changing the fundamental structure of our society in a way that narcissists and psychopaths are no longer rewarded with power. The basic ways that we decide who gets jobs, who gets published, and who gets elected seem to be deeply, fundamentally broken; they are selecting all the wrong people, and our whole civilization is suffering the consequences.


We are so far from a just world that I honestly can’t see how to get there from here, or even how to move substantially closer.

But I think we still have to try.

Taylor Swift and the means of production

PNRJ development economics, futurism, inequality, market failure, politics , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 5 JDN 2460954

This post is one I’ve been meaning to write for awhile, but current events keep taking precedence.

In 2023, Taylor Swift did something very interesting from an economic perspective, which turns out to have profound implications for our economic future.

She re-recorded an entire album and released it through a different record company.

The album was called 1989 (Taylor’s Version), and she created it because for the last four years she had been fighting with Big Machine Records over the rights to her previous work, including the original album 1989.

A Marxist might well say she seized the means of production! (How rich does she have to get before she becomes bourgeoisie, I wonder? Is she already there, even though she’s one of a handful of billionaires who can truly say they were self-made?)

But really she did something even more interesting than that. It was more like she said:

“Seize the means of production? I am the means of production.”

Singing and songwriting are what is known as a human-capital-intensive industry. That is, the most important factor of production is not land, or natural resources, or physical capital (yes, you need musical instruments, amplifiers, recording equipment and the like—but these are a small fraction of what it costs to get Talor Swift for a concert), or even labor in the ordinary sense. It’s one where so-called (honestly poorly named) “human capital” is the most important factor of production.

A labor-intensive industry is one where you just need a lot of work to be done, but you can get essentially anyone to do it: Cleaning floors is labor-intensive. A lot of construction work is labor-intensive (though excavators and the like also make it capital-intensive).

No, for a human-capital-intensive industry, what you need is expertise or talent. You don’t need a lot of people doing back-breaking work; you need a few people who are very good at doing the specific thing you need to get done.

Taylor Swift was able to re-record and re-release her songs because the one factor of production that couldn’t be easily substituted was herself. Big Machine Records overplayed their hand; they thought they could control her because they owned the rights to her recordings. But she didn’t need her recordings; she could just sing the songs again.

But now I’m sure you’re wondering: So what?

Well, Taylor Swift’s story is, in large part, the story of us all.

For most of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, human beings in developed countries saw a rapid increase in their standard of living.

Yes, a lot of countries got left behind until quite recently.

Yes, this process seems to have stalled in the 21st century, with “real GDP” continuing to rise but inequality and cost of living rising fast enough that most people don’t feel any richer (and I’ll get to why that may be the case in a moment).

But for millions of people, the gains were real, and substantial. What was it that brought about this change?

The story we are usually told is that it was capital; that as industries transitioned from labor-intensive to capital-intensive, worker productivity greatly increased, and this allowed us to increase our standard of living.

That’s part of the story. But it can’t be the whole thing.

Why not, you ask?

Because very few people actually own the capital.

When capital ownership is so heavily concentrated, any increases in productivity due to capital-intensive production can simply be captured by the rich people who own the capital. Competition was supposed to fix this, compelling them to raise wages to match productivity, but we often haven’t actually had competitive markets; we’ve had oligopolies that consolidate market power in a handful of corporations. We had Standard Oil before, and we have Microsoft now. (Did you know that Microsoft not only owns more than half the consumer operating system industry, but after acquiring Activision Blizzard, is now the largest video game company in the world?) In the presence of an oligopoly, the owners of the capital will reap the gains from capital-intensive productivity.

But standards of living did rise. So what happened?

The answer is that production didn’t just become capital-intensive. It became human-capital-intensive.

More and more jobs required skills that an average person didn’t have. This created incentives for expanding public education, making workers not just more productive, but also more aware of how things work and in a stronger bargaining position.

Today, it’s very clear that the jobs which are most human-capital-intensive—like doctors, lawyers, researchers, and software developers—are the ones with the highest pay and the greatest social esteem. (I’m still not 100% sure why stock traders are so well-paid; it really isn’t that hard to be a stock trader. I could write you an algorithm in 50 lines of Python that would beat the average trader (mostly by buying ETFs). But they pretend to be human-capital-intensive by hiring Harvard grads, and they certainly pay as if they are.)

The most capital-intensive industries—like factory work—are reasonably well-paid, but not that well-paid, and actually seem to be rapidly disappearing as the capital simply replaces the workers. Factory worker productivity is now staggeringly high thanks to all this automation, but the workers themselves have gained only a small fraction of this increase in higher wages; by far the bigger effect has been increased profits for the capital owners and reduced employment in manufacturing.

And of course the real money is all in capital ownership. Elon Musk doesn’t have $400 billion because he’s a great engineer who works very hard. He has $400 billion because he owns a corporation that is extremely highly valued (indeed, clearly overvalued) in the stock market. Maybe being a great engineer or working very hard helped him get there, but it was neither necessary nor sufficient (and I’m sure that his dad’s emerald mine also helped).

Indeed, this is why I’m so worried about artificial intelligence.

Most forms of automation replace labor, in the conventional labor-intensive sense: Because you have factory robots, you need fewer factory workers; because you have mountaintop removal, you need fewer coal miners. It takes fewer people to do the same amount of work. But you still need people to plan and direct the process, and in fact those people need to be skilled experts in order to be effective—so there’s a complementarity between automation and human capital.

But AI doesn’t work like that. AI substitutes for human capital. It doesn’t just replace labor; it replaces expertise.

So far, AI is currently too unreliable to replace any but entry-level workers in human-capital-intensive industries (though there is some evidence it’s already doing that). But it will most likely get more reliable over time, if not via the current LLM paradigm, than through the next one that comes after. At some point, AI will come to replace experienced software developers, and then veteran doctors—and I don’t think we’ll be ready.

The long-term pattern here seems to be transitioning away from human-capital-intensive production to purely capital-intensive production. And if we don’t change the fact that capital ownership is heavily concentrated and so many of our markets are oligopolies—which we absolutely do not seem poised to do anything about; Democrats do next to nothing and Republicans actively and purposefully make it worse—then this transition will be a recipe for even more staggering inequality than before, where the rich will get even more spectacularly mind-bogglingly rich while the rest of us stagnate or even see our real standard of living fall.

The tech bros promise us that AI will bring about a utopian future, but that would only work if capital ownership were equally shared. If they continue to own all the AIs, they may get a utopia—but we sure won’t.

We can’t all be Taylor Swift. (And if AI music catches on, she may not be able to much longer either.)

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.

Passion projects and burnout

PNRJ cognitive science, personal , , , , , , , ,

Sep 14 JDN 2460933

I have seen a shockingly precipitous decline in my depression and anxiety scores over the last couple of weeks, from average Burns Scores of about 15/29 to about 7/20. This represents a decline from “mild depression” and “moderate anxiety” to “normal but unhappy” and “mild anxiety”; but under the circumstances (Trump is still President, I’m still unemployed), I think it may literally mean a complete loss of pathological symptoms.

I’m not on any new medications. I did recently change therapists, but I don’t think this one is substantially better than the last one. My life situation hasn’t changed. The political situation in the United States is if anything getting worse. So what happened?

I found a passion project.

A month and a half ago, I started XBOX Game Camp, and was assigned to a team of game developers to make a game over the next three months (so we’re about halfway there now). I was anxious at first, because I have limited experience in video game development (a few game jams, some Twine games, and playing around with RenPy and Unity) and absolutely no formal training in it; but once we got organized, I found myself Lead Producer on the project and also the second-best programmer. I also got through a major learning curve barrier in Unreal Engine, which is what the team decided to use.

But that wasn’t my real passion project; instead, it enabled me to create one. With that boost in confidence and also increased comfortability with Unreal, I soon realized that, with the help of some free or cheap 3D assets from Fab and Sketchfab, I now had the tools I needed to make my own 3D video game all by myself—something that I would never have thought possible.

And having this chance to create more or less whatever I want (constrained by availability of assets and my own programming skills—but both of which are far less constraining than I had previously believed) has had an extremely powerful effect on my mood. I not only feel less depression and anxiety, I also feel more excitement, more jeu de vivre. I finally feel like I’m recovering from the years of burnout I got from academia.

That got me wondering: How unusual is this?

The empirical literature on burnout doesn’t generally talk about this; it’s mostly about conventional psychiatric interventions like medication and cognitive behavioral therapy. There are also some studies on mindfulness.

But there are more than a few sources of anecdotal reports and expert advice suggesting that passion projects can make a big difference. A lot of what burnout seems to be is disillusionment from your work, loss of passion for it. Finding other work that you can be passionate about can go a long way at fixing that problem.

Of course, like anything else, I’m sure this is no miracle cure. (Indeed, I’m feeling much worse today in particular, but I think that’s because I went through a grueling six-hour dental surgery yesterday—awake the whole time—and now I’m in pain and it was hard to sleep.) But it has made a big difference for me the last few weeks, so if you are going through anything similar, it might be worth a try to find a passion project of your own.