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Well, is it?

In his book The Mansions of Philosophy, historian Will Durant has a chapter titled “Is Socialism Dead?” He wrote the book in 1929 but I think we could still seriously ask the question in 2024.

And for that matter, Durant had another chapter titled “The Breakdown of Marriage.” How long has it been reportedly breaking down?

But it was another chapter in his book, one titled “Is Progress a Delusion?,” that I thought most odd. 1929 was well into the 70 years of fast technological and social change (1870 to 1940) noted by Robert Gordon in The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Gordon claims that those 70 years of fast change might never be seen again in the history of the world.

So the question of whether progress was a delusion struck me as odd. Let’s  look at some of the Durant’s supporting examples:

Durant notes that the ancient Greeks thought of history as a “vicious circle” that repeated again and again. There was no mention of progress in the works of Xenophon, Plato, or Aristotle.

Related, ancient Greek historian Polybius pushed a theory called anacyclosis, with six repeating stages of history, a concept explored by others as well. Polybius’ stages were monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy (mob-rule).

Support for this theory came from the historical evidence that the ancient Greeks had, looking around at their 1500 city states. Notably, the six stages come in pairs that proceeded through a good-bad sequence (for example monarchy as the good form and tyranny as the bad form). Those city state examples tended to proceed in the order listed and not the reverse. Thus, the cycle.

Another ancient Greek belief from Aristotle was that all arts and sciences have been invented and lost an infinite number of times. A belief like that leads one to believe in rediscovery and perfection rather than in creation. There is a finite set of arts and sciences to draw from. Study the past for clues of what to do, build, or create. People alive today are only reconfiguring from among a fixed set of options.

Others (too many to name) even looked to the past as a golden age and despaired of living in the current era. Durant notes that even the more recent Rousseau “preferred American savages, whom he had not seen, to the cruel Parisians who had rasped his nerves; he thought thinking a form of degeneracy, and preached a Golden Age of the past that echoed the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man.” We still find the same attitudes today, but  less often.

Also odd, though given context by the belief in an inevitable cycle, is the fact that we do not know of ancient civilizations with historians other than the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese. Why were there no known ancient Indian, Mayan, Egyptian, Persian, or Incan historians? Is it a matter of lost works (the ancient Egyptian partial-historian Manetho as an example)?

Whatever the reason, at some point the mindset shifted. The cyclical nature of history or the belief in constancy gave way to a belief in progress. As Western Europe became wealthier, Durant wrote that it “displaced the hope of heaven with the lure of progress” in the Middle Ages.

More recent comments on progress (OK, these are still centuries old) seem like they could be from today. French philosopher Pierre de la Ramee (writing about the years 1450 – 1550): “In one century we have seen a greater progress in men and worlds of learning than our ancestors had seen in the whole course of the previous fourteen centuries.” And of course Durant in 1929 himself wrote “This has an ironically contemporary sound.” It seems contemporary even today, a century later.

It was one of Durant’s small examples that most struck me. During the worst parts of the French Revolution, Condorcet, an aristocrat, was wanted and hiding from the mob because while a revolutionary, he had voted against the execution of King Louis XVI. In hiding, Condorcet somehow took the opportunity to write a book titled Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind. 

As Durant commented:  “To read his book is to realize to what a bitterly disillusioned and skeptical generation we belong. Here was a man who had lost apparently everything, who had sacrificed privilege, position and wealth for the Revolution, who was now hunted to death by empowered barbarians, and who had to bear the culminating bitterness of seeing the Revolution, hope of the world, issue in chaos and terror; and yet his book represents the very zenith of man’s hopefulness for man.”

Condorcet kept his belief in the bright future of humanity, even as he was pursued by thugs of the French Revolution. Durant writes: “What generous optimism! What courageous idealism, and what passion for humanity! Shall we scorn more the naive enthusiasm, Condorcet, or the intellectual cowardice of our time, which, having realized so many of his dreams, no longer dares to entertain the rest?”

One of the simpler, more insightful quotes comes from Sir Arthur Balfour, who in 1890 wrote that (quote from Durant): “human behavior and social organization are founded not on thought, which progresses, but on feeling and instinct, which hardly change from thousand years to thousand years; this, he believed, was the secret of our failure to transmute our growing knowledge into greater happiness or more lasting peace.”

And again, the comments from 1929 could be contemporary.

Relating to industrial progress and the experience of WWI, Durant writes: “It was the passing of art and the coming of war that shook the faith in our century in progress. The spread of industry and the decay of aristocracy cooperated in the deterioration of artistic form….[W]hen the machine, compelled to seek vast markets for its good, adjusted its products to the needs and tastes of vast majorities, design and beauty gave place to standardization, quantity, and vulgarity. Architecture halted its splendid development before the compulsion to build for a decade and not for centuries…”

For Durant, writing this essay, it was WWI that made people realize how fragile their current situation was. “War had decreased in frequency, and had increased in extent.” (Frequency vs intensity is a theme on this blog.) But, to me there is hope — though Durant doesn’t say it outright. “Hope faded away… a wave of apathy and cynicism engulfed all but the least or the most experienced souls.”

But What Is Progress?

You can get through Durant’s chapter unsure of what progress actually is. He does note that progress carries a question about what to do rather than simply being about doing things more effectively. In a world where technology and process make it easier to do more, faster, we pay too much attention to what benefits from those two qualities.

That earlier noted belief in past golden ages gave way to the belief in a future that was better than the past. To that and the belief that progress was the march toward that better future.

15 years before Durant wrote that chapter we have a different example from Woodrow Wilson. From The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People:

“Progress! Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one? No word comes more often or more naturally to the lips of modern man, as if the thing it stands for were almost synonymous with life itself, and yet men through many thousand years never talked or thought of progress. They thought in the other direction. Their stories of heroisms and glory were tales of the past. The ancestor wore the heavier armor and carried the larger spear. “There were giants in those days.” Now all that has altered. We think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress, development—those are modern words. The modern idea is to leave the past and press onward to something new.”

Durant finally does give a definition of progress, but I think it’s lacking. He writes: “Let us provisionally define progress as increasing control of the environment by life; and let us mean by environment all the circumstances that condition the coordination and realization of that desire. Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will.”

Durant notes stages that humans went through in climbing from “the savage to the scientist.”

• Speech: The ability to communicate using words.
• Fire: And its role unlocking access to different climates around the world, tool-making, cooking food, mastering the night.
• Conquests of the animals: “That struggle between strength of body and power of mind… when at last it was won, the fruit of man’s triumph… was transmitted across a thousand generations…”
• Agriculture: Civilization called for permanent habitats.
• Social organization: The formal and informal expectations of what is right.
• Morality: With the amount of violence, poor treatment or others, and character all contributing.
• Tools: “that have enslaved and are liberating man.”
• Science: And the scientists who “will die before the trees they plant will bear fruit…”
• Education: As a way to “become” human.
• Writing and print: To transmit knowledge across. time.

Missing from the list are what I take as the more recent additions to thoughts on progress.

• Coordination. How does a more interconnected world respond to humanity’s grand challenges?
• Thought. Will humans continue to monopolize thinking? Can machines think? Then again, can other animals?
• The belief in progress itself. Breaking the belief in past golden ages and cyclicity was necessary for a culture of progress to emerge.

That expectation of progress, like an expectation in Moore’s Law, requires continued investment. On the part of Moore’s Law it is the thousands of individuals and entities collaborating and competing their way to new advances in materials science, imaging, fab construction, and business models.

That expectation of progress requires investment in product innovation,  observation of new opportunities to pursue, and yes, process innovation. Also, an enduring optimism to keep the belief going another generation.

Consider

In Fontenelle’s book Dialogues of the Dead, Socrates speaks to Montaigne in the afterworld. Montaigne tells him that the world has degenerated. Socrates replies: “In our days, we esteemed our ancestors more than they deserved; and now our posterity esteem us more than we deserve. There is really no difference between our ancestors, ourselves, and our posterity.”

The example above seems to have reversed recently. It has become common to judge people of the past according to the beliefs and morals of today. In other words, Your Great-Grandchildren Are Outraged.

Six month ago I wrote a post called Ghost Shirts, Guilds, and Generative AI, which started with the infamous “Pause Giant AI Experiments” letter. In my post I looked at how groups historically tried to block or reverse change that the general public experienced as inevitable. But there are always options. I wrote about options for the situations where you don’t want that inevitable change:

“You could fight it indirectly and delay how fast the change happens. In that case, you will quietly subvert the system.

“You could fight it directly, even though you will probably lose. In that case, you are fighting for honor.

“Or, through a combination of luck and foresight you could build a system that shields you from the inevitable change taking over your corner or the world. In that case, you need to build and defend a boundary.”

Authors of the letter requested a pause of at least six-months in training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. It’s now six months after their letter, so I thought it was time for another look at the topic.

Melos

One of the many things the world is dealing with now is the inevitability of AI having a big impact on the way we live. We could compare that inevitability to a historical conflict between two groups: one weak and one strong. But a commonality of weaker groups in history is their isolation — their physical inability or cultural unwillingness to learn from, adapt to, or combine with other groups. What can we learn from this?

We’re not used to thinking about such situations when it comes to ourselves in the present. We more often encounter something historical like the Melos Dialogue from the Spartan War.

Melos was neutral in the Spartan War, but was the only significant island in the Aegean Sea that Athens didn’t control. Athens’ negotiators eventually arrived to demand Melos take sides and pay tribute. What’s interesting about the dialogue and the reason we still study it today is that Melos’ negotiators — the weaker side — declined. They chose honor, which came with the risk of annihilation.

Athens then set a siege. Melos eventually surrendered, the Athenians executed the island’s adult men, and enslaved everyone else. To the Athenians, it was just common sense. From the dialogue:

Athenians: “For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretenses… and in return we hope that you… will aim at what is feasible… since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Who Are the Strong? Who Are the Weak?

Dealing with AI, some propose bans or regulatory exclusions in certain arenas. Such actions come from the currently strong (notably including those in the entertainment industry as well as government). But strength can be a local measure. How do these decisions impact what will come later?

As a way to learn, I chose from the long list of isolated peoples encountering an entering force.

Here’s a short list of some of past encounters between isolated groups and entering groups. In these examples, the contacted isolated groups were all based on islands.

• Han Chinese – indigenous Taiwanese. Hundreds of years ago, Chinese migrations and expansions took them to Taiwan, resulting in cultural exchanges, conflicts, and the assimilation of some indigenous groups. The later 1949 Nationalist retreat to Taiwan from mainland China led to a white terror, the 2-28 massacre, and the still common control of many government and media positions.
• Maori – Moriori. The Moriori arrived on the Chatham Islands around the year 1400 and lived in isolation for 400 years. In 1835, two Maori groups from New Zealand invaded the Chatham Islands. While the Moriori met them peacefully, the Maori killed and enslaved the Moriori.
• Spanish – Canary Islands. In the early 1400s the Spanish enslaved the island’s Guanche people before intermarrying with them, forming the modern Canarian culture.
• French – New Caledonia. Both British and French explorers visited New Caledonia in the late 1700s, but France didn’t take possession of the islands until 1853, when it established a penal colony. France then restructured existing tribal leadership and imposed forced labor and curfews. The French suppressed multiple uprisings and deported or killed the rebels.
• Dutch – Banda Island. In 1621, Dutch colonists conquered and nearly wiped out the local Bandanese people in order to gain a monopoly on nutmeg and mace.

Distinct from above, the following groups are not physically isolated on islands, but still remained separate from their surroundings. The examples below are of peoples who chose to invest in preserving their way of life (defending a boundary), even as they were surrounded by larger groups or social change.

The following mostly use the boundary defense tactic, whether intentionally through religion and culture or through careful consideration of change.

• Amish in the US and elsewhere. The Amish will adopt certain new technologies, but carefully and after considering whether it is good for the group. Amish communities have bought cheap farmland and established new colonies to support their growing population. Population: 360K.
• Coptic Christians in Egypt. This group preserved their language, religious practices, and traditions while living within a predominantly Muslim society. Population: 5 – 20M.
• Zoroastrians (Parsis) in India. This group is descended from Persians who migrated to India centuries ago. They maintained their Zoroastrian faith, rituals, and traditions. Population: 6K.
• Tribes in the Amazon rainforest, including the Yanomami, Kayapo, and Ashaninka. These groups maintained their languages and independence (though at the whim of loggers, miners, and the Brazilian government). Population: in the thousands
• Saami people of Kola Peninsula in Russia. This group maintained their language, reindeer herding practices, and culture while living within larger Russian communities. Population: 50 – 100K.

As subversion and honor examples, in Ghost Shirts, Guilds, and Generative AI I mentioned examples of dancing and flagellant “epidemics” in Europe and the US. These epidemics served a human need, even if they had minimal results. The other example of the iron guild resisting the steel industry was a more modern social example of people trying to preserve a way of life to which they had grown accustomed.

These were actions of the weak trying to subvert or fight the strong, rather than defend a boundary. And those examples failed.

Back to Melos. As a very partial recovery after mass execution and enslavement, Athens’ loss in the Spartan War led to Spartan military leader Lysander returning the island of Melos to the previous inhabitants that could be identified.

Executive Order on AI

On October 30, 2023 the Biden administration issued an “Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.”

It attempts at “seizing the promise and managing the risks” of AI. At least as stated it seems like a mix of defending a border, subverting to delay change, and fighting to stop change. A few of the sections and my interpretation of their purpose:

• Subvert / Delay. “Develop standards, tools, and tests to help ensure that AI systems are safe, secure, and trustworthy.” I really wonder how we could accomplish this or whether the statement even makes sense.
• Fight. “Protect against the risks of using AI to engineer dangerous biological materials…” Another way to look at this would be to intentionally use AI for those purposes but with the aim of then guarding against such materials.
• Fight. “Protect Americans from AI-enabled fraud and deception…” Ironically, this was the topic of my first on unintended consequences, which focused on voice AI.
• Subvert / Delay. “Evaluate how agencies collect and use commercially available information—including information they procure from data brokers…” Interesting to include this and I’m happy to see any oversight of the the data broker industry. I earlier wrote about the “Techno Richelieu Effect,” where AI identification of behavior produces statistical guilt. And since so much data is tracked, everyone has that guilt.
• Defend a Border. “Ensure fairness throughout the criminal justice system by developing best practices on the use of AI in sentencing, parole and probation, pretrial release and detention, risk assessments, surveillance, crime forecasting and predictive policing, and forensic analysis.” The inclusion of predictive policing was the one that stood out for me. How will crime prevention change because of AI? But my read on recent problems using AI for suspect identification is that they can fail more because of human laziness than anything else. In the famous Robert Julian-Borchak Williams case from 2020, AI analysis of video of a crime identified the wrong person, but he was actually arrested because of a poorly run police process rather than bad facial recognition tech.
• Subvert / Delay. “Develop principles and best practices to mitigate the harms and maximize the benefits of AI for workers by addressing job displacement” is a point on slowness, almost like an Amish approach. Or would this simply stifle an industry?
• Defend a Border. “Use existing authorities to expand the ability of highly skilled immigrants and nonimmigrants with expertise in critical areas to study, stay, and work in the United States…” and “Accelerate the rapid hiring of AI professionals as part of a government-wide AI talent surge”

Depending on how you see yourself and how comfortable you are with AI-related change, you might choose or push for different choices. To me, this is a strong encountering weak situation. The world won’t go back to the way things were pre-AI but we can try to maneuver through the change.

Consider

• I previously wrote about historical choices to isolate the body and isolate the mind. The people making those choices looked at the outside world as something to temporarily leave, for reasons of pandemics or social decline.
• The AI debate deals with issues that permanent change, of no going back. There may be, like the Melos example, situations where the strong give the weak back some of what they lost or intentionally want to preserve “historical colonies,” whether out of cultural interest or embarrassment.

Are some things inevitable?

And if something is inevitable, what do you do if you don’t like it?

You could fight it indirectly and delay how fast the change happens. In that case, you will quietly subvert the system.

You could fight it directly, even though you will probably lose. In that case, you are fighting for honor.

Or, through a combination of luck and foresight you could build a system that shields you from the inevitable change taking over your corner or the world. In that case, you need to build and defend a boundary.

The Letter

The “Pause Giant AI Experiments” letter came as a shock to me. Not that someone wrote it, but that they wrote it yesterday.

Noteworthy signatories of that letter include Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and a number of business leaders and academics. The list also included Andrew Yang, whose 2020 presidential campaign platform included AI-fomented Universal Basic Income.

But I disagree with the pause argument because the bubble of history seems already to have popped.

This has happened before. It was scary back then, too.

The most recent bubble of history (that is, a time of relative slow change) has been described in books like The Rise and Fall of American Growth. The authors point to the years 1870 to 1940 as a period of great inventions that fueled the modern era and the growth-based world we benefit from today. The time since 1940 has been a time of comparably less change than experienced before.

In the 1870 to 1940 period we saw the invention or popularization of transportation in railways, steamships, cars, and airplanes. We saw communications tech such as the telegraph, recorded voice, the telephone, the fax machine, radio, movies, and television. And we also saw the development of implements of war such as tanks, long-range bombs, and poison gas. Some good and some bad. Along with those changes came social changes as well, again, some arguably good and some arguably bad.

By comparison, the period after 1940 has been relatively slow. That is, until just recently you heard people who studied the issue claim that we don’t have enough growth, which seems strange. We are distant enough from that previous growth era that today we actually have a small radical degrowth movement. And then we even have (had) some wondering if that 1870 to 1940 era was a one-off improvement in the history of the world, unlikely to be seen again.

There is no consensus on this topic, though the issue of slowness is surprising to many people. “How could the world be changing too slowly? For decades everything seems to have been changing too fast!”

But whether the years since 1940 were changing too slow or too fast, another time of change is now upon us. And when there is change it wells up deep emotions. I like the “pre-nostalgia” framing another blogger coined. I can only look to history for clues to what earlier people did in related situations.

Ghost Shirts

In the 1870s Native American tribes were being pushed further onto other lands and their societies were falling apart. In a time like that, spiritual leaders emerged. One such leader was Wodziwob, who came up with a solution.

The various tribes were to perform a “ghost dance,” which Wodziwob described as the way to push away the white settlers and return the land to the previous, better era.

You can watch a video (from 1894!) of this dance.

The dances happened away from the settlers, but when they fought, some warriors wore ghost shirts, which were supposed to be impervious to bullets. They were beautiful, as you can see, but bullets went straight through them.

The book that sums up this era for me is The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, by James Mooney.

The ghost dancers are an example of a group unable to deal with, unable to counter, and unable to accept enormous change, and then taking a religious approach. What is coming is so strong, so different, so inevitable, that the reaction is faith-based. A dance and a protective shirt.

For the 1870 ghost dance, Wodziwob spoke about the dead coming back to life and of eternal life for all Native Americans. His dance spread from Nevada, to California, and Oregon. It didn’t work.

The later 1890 ghost dance was revealed by the spiritual leader Wovoka, who happened to be the son of one of Woziwob’s disciples. His dance also spread, from Nevada, to California, Oklahoma, Texas, and Canada. And there was something common about this shared human experience.

The ghost dance movement ended inevitably with the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota.

As I read the history of this time of dance and expectations, I heard echoes of the “natural order of things” approach to technological change — that we judge technologies as right or wrong depending on our age at encountering them. But the ghost dance itself was supposed to do something a bit different. It was to bring about Wovoka’s vision of a return to the past — a time when things were better.

As was said, years after the ghost dances:

“Eighty years ago our people danced the Ghost Dance, singing and dancing until they dropped from exhaustion, swooning, fainting, seeing visions. They danced in this way to bring back their dead, to bring back the buffalo. A prophet had told them that through the power of the Ghost Dance the earth would roll up like a carpet, with all the white man’s works — the fences and the mining towns with their whorehouses, the factories and the farms with their stinking, unnatural animals, the railroads and the telegraph poles, the whole works. And underneath this rolled-up white man’s world we would find again the flowering prairies, un-spoiled, with its herds of buffalo and antelope, its clouds of birds, belonging to everyone, enjoyed by all.

“I guess it was not time then for this to happen, but it is coming back. I feel it warming my bones. Not the old Ghost Dance, not the rolling-up — but a new-old spirit, not only among Indians but among whites and blacks, too, especially among young people.”

— from Lame Deer, Seeker Of Visions, p 124

Ghost-Dance Religion author Mooney also notes other dancing and flagellant “epidemics” which emerged in Europe and the United States, including:

• The dancing epidemic of Saint John, which broke out in Germany, the Netherlands, and France in the 1300s and 1400s.
• The Flagellant movement, which erupted in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Denmark, and England in the 1200s and 1300s.
• The Quakers, who early in their history, were known for violently shaking.
• The “Jumpers,” a group that started in 1740 in Wales, whose actions Mooney noted as most similar to the ghost dancers. They would repeatedly sing songs while jumping for hours.
• The Shakers. You get the idea from the name.
• And even the Methodists.

There is something internally human about this approach to change.

Guilds

I was curious about other situations when the world moved too fast and changed too much. What other tactics did people take? Affected groups try to sway the course of history in a few ways. But as Victor Hugo wrote: “One can resist the invasion of armies; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”

The invasion of ideas happened to the late 1800s iron industry with the new Bessemer steel production process. As industrialist Abram Hewitt noted:

“I look upon the invention of Mr. Bessemer as almost the greatest invention of the ages. I do not mean measured by its chemical or mechanical attributes. I mean by virtue of its great results upon the structure of society and government. It is the enemy of privilege. It is the great destroyed of monopoly. It will be the great equalizer of wealth. … Those who have studied its effects on transportation, the cheapening of food, the lowering of rents, the obliteration of aristocratic privilege .. will readily comprehend what I mean by calling attention to this view of the subject.”

The Bessemer process dramatically improved the earlier focus on the production of iron and enabled steel products to be made faster and cheaper. The finished results were harder and more durable. What’s not to like?

It depends on who you asked.

In Men, Machines, and Modern Times, Elting E. Morison described the reaction of many in the Pennsylvania iron industry this way:

“By hard work and infinite pains, they had reached a position of eminence in an ageless guildlike craft and in the community. Now they were suddenly confronted not by a new way to make iron, but by a new way to make something that would replace iron. Would not this new thing destroy the competitive advantage, so hardly won, by forcing every man to start over again in the same degree of innocence and from the same level? Would it not, by replacement of an old reagent, iron, with the new element of steel, replace also the customs, habits, procedures, and hierarchical arrangement upon which the security of life in the iron trade depended? The [Bessemer] converter, in this context, looks less like a tool of commerce and more like some catapult leveled against a walled town.”

The Bessemer steel process was relatively new. And up until that time, industrialists considered American iron inferior to what was produced in Europe. In fact, in England, the lowest grade railway rails were casually called “American rails.” But when American producers eventually embraced the new Bessemer process, they surpassed the other rail producers from Europe.

Those iron guilds just slowed down an inevitable process. Once invented, higher quality and cheaper steel was going to happen, whether it was with the guilds or without them.

But then who adopted the new technology? Morison says they came from outside the iron guilds:

“These were the innovators, the men without heavy commitments to the system of attitudes and prejudice built up in the iron trade…. They could weigh the merits of Bessemer steel not by trying to decide what it would do to them in the iron trade but what problems it would solve for  them in their railroad interests.”

Generative AI

Guilds are sustainable when applied to products that don’t change much with technology. For example, food products where consistency and even the history and process itself is part of our enjoyment.

Ghost shirts work best when applied to cultural and religious aspects, which exist outside of objectivity and where faith is a requirement. For example, the beliefs related to individual and community purpose and meaning.

On the one side, we have fear and protective behavior that is guild-like. In that case we try to prevent the change from impacting us.

On the other side, we have a yearning for the past that is religious. In that case we reject the change.

But what about a pause?

A pause is neither of the above.

A pause admits that the change has come, but asks for a time out while everyone thinks a bit more and puts new precautions in place. On this blog, I’ve often asked not for a pause, but consideration of the precautions and trade-offs. For example, on this blog you’ve seen me argue against certain types of top-down change, including systemic risk from autonomous vehicles, universal basic income, species introductions, and more.

I’ve also argued that some awful changes, such as those in Xinjiang, with  overbearing surveillance, and even robot soldiers, seem like they are inevitable.

But what if inevitability is just acceptance? What if it’s a choice? In Narrative Capture, I wrote about the Myth of the Inevitable. “When people believe something is inevitable, they won’t bother to fight it.”

How should we look at generative AI? If indeed we are at a point of inevitability, as I believe we are, slowing down only affects those who agree to slow down. The worst actors in such a situation would simply use that slowdown to continue to make progress and eventually even potentially get ahead. I know the authors of the letter believe otherwise, but I would like to know how we could ensure the pause is respected everywhere. Or rather than a “pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” what about no pause in the training, but a pause in deploying new AI systems instead?

We don’t know what will happen as changes in workforce, education, lifestyle, and meaning work their way through humanity. With a pause, we might delay the imagined benefits that generative AI could bring. As with unexpected impacts during COVID we will see things that might look worse than they actually are and only be temporary until finding a new equilibrium. Or, if that historical bubble did really pop, new equilibria might be short-lived.

From the “pause” letter:

“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines  flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our  civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech  leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects. “

I have often thought that my choice of domain name where I write these posts sometimes leads me to think of the downside of systems change. It’s easy to say “stay optimistic,” I suppose. But why is it staying pessimistic any better?

I’m neutral or even against a pause for generative AI, for the reasons above.

History is coming back. The train is leaving the station and you’re already on it.

The spark for this post was an article published in The Century Magazine in 1892. In it the author explains to a foreign visitor the odd way that Americans keep the peace. I couldn’t improve upon the article’s title, “The Great American Safety Valve,” so I stole it for my title.

It’s a short, informal article from 130 years ago, but there’s a lot going on. In it the author explains to a bewildered foreign friend how the US balances a large population that has been taught that the class they were born into doesn’t prevent them from rising to the peak of power, with the obvious lack of political offices. In 1892 language, “it is the birthright of every American boy to have the chance to be president…”

It might seem odd to turn to an obscure article from over a century ago, but the topic relates to today. Here are some of the main points:

• Countries are different in the available opportunities and choose different tactics to keep their populations peaceful.
• The story you tell the child will eventually be expected by the adult.
• Do not dismiss the importance of expectations and opportunities to fulfil ambition when it comes to national morale.

Continue reading “The Great American Safety Valve”

Star Spangled Ice Cream (shuttered for over 10 years) started as a conservative option to liberal Ben & Jerry’s. I’m not sure why it shut down, but some of its flavors sound just bad (John Kerry Ketchup Dough) and used suspiciously similar puns to their main competition (Cherry Falwell vs Cherry Garcia).

Why there is a market for liberal, but not conservative, ice cream is the wrong question. Liberals and conservatives are mostly the same when it comes to food.

Just as there is liberal ice cream, there is conservative chicken. Chick-fil-A serves chicken sandwiches, but runs itself based on conservative Protestant values, including keeping locations closed on Sundays. Like Ben & Jerry’s, I doubt many people choose to eat or not eat Chick-fil-A because of the founder’s beliefs. Those beliefs are what they are and the products are what they are. There might be a liberal or conservative business model (sourcing, fair trade, pricing, staff treatment, etc) but the ingredients and flavors have to work.

That was the problem with Star Spangled Ice Cream. Its founding was ideology rather than flavor. In the end, ideology wasn’t enough. Continue reading “Meaning and Ice Cream”