AI will make your fingers long, or it will eat you. {god} will hear your prayer when the words can't make it past your lips
Prophesies of robots, capital's desires, Roko's basilisk, and the god of sampling bias
AI will take our jobs and we’ll deal with it the way we dealt with it the way we did when tractors and combines rolled over the agriculture industry.
Machines have already taken over and we are living in the ruins and residue. We tend to them, polish the cold stainless steel, to preserve the shape as the mechanical rose rusts over. Before 1880, over 50% of the population was employed in agriculture. Now it’s about 10%. This trend will continue in other things machines excel at. Machines saved our backs from us working the soil and AI may save our wrists from carpel tunnel.
What happens when everyone loses their clickety clacky office jobs? What jobs are left? How about jobs of the heart? AI can replace much of what we call art. AI will not replace betrayal, for example—faint praise to our robot overlords, but it’s important to remember. The computer may do my thinking for me, but it won’t feel for me.
How to not find yourself under the wave? If you don’t time it right, you find yourself under it—your experience with AI is the crushing feeling you get as the wave presses down on you and washes you to shore bleeding from every sharp quartz rock cutting you till your raw flesh stings from the salt in your wounds.
How to avoid the wave? Should you?
First you had to plow your fields nearly by hand, then you had to raise an animal to plow the fields, then you got machines that can plow faster, and now the fields nearly plow themselves. You can take a nap and wake up to a plowed field. You direct your farm with your fingertips. At every step, yes, you’re further removed from the act of farming—your fingers are long like stringy slime.
In both farming and programming, we have the same pattern. Every industry is getting upturned by wizards finding ways to coax rocks into thinking. It used to be that your phone, calendar, and photo album were different things, now these things sit a thousand miles away, and ride a beam of light across the surface of the earth to land inside your pocket.
Software continues to eat like a dragon incorporating the world itself and converting warm bleeding hearts into cold steel. The thesis of one of the greatest VC firms in the world Andreesen Horowitz is “software eats the world.”
But consumption may not be the best analogy. What software does is it extends the reach of individuals. This is the what the The Sovereign Individual promises. This small minority become the sorcerers of the future. They will cast digital spells over the physical world. With a few taps of their fingers, they will move mountains. And when Neuralink arrives, even a tap would be too brutish. We will think things, and they will be done.
Nikola Tesla prophesied digital communication. People since him have prophesied that we’d have mobile telephones (as a pita in your pocket) long before we were even close having the technology to make it happen. Metropolis, from the cover image of this post is from a movie released in 1927. Before then, golem, is an even older conception that traces back to the Bible. What we now fear has been prophesied again and again for millennia.
People correctly understand that as we build new machines, we have to oil and repair them. We use machines to do things for us, but then we become beholden to these same machines. But we need to be careful. Hair is not the hair follicle. We imagine hair products make our hair better, forgetting the supply chain. Technology mediates our relationship with nature. But money mediates are relationships with other people. You could think of money as one of the simplest tools for abstracting human effort. Money is almost spiritual. You can hold coins in your hand, but that’s not exactly the money. The money you have in your bank account is nothing more than a digital entry on a computer. But you have a computer, and you can also put a digital entry on it. What’s the difference? The physical medium of exchange is as much a part of money as a church building is to the faith. Everyone who goes to church understands it’s not about the building. The building is a vessel for {god}. And in the same way that a building has affordances and helps to structure human behavior, so does money. You could even say (poetically) that capital wants and prefers some things over others.
For example, money likes to be scarce enough to be valuable. If it’s not scarce, currency grows into a monster, eating into the value of everyday things until you cannot afford toothpaste. Abstractly, money doesn’t like to sit still. Money that isn’t traded is money that also has no value. If you have a million dollars and you’re stuck on an island and nobody knows you’re there, you might as well be broke.
If Tesla and technologists could make predictions about how technology would go, is that as deep as prophesies go? Is there a way to prophecy at a deeper level? What I’m getting at is that technology and physics isn’t everything. Suppose you go back 1000 years and you have to bring them something from the future that would help them.
We imagine that bringing modern technology would impress them. It would if you could bring the rest of modernity along with it. Otherwise, you give them a gimmick that once broken cannot be fixed. You see—before you have a phone, you need to have someone else to call.
Tech needs customers. Many ideas just don’t make economic sense because the upfront capital wouldn’t make it worth it. This should be obvious. Say you’re a barber. Are you going to buy a barber’s chair if you only ever have a single customer? In theory, making your product scarce will make it more valuable. In practice, you’d be a shitty barber, and the few who do get their hair cut by you would be disappointed. Everywhere you look, you depend on scale. Even when you want to make something scarce, you find yourself making the rare thing with commodity tools, and when you’re taking a break, you take a bite using a commodity fork. Maybe after a decade of cutting hair and becoming famous for it, you invent a new style and only give that style to a single person.
Even when you look at famous works of art, the reproductions in newspapers, books, magazines, and online add to the value of an item by increasing the number of people aware of the artwork. The Mona Lisa would be worth far less if nobody knew about it. Even if the work itself could be made secret, its value would still gain by having more people know that the work is secret. Secrecy means little if nobody cares. And to get people to care, you first have to make them aware, and to do that, you need mass media. And if you don’t have mass media, you need people to care enough to share the info by telling others. So even without mass media, you still need the technology of language that many people already use. You. simply. cannot. get. away. from. scale.
The entire reason for automation is not just so a couple people can wield their power over the world like a witch over her orb. Another example. You’ve got the iPhone or some other smartphone. Making one of them would be almost useless because everything that’s interesting on that phone is something someone else created. The phone is not interesting on its own. My point is that you can’t just make one phone. You have to make millions of them. And in order to make that many, you need enough people who could make use of it. And if everyone is farming all day and they don’t have electricity, they’re not going to get much use out of it. Everything is contingent on scale.
Though {god} is often defined as being everywhere, omnipotent, and omniscient, capital is His contender. His contender is the all-seeing state, the god of selection bias. Capital wants to be universal, and smooth. When it discovers a discontinuity—or a gap—capital flows to fill it. We can give capital eyes with every security camera we install. We can never have enough eyes.
In order for people to agree on things broadly enough for economies of scale to take off, you need to have social technologies. You can’t go back a thousand years, hand them a book of equations, and hope this will propel them into the future. No, if your town of 10,000 can hardly get along with the next town of 10,000, it doesn’t matter what technology you start with. We can send them an iPhone. We can teach them how it works. None of this will be any good. They will sooner kill you for bringing such sorcery into their lives. We can spend unlimited amounts of money to teach them and train them on the technology. But as long as their potential market for their products doesn’t extend past 10,000 people, they’re not going anywhere.
You need people to get along with one another at massive scales. And technology both hurts and helps here. For example, if we know less about each other, we can pretend we’re not that different because we don’t come in contact enough that it matters. But more contact could do little more than amplify the narcissism of small differences.
For all my disdain of organized religion, especially Christian religion, I did grow up in that world. And I realized that something Jesus said 2000 years ago will literally come true in our lifetimes. He said faith could move mountains. This prophesy might come true within my lifetime. A person will think a thought and a mountain will move or disappear. Jesus was a carpenter. As an aside, we should take him more literally than we’re used to. When he says “heaven,” could it mean he’s referring to a physical place, and the possibility that if we could all get along, we’d be among the stars?
The thing about going multi-planetary, is it doesn’t just happen. Where are the aliens? Why aren’t they here? Why don’t we see them? As far as mainstream science can tell us, we’re alone. And the more we search the stars, the more lonely it appears. If {god}, or some life is out there, and sees us, it must have incredibly long fingers, or incredibly good vision in order to reach us. As time passes, we realize we are not only made in the image of {god}, but we are continually making ourselves into this image.
When Moses went up the mountain, the Israelites forgot {god}. They began to worship the creation over the creator. Fear is a kind of worship. Fear of AI is hard to distinguish from worship. Roko’s basilisk tells you how to avoid the wrath of this god.
I was taught that {god} didn’t need hands in order to create this world; his thoughts were enough; and that {he} is so hidden that science couldn’t find {him}, and that {god} is so close that you could pray a quiet prayer in the dead of night, or with your last breath before you drown, and {he} will hear your voice.
