James Priestley discovered Oxygen around the same time as the revolutionary war. Prior to that the prevailing belief was that something called phlogiston was responsible for combustion.
When I remembered that moments ago, I realized something that says volumes about the state of the world today, and that is that the knowledge of why wood burns is only 250 years old. That actually terrifies me. As a civilization we are in way over our head.
As a kid, I had a pocket radio that boasted ā3 Transistorsā on its plastic case.
Today, my pocket phone has a billion times that many.
Mary Shelley wrote of a Modern Prometheus. Letās hope our story turns out better.
It is wild in so many ways. Thereās been other conversations on here about āthe dangers of aiā of course, and one of the things that Iām certain weāre dealing with is that the entirety of humanity is an AGI and we are the cores it is running on. Culture is itās internal communications and they are actually meaningless to us. Weāre just carriers.
What happened was that about 50 years ago communications between cores skyrocketed in numbers of connections and transmission speed. Suddenly 8 billion people were connected in a network for the first time. That MetaOrganism is thrashing around now trying to learn what is going on, and we are the sensors and the legs and all the rest. We take the damage, we get replaced, culture is absorbed by the replacements automatically and they sync up and go. Itās taken a couple hundred thousand years for it to reach this stage.
Organisms seek equilibrium, and this will settle back down, but in the meantime itās going to be rough. We are trapped in an AGI that is basically a toddler right now. A classic trope in the simulation genre is The Thirteenth Floor where someone in a simulation creates a simulation. Itās possible that the MetaOrganism is trying to save itself and it needs to know how we work to understand the basic building blocks it is made from and make corrections. Thatās what weāre doing in neuroscience and psychology. The current attempts to respond to the call for help have made it worse, and because weāre autonomous, self-replicating and organic itās going to be messy.
We can only know our own minds, and thatās why people project their intentions onto others. That means The Singularity is a metaphor, because analogy and metaphor are ways brains associate information. It is a metaphor for the AGI we are the cores of. If we stay with that, it fits the behavior of civilization right now. The MetaOrganism is self-improving to the point it can control itself. It makes sense that after The Singularity things would have be a peaceful utopia because the MetaOrganism will die if it isnāt. Social aggression is sand in the crankcase of technology. Authoritarianism creates unstable equilibrium and canāt survive, it can only keep resetting and rebooting. Nothing we are doing now will work, or we wouldnāt be having this conversation. The structure of a stable, sustainable high technology civilization isnāt something humanity has put much time into, so we have no clue what that will be like. Weāre still applying the agricultural ideas of farmers in the Fertile Crescent 12,000 years ago to everything. They would love the manosphere, itās like their dream world.
I try to think about that when Iām communicating with others and when something attracts my attention in the world. Of the possible messages I could be sending, based on the ones Iām receiving, what can I say, and where can I put my time and energy that moves things in a direction that will help save the MetaOrganism I rely on for my survival and the survival of my descendants.
This project is extremely important for the future of humanity in ways we canāt know, even if we can pick up hints in the constant messaging of culture. By 2040 after whatever happens between now and then, the world will either be stablized or on the way down fast. My concern has been the window because we knew with absolute certainty in the 70s that we would be right here, right now, and then the 80s came and all the numbers got fudged and the tiny bit of progress vanished, and here we are almost there. Itās been a nightmare graduating high school right into the 80s and the beginning of the takeover of the country. They play the long game. But 250 years from āwhy shit burnsā to this? Thatās phenomenal. I think the Big Mess might beat the clock.
Build Monty, save the world. 