Entertaining. C20th saw the rise of a holy trinity, the Economist, Technologist and the Marketeer. The economist provides the justification for a rent creation and extraction society "the management of scarce resources", the Technologist provides the tools to do it and the Marketeer devises the pyschological nudges that persuade all in society this move to create a rent extraction society for a few is in the interests of all. The Politician in awe of the Holy Trinity's accomplishments says "we must deal with the world as we find it not as we wish it to be". Stage is set complete for utter carnage.
What I hang my hat on is that this is mainly a western problem and that there are other parts of the world that seem to work OK, such as China. If they manage to avoid being destroyed by the arrogant and ignorant Americans, they will remain as both a good example of what can be done and as a repository of knowledge as to how it can be done.
Usually success depends on being prepared and organised. China is both of these things so it should be able to see off the western rabble, but it is not guaranteed.
They are at late 40s-early60s, have a lot to lose and even if they have experienced things working properly before, they might lack the courage or strength.
Indeed,, just as in the American civil rights and anti-Viet Nam war movements, it is those with nothing to lose who form the vanguard - the youth. But they are (or will be) real, and I think there are enough of them, and they are pissed off. See what happens,
During the Covid paranoia, the young ones were the first ones to embrace modernity and willfully show IDs to random civilians.
Hope I will be proven wrong.
I have studied elec engineering end 80s mid 90s.
In today’s politically correct corp world I must struggle with words to convey what were were taught back then that renders BS all main policies right now.
That was depressing. Dmitri Orlov was writing about this inevitability in the early 2000's. Carl Sagan was discussing this foreseeable problem in the 1980's. Both are looking like prophets right about now. I don't know how to fix this mess. The big question is does it get fixed via violent revolution or via peaceful politics by the masses?
Does someone come along, take control and divert disaster or does it all crash and the survivors rebuild something worth while from the ashes?
I think any reasonably intelligent person has seen the train wreck coming for at least the last 3 decades. Initially I was upset because I couldn't get anyone else to see what was coming, then I was depressed because nobody seemed able to think beyond next week, and finally I said, "to hell with it! I'll be dead by the time the sh*t hits the fan" and decided on living the best life I'm able to and not worrying about things I am unable to do anything about. (For me living the best life is taking care of my needs and not supporting the systems that are hastening our downfall any more than I'm forced to in order to survive).
I'm not so sure anymore. I'll probably get splattered along with everyone else.
Concerning AI, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The kind of money being invested and the data centers being built in places where we know before they are built that relatively soon (20-50 years) the water supply used to cool the centers is going to conflict with people's need of that water to survive. Knowing this, they're pressing ahead anyway.
I find it very hard to believe that this is simply about greed, profit, and eliminating jobs. For some of the "front men" involved, that is exactly what it is about. But for the very smart planners behind the scenes there has to be a different reason. Do they see the system is about to unravel and that AI is their ticket to surviving and remaining on top? This seems more likely to me than the first assumption.
I wish I knew. I wish I had some power to change things. I guess I'll keep on keeping on as best I can and hope things don't get too bad before I die.
'the water supply used to cool the centers is going to conflict with people's need of that water to survive. Knowing this, they're pressing ahead anyway.'
No worries. They're planning to put most of it in cold, cold orbital space 😐
Wow. Surprising again. Chapeau. I will have to chew on this essay for an entire week in order to understand its implications. A BMW uprising, of all things. If anything, the Gods must be entertained.
An excellent essay as always and coherent framing of a system unable to stave off its entropic destiny much longer. In the 73 years I have been alive the global population has gone from 2.6 billion to 8.2 billion, a 3X increase in a very short historical period. The amount of physical capital expenditure to sustain that growth over this short period has been massive. The amount and pace of technological innovation during this period has also been exponentially greater. It seems we have reached a scale and complexity tipping point, where the amount of physical and intellectual energy required to sustain societal equilibrium exceeds our grasp, and thermodynamics is the one law we can’t repeal.
Now we add to this unstable mix the AI revolution and we are told its outcome will either be infinite abundance and human flourishing, or Armageddon. One thing has become abundantly clear in the great game of power politics, your financial system can’t print atoms, and the ultimate realization of the AI wars is there is no coding without cooper. Now the great reshaping of the global system is the race to secure access to these minerals, and this becomes the potential tripwire for entropy at scale to become emergent.
Yes, very often I see my system iterate through several versions of what I've dictated, even one that's exactly right, and then when I stop the dictation, it presents me with gibberish. Developing a habit of proofreading is hard but necessary.
The Youtuber Academic Agent - Neema Parvini - has said several times that an organised minority will defeat a disorganised majority 10 times out of 10. It may be that in Britain the PMC will be this minority and be able to get the worst things at least partly fixed in a way that the working class and lower-middle class have not been able to do. A serious issue is: how do they identify and mobilise politicians who will be able to achieve anything like this? A recent poll suggested that there are now 6 parties excluding nationalists in Wales and Scotland - more or less three from the left and three on the right - each attracting between 10% and 25% of voters. Goodness knows what this means in a first-past-the-post system, especially as both the left and right groupings are at around 50%. A coalition on either side would probably be highly unstable and attract outrage from supporters of the other side that could easily edge towards mass disobedience if not outright violence. In any case, none of these parties at present appear to have the policies that are actually required.
My own take is that Britain and probably several other countries in Europe are heading into a decade or more of political turmoil that will make the decade up to now - with Boris, Brexit, the rise of Reform and Restore - seem like flat calm before a tumultuous storm. Economic crises and social chaos are probable accompaniments. This is more or less what our host has predicted of course and whether we will be somewhat better or much worse off when such a period ends, I wouldn't like to guess.
Here's a few random thoughts prompted by this week's essay...
It's often said that it is the disgruntled middle classes that start revolutions.
Over the last forty years mass communications have changed from few-to-many to many-to-many, leading to a lowering of the prestige of the erstwhile ruling classes, and the fracturing of social and political groupings.
'Artificial Intelligence' is not the same as 'Real Skills'.
There is evidence that China now controls many of the manufacturing supply chains.
If ~3% of the population is employed in agriculture, ~25% in manufacturing, and ~20% in 'distribution', then around half the population cannot be said to be productive, and many of these will be paying nett negative taxes.
Immigration from countries where societies are organised around kin-groups increases chances of corruption and is incompatible with open, high-trust Western Societies.
There was at least one person who predicted what would happen. The historian Christopher Dawson. He credited liberalism for having tamed the "markets" after it had contributed to the rise of untrammeled industry by its doctrine of nonintervention.
He was not a liberal himself but foresaw that with the decline of liberalism these checks would be abolished and we would have a new, but different version of what the 19th century had. If I remember rightly he called economic despotism.
"One is whether it’s actually sensible to abandon an established system which has a small but known proportion of errors in it, for an untried but cheaper system whose proportion of errors is not only unknown but actually unknowable. The other is whether it’s sensible to rely on a system, however cheap, that is trained on material including its own errors and those of other systems, and thus mathematically becomes less reliable over time. "
the problem is that, while there's no "I" in AI and, yes, it'll be a mess for society at large... it's military and surveillance applications are perfectly valid. And pretty darn important.
so we'll lower the standard of living(by a lot) in order to waste a ton of energy on basically mil tech.
"lower the standard of living (by a lot) in order to waste a ton of energy on basically mil tech."
---------
And we will certainly apply the new AI/data tech to controlling our OWN populations when they get restive over their declining standards of living... AI enabled "pre crime" algorithms for domestic counter insurgency, guaranteed to be just as accurate as Google Answers!
The 3rd Reich was pretty effective at suppressing dissent with their antideluvian IBM punch card based social controls, just THINK what can be done now?
more than anything else. Though, while it looks creepy, in the end all this is human controlled. Humans at the top are as corruptible as anyone else; heck, even more than the average actually ;)
'Had governments, for example, not given up telecommunications and broadcasting monopolies, had governments retained an in-house capability to assess the impact of technological developments on society, we would not have been in this mess now.'
I was feeling the warm glow of agreement and shared thinking until I got to this sentence. Are you really saying that governments relinquishing their telecommunications and broadcasting monopolies was a bad thing? Just curious about the thinking here.
It is a pretty clear historical reality that revolutions generally only succeed when some elements of the upper middle classes (however you define it) decides it should succeed, either by organising it, getting actively involved, or just withdrawing support from the elites. From my casual conversations with people at this level it is, as you suggest, the sudden horrified realisation that their children are going to have much worse lives than they had that could be the catalyst.
'The hope—if that’s the word—is that the system itself, impossibly complex, tightly coupled, intolerant of delay and difficulty—will start to come apart.'
Hope - for me - is the right word and more: I WANT to see the great unravelling and just hope it won't be TOO violent. It was clear to me 30 years ago what was coming and so I got out and now I sit and observe the train crash and envy China. It has the right approach - tight control at the top, long term planning, and a bottom-up democracy. Our 5 minutes Governments just produce chaos. I was 'trained' in planning and public health - but we have NEVER had any. Allegations of dictatorship and nanny stateism and greed put an end to that. As I get older I understand more than ever the French Revolution: the bloodletting went too far BUT the spectacle was necessary. Perhaps we need another such spectacle....
Entertaining. C20th saw the rise of a holy trinity, the Economist, Technologist and the Marketeer. The economist provides the justification for a rent creation and extraction society "the management of scarce resources", the Technologist provides the tools to do it and the Marketeer devises the pyschological nudges that persuade all in society this move to create a rent extraction society for a few is in the interests of all. The Politician in awe of the Holy Trinity's accomplishments says "we must deal with the world as we find it not as we wish it to be". Stage is set complete for utter carnage.
Thanks Aurelien. What a mess!
What I hang my hat on is that this is mainly a western problem and that there are other parts of the world that seem to work OK, such as China. If they manage to avoid being destroyed by the arrogant and ignorant Americans, they will remain as both a good example of what can be done and as a repository of knowledge as to how it can be done.
Usually success depends on being prepared and organised. China is both of these things so it should be able to see off the western rabble, but it is not guaranteed.
And what could the PMCs do?
They are at late 40s-early60s, have a lot to lose and even if they have experienced things working properly before, they might lack the courage or strength.
At work, no easy to speak up “openly”.
Indeed,, just as in the American civil rights and anti-Viet Nam war movements, it is those with nothing to lose who form the vanguard - the youth. But they are (or will be) real, and I think there are enough of them, and they are pissed off. See what happens,
"it is those with nothing to lose who form the vanguard - the youth"
Yeah, mostly entitled youth from the well-to-do families
Hmmm, not so sure.
During the Covid paranoia, the young ones were the first ones to embrace modernity and willfully show IDs to random civilians.
Hope I will be proven wrong.
I have studied elec engineering end 80s mid 90s.
In today’s politically correct corp world I must struggle with words to convey what were were taught back then that renders BS all main policies right now.
Pray tell, what did you learn in electrical engineering in the 1980s and 1990s which "renders BS all main policies right now?"
Effing brilliant. I clipped off at least 3 quotes to save for further use (with attribution of course)
But I would add that its not just the kids that won't find work. The PMC itself is threatened by The AI Creature.
"Learn to code" They clucked at the proles
Now code is threatening to throw them in the streets.
“Let them eat training.”
That was depressing. Dmitri Orlov was writing about this inevitability in the early 2000's. Carl Sagan was discussing this foreseeable problem in the 1980's. Both are looking like prophets right about now. I don't know how to fix this mess. The big question is does it get fixed via violent revolution or via peaceful politics by the masses?
Does someone come along, take control and divert disaster or does it all crash and the survivors rebuild something worth while from the ashes?
I think any reasonably intelligent person has seen the train wreck coming for at least the last 3 decades. Initially I was upset because I couldn't get anyone else to see what was coming, then I was depressed because nobody seemed able to think beyond next week, and finally I said, "to hell with it! I'll be dead by the time the sh*t hits the fan" and decided on living the best life I'm able to and not worrying about things I am unable to do anything about. (For me living the best life is taking care of my needs and not supporting the systems that are hastening our downfall any more than I'm forced to in order to survive).
I'm not so sure anymore. I'll probably get splattered along with everyone else.
Concerning AI, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The kind of money being invested and the data centers being built in places where we know before they are built that relatively soon (20-50 years) the water supply used to cool the centers is going to conflict with people's need of that water to survive. Knowing this, they're pressing ahead anyway.
I find it very hard to believe that this is simply about greed, profit, and eliminating jobs. For some of the "front men" involved, that is exactly what it is about. But for the very smart planners behind the scenes there has to be a different reason. Do they see the system is about to unravel and that AI is their ticket to surviving and remaining on top? This seems more likely to me than the first assumption.
I wish I knew. I wish I had some power to change things. I guess I'll keep on keeping on as best I can and hope things don't get too bad before I die.
'the water supply used to cool the centers is going to conflict with people's need of that water to survive. Knowing this, they're pressing ahead anyway.'
No worries. They're planning to put most of it in cold, cold orbital space 😐
My situation exactly.
Wow. Surprising again. Chapeau. I will have to chew on this essay for an entire week in order to understand its implications. A BMW uprising, of all things. If anything, the Gods must be entertained.
The PMC's BMW does not perform as well as a war vehicle as does the proletariat's Dodge Ram Truck.
An excellent essay as always and coherent framing of a system unable to stave off its entropic destiny much longer. In the 73 years I have been alive the global population has gone from 2.6 billion to 8.2 billion, a 3X increase in a very short historical period. The amount of physical capital expenditure to sustain that growth over this short period has been massive. The amount and pace of technological innovation during this period has also been exponentially greater. It seems we have reached a scale and complexity tipping point, where the amount of physical and intellectual energy required to sustain societal equilibrium exceeds our grasp, and thermodynamics is the one law we can’t repeal.
Now we add to this unstable mix the AI revolution and we are told its outcome will either be infinite abundance and human flourishing, or Armageddon. One thing has become abundantly clear in the great game of power politics, your financial system can’t print atoms, and the ultimate realization of the AI wars is there is no coding without cooper. Now the great reshaping of the global system is the race to secure access to these minerals, and this becomes the potential tripwire for entropy at scale to become emergent.
Ah. *Copper*.
Don’t you just hate it when it puts word substitutes in while you’re not looking.
Thanks, yes copper.
Yes, very often I see my system iterate through several versions of what I've dictated, even one that's exactly right, and then when I stop the dictation, it presents me with gibberish. Developing a habit of proofreading is hard but necessary.
The Youtuber Academic Agent - Neema Parvini - has said several times that an organised minority will defeat a disorganised majority 10 times out of 10. It may be that in Britain the PMC will be this minority and be able to get the worst things at least partly fixed in a way that the working class and lower-middle class have not been able to do. A serious issue is: how do they identify and mobilise politicians who will be able to achieve anything like this? A recent poll suggested that there are now 6 parties excluding nationalists in Wales and Scotland - more or less three from the left and three on the right - each attracting between 10% and 25% of voters. Goodness knows what this means in a first-past-the-post system, especially as both the left and right groupings are at around 50%. A coalition on either side would probably be highly unstable and attract outrage from supporters of the other side that could easily edge towards mass disobedience if not outright violence. In any case, none of these parties at present appear to have the policies that are actually required.
My own take is that Britain and probably several other countries in Europe are heading into a decade or more of political turmoil that will make the decade up to now - with Boris, Brexit, the rise of Reform and Restore - seem like flat calm before a tumultuous storm. Economic crises and social chaos are probable accompaniments. This is more or less what our host has predicted of course and whether we will be somewhat better or much worse off when such a period ends, I wouldn't like to guess.
Here's a few random thoughts prompted by this week's essay...
It's often said that it is the disgruntled middle classes that start revolutions.
Over the last forty years mass communications have changed from few-to-many to many-to-many, leading to a lowering of the prestige of the erstwhile ruling classes, and the fracturing of social and political groupings.
'Artificial Intelligence' is not the same as 'Real Skills'.
There is evidence that China now controls many of the manufacturing supply chains.
If ~3% of the population is employed in agriculture, ~25% in manufacturing, and ~20% in 'distribution', then around half the population cannot be said to be productive, and many of these will be paying nett negative taxes.
Immigration from countries where societies are organised around kin-groups increases chances of corruption and is incompatible with open, high-trust Western Societies.
well that was cheerful
There was at least one person who predicted what would happen. The historian Christopher Dawson. He credited liberalism for having tamed the "markets" after it had contributed to the rise of untrammeled industry by its doctrine of nonintervention.
He was not a liberal himself but foresaw that with the decline of liberalism these checks would be abolished and we would have a new, but different version of what the 19th century had. If I remember rightly he called economic despotism.
"One is whether it’s actually sensible to abandon an established system which has a small but known proportion of errors in it, for an untried but cheaper system whose proportion of errors is not only unknown but actually unknowable. The other is whether it’s sensible to rely on a system, however cheap, that is trained on material including its own errors and those of other systems, and thus mathematically becomes less reliable over time. "
the problem is that, while there's no "I" in AI and, yes, it'll be a mess for society at large... it's military and surveillance applications are perfectly valid. And pretty darn important.
so we'll lower the standard of living(by a lot) in order to waste a ton of energy on basically mil tech.
@Vlad
"lower the standard of living (by a lot) in order to waste a ton of energy on basically mil tech."
---------
And we will certainly apply the new AI/data tech to controlling our OWN populations when they get restive over their declining standards of living... AI enabled "pre crime" algorithms for domestic counter insurgency, guaranteed to be just as accurate as Google Answers!
The 3rd Reich was pretty effective at suppressing dissent with their antideluvian IBM punch card based social controls, just THINK what can be done now?
"controlling our OWN populations"
more than anything else. Though, while it looks creepy, in the end all this is human controlled. Humans at the top are as corruptible as anyone else; heck, even more than the average actually ;)
@Vlad
“Behind every great fortune is an equally great crime”?
'Had governments, for example, not given up telecommunications and broadcasting monopolies, had governments retained an in-house capability to assess the impact of technological developments on society, we would not have been in this mess now.'
I was feeling the warm glow of agreement and shared thinking until I got to this sentence. Are you really saying that governments relinquishing their telecommunications and broadcasting monopolies was a bad thing? Just curious about the thinking here.
Thanks - sums it up so well.
It is a pretty clear historical reality that revolutions generally only succeed when some elements of the upper middle classes (however you define it) decides it should succeed, either by organising it, getting actively involved, or just withdrawing support from the elites. From my casual conversations with people at this level it is, as you suggest, the sudden horrified realisation that their children are going to have much worse lives than they had that could be the catalyst.
Apparently, Aurelian has not had the pleasure of a “No Kings!” rally helpfully organized and financed by Son of Soros.
'The hope—if that’s the word—is that the system itself, impossibly complex, tightly coupled, intolerant of delay and difficulty—will start to come apart.'
Hope - for me - is the right word and more: I WANT to see the great unravelling and just hope it won't be TOO violent. It was clear to me 30 years ago what was coming and so I got out and now I sit and observe the train crash and envy China. It has the right approach - tight control at the top, long term planning, and a bottom-up democracy. Our 5 minutes Governments just produce chaos. I was 'trained' in planning and public health - but we have NEVER had any. Allegations of dictatorship and nanny stateism and greed put an end to that. As I get older I understand more than ever the French Revolution: the bloodletting went too far BUT the spectacle was necessary. Perhaps we need another such spectacle....