Daniel Schmachtenberger: …Moore’s law, right? It historically, kind of ate the world. And that was a progressive doubling of computing power every couple of years. And just the hardware on GPU-based AI will 10X in the next six months. You know? The power will 10X in six months, not 2X in two years, right? And then in six months, it will do it again in less time than that. And the software and the parameters and the data are also an exponential function.
Nate Hagens: 100X in less than a year? Probably. Something like that.
Schmachtenberger: And if you look at, I think it's a million X increase in the last 10 years.
Schmachtenberger and Hagens are about to reprise a number of the themes I explored in Retropopulationism and extend them. Any of my readers with 3 hours to spare, I’d urge you to spend that watching their full Great Simplification interview.
We have entered the Age of Limits and it is still a dark room for most. We are looking for the light switch and can’t seem to find one. At the turning point of an exponential doubling function it is like that. Dark and weightless. It’s the shallow curve at which the hockey stick transitions to or from its blade. The “singularity is near,” to borrow a title from Ray Kurzweil. It feels like being pulled into a Black Hole. Most are still fumbling for the light switch.
We designed the learning algorithm that's a bit like designing the principle of evolution but when this learning algorithm then interacts with data it produces complicated neural networks that are good at doing things but we don't really understand exactly how they do those things.
60 Minutes: What are the implications of these systems autonomously writing their own computer code and executing their own computer code?
Higgins: That’s a serious worry, right?
60 Minutes: What do you say to someone who might argue if the systems become malevolent, just turn them off?
Higgins: They will be able to manipulate people, right? And these will be very good at convincing people because they'll have learned from all the novels that were ever written, all the books by Machiavelli, all the political connivances. They'll know all that stuff. They'll know how to do it.
In the original Great Change post from which one of my chapters in Retropopulationism is drawn, I explored what life was like in an 18th century Iowa village before the wagon trains arrived. I read from the autobiography of Black Hawk (Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak), published in 1834.
Our village was situated on the north side of Rock River, at the foot of its rapids, and on the point of land between Rock River and the Mississippi. In its front, a prairie extended to the bank of the Mississippi; and in our rear, a continued bluff, gently ascending from the prairie. On the side of this bluff we had our corn fields, extending about two miles up, running parallel with the Mississippi; where we joined those of the Foxes, whose village was on the bank of the Mississippi, opposite the lower end of Rock Island, and three miles distant from ours. We had about eight hundred acres in cultivation, including what we had on the islands of Rock River. The land around our village, uncultivated, was covered with bluegrass, which made excellent pasture for our horses. Several fine springs broke out of the bluff nearby, from which we were supplied with good water. The rapids of Rock River furnished us with an abundance of excellent fish, and the land, being good, never failed to produce good crops of corn, beans, pumpkins, and squashes. We always had plenty — our children never cried with hunger, nor our people were ever in want. Here our village had stood for more than a hundred years, during all which time we were the undisputed possessors of the valley of the Mississippi, from the Ouisconsin to the Portage des Sioux, near the mouth of the Missouri, being about seven hundred miles in length.
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The point in revisiting Black Hawk’s world was not to say that life on the pre-colonized prairie was ideal, but rather that there is a great change coming, like it or not, and Black Hawk’s village might be one scenario to imagine. While his was not an easy life, it was, in his estimation, a good one. The Odums would have called it “a prosperous way down.” This was explored by Schmachtenberger and Hagens.
Schmachtenberger: An arms race is a multipolar trap where everybody's racing to make faster hypersonic weapons and multiple reentry vehicles and more effective autonomous weapons and whatever, because we have to do that. ‘Cause what if the other guy gets it? Even though we're making a world [where] our own risk of dying from all those things goes way up and is a comprehensively worse world.
Courtesy Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts
So the arms race is a multipolar trap. The market race. Even if what it's doing is driving massive externalities as a multipolar trap, the tragedy of the commons, we have to extract the resources, even if we destroy the ecology before the other guy, because if we don’t…. It doesn't protect the ecosystem.
The other guy is going to destroy them all first and use that increased resource as competitive advantage to beat us. So the multipolar trap is one of the reasons why we can't do anything about climate change very effectively right now is nobody wants to price carbon properly, at a country level, that has the rule of law, to be able to bind its own economy, because it would put them so radically behind everyone else who wasn't doing that economically. And that economics is converted to military power and technological innovation and everything else.
Obstetrician 1: Get the EEG, the BP monitor, and the AVV.
Obstetrician 2: And get the machine that goes "Ping!".
Obstetrician 1: And get the most expensive machine - in case the Administrator comes.
***
Hospital Administrator: Ah, I see you have the machine that goes 'ping!'. This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to - that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account. [the doctors and onlookers applaud] Thank you, thank you. We try to do our best. Well, do carry on.
—Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Part I: The Miracle of Birth
Schmachtenberger: No one wants to slow down their A. I. to try to do it safely, slow down their synthetic biology. So it's just kind of a full race dynamics. Now, we've talked about this before, but there's something even deeper that you just mentioned, which is the multipolar trap is usually initiated by…
Hagens: …a psychopath. And in our tribal past, sub-Dunbar numbers, there was strong social reciprocity that would inhibit the potential power of a psychopath.
Courtesy Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts
***
Schmachtenberger: And so, you know, and if you take something like AI, where we're developing it for increasing generality, it is basically a general purpose goal achieving tool. Do you want to beat people at chess? Do you want to beat them at Go? Do you want to beat them at Starcraft? Do you want to beat them at missile targeting?
Do you want to beat them at protein folding? Do you want to beat them at comprehensive war planning or high speed currency trading? Great. Let's increase the ability to do all those things. The technology will be developed for one purpose and we'll focus on the upside of that. But then the cost of the technology becomes cheap for that purpose. And then the affordance allows everybody to advance every kind of goal. That has to be really thought about as part of the externality set.
Hagens: … Isn't AI being trained with the old linear model in English and with all the perceptions of what we just discussed, of progress? And isn't it like an exponential layer of the same on top? Like you said, as humans, we have to change our perception of our relation to the whole. Isn't AI like being fed zillions of times more the perception of what we don't want?
Schmachtenberger: Yes, but worse than that, it does not, you know, it has the ability to already do goal achieving, obviously. It does not have the ability for empathy, which means that goal achieving without empathy is sociopathic….
The whole conversation around will AI develop sentience or not is another thing. More importantly is that AI doesn't operate by itself.
Courtesy Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts
It operates inside of companies and inside of militaries with the people that are there as part of a cybernetic system. So it already doesn't have to be completely general to be part of a cybernetic system that is general. Because what the AI does, what other types of AI is, so the whole cybernetic system as a hybrid of cognitive architectures, plus what it predisposes the people to do, you know, is actually the thing that's being selected for. So, as we're in a place where technological advancement is speeding up, it is being sold as the solution to all these problems. They're problems that our previous technological success has caused. The harms of these technologies are being downplayed. Everyone is racing as we're crossing planetary boundaries.
It would be better if more people understood what is wrong with the progress narrative and understood what authentic progress actually entails, and understood the caution and restraint that it requires; understood the emphasis on maintaining, understood that very often the best way to solve a problem is to remove its causes, which actually involves reversing some stuff rather than always creating new stuff.
“There is a 50-50 chance AI will get more intelligent than humans in the next 20 years. We’ve never had to deal with things more intelligent than us. And we should be very uncertain about what it will look like.” — Geoffrey Hinton
Of course, the simple solution is that plug in the wall, just behind the machine that goes Ping! Yank out the cord. Given the enormous power demands of AI, that will eventually have to happen anyway. But by then, what are we left with? Would even the prairie life in Black Hawk’s village still be possible?
There is a risk in idolizing a return to the rustic—societies made of family and clan, usually inhabiting tribal or band configurations with populations below Dunbar’s number—the pattern of regenerative, stable, “sustainable” culture that existed for ten or one hundred times the span of modern civilization. Idylls are hazardous. Recall that the Salem Witch Trials happened in New England towns no larger than Black Hawk’s village, or that the towns adjoining Dachau and Buchenwald could so compartmentalize their daily lives that they could ignore and externalize what was happening a mile down the road. Social hysteria is just as possible in family clans as in entire nations or groups of them.
To get out of this mess we may have to change the way we think about the problem. Hager and Schmachtenberger conclude that the flaw in our thinking began when we drifted out of the “we” narrative and into the “I” and, moreover, the new “we” had hard boundaries.
Schmachtenberger: It goes deeper, because the “we” never just meant our tribe. It also meant nature; the extension to all our relationships, and all our relations was all life, and life didn't just mean biological, which is why they were animistic. Those cultures were all animistic. The spirit of the sun, the spirit of the river, the spirit of everything, because it was a very clear understanding. What would I be without the tribe? I'd be dead. What would I be without the sun? I would have never existed. What would I be without the galactic center around which the sun orbits? I wouldn't exist. What would I be without the gravitational field? What would I be without the soil microbes? What would I be without plants? What would I be without all of that? I wouldn't be. So, “I,” that is not the emergent property of “We.” We isn't even a thing. It's not even thinking.
This was the subject of a June 18th panel discussion “Regenerative Masterclass” on climate, psychology and change with collective trauma healer and facilitator Thomas Hübl, warm data wizard and filmmaker Nora Bateson, visionary mystic Bayo Akomolafe and alchemical psychotherapist Francis Weller. Different pathways, but after addressing our collective trauma, what is needed is a reversion to reality.
Tomas Pueyo, What would you do if you only had 8 years left to live? Uncharted Territories, June 20, 2024
Schmachtenberger: So as long as humans believe that they are separate from everything else, as long as they perceive the world separately…. A tree is not a static noun. It's doing trillions of metabolic functions every second. It's interacting. biophysically, with the sun and the air, it's interacting biochemically, it's interacting biologically, doing gene transfer with the fungus on its roots and the soil microbes, like the tree is in a live process. It's a verb. It's lots of verbs. And the idea that it's a noun just makes us think very poorly, makes us very bad thinkers.
And the fact that we're thinking in nouns all the time and built into our language is making us bad thinkers at scale that we don't even realize because we don't know what it's like to have a language that doesn't see the world as a bunch of nouns that are all separate.
Which brings us back to the problem of the language learning A.I. models. Whose language are they learning?
Bates, A., Retropopulationism: Clawing back a stable planet from 8 billion and change (Summertown: Ecovillage 2023)
Hawk, Black. Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak Or Black Hawk: With an Account of the Cause and General History of the Late War, His Surrender and Confinement at Jefferson Barracks, and Travels Through the United States. JB Patterson, 1834.
Kurzweil R. The singularity is near. In Ethics and emerging technologies 2005 (pp. 393-406). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Odum, Howard T., and Elisabeth C. Odum. "The prosperous way down." Energy 31, no. 1 (2006): 21-32.
The Great Simplification Episode 126, “Daniel Schmachtenberger: Moving from Naive to Authentic Progress: A Vision for Betterment” (June 5th, 2024)
The Great Simplification Episode 125, “Vanessa Andreotti: Hospicing Modernity and Rehabilitating Humanity” (May 29th, 2024)
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When humans are locked in a cage, the earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is: Human beings are not important. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the great old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. It is not too late. All of these great works are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
I wish a long life for Bates; I have depended upon his uninvested analysis, scholarship, common sense, vision, intuition, fearlessnes, communicative skills, and more for over half a century.
Trust is a rare thing these days, applicable to Albert Bates.
I wish a long life for Bates; I have depended upon his uninvested analysis, scholarship, common sense, vision, intuition, fearlessnes, communicative skills, and more for over half a century.
Trust is a rare thing these days, applicable to Albert Bates.