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To Learn to Live in a Mundane Universe
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[14]Freddie deBoer
Sep 16, 2024
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were all just one more card in the catalog, man
Scott Alexander has [24]responded to my advice that we should not imagine
ourselves to be living in some sort of revolutionary epoch. You can decide for
yourself if hes convincing. I continue to maintain the basic point that a) we
are definitionally more likely to live in ordinary times than extraordinary and
b) we are conditioned to overstate our own uniqueness and importance, not even
as a matter of intellect or character but as a basic reality of cognitive
science, a consequence of living as a consciousness. I would say that, for one
thing, his schema would suggest that someone living in the 1810s or 1860s or
1910s had just as much cause to think that they lived in extraordinary times as
we do, and yet Alexander certainly seems to think that now is more important
than then. I do want to address this one point.
Freddie sort of starts thinking in this direction[25]^6, but shuts it down
on the grounds that some people think technological growth rates have
slowed down since the mid-20th century. Usually the metric that gets
brought out to support this is changes in total factor productivity, which
do show the mid-20th century as a more dynamic period than today. So fine,
lets do the same calculation with total productivity. My impression from
eyeballing [26]this paper is that about 35% of all increase in TFP growth
and 15% of all log TFP growth has still happened during Freddies lifetime.
Lets take as given the claim in the last sentence is true: its still
inarguable that meaningful technological growth has dramatically slowed in the
last 50 years compared to the 100 prior years, to choose an arbitrary but
useful comparison. And if thats true, it suggests that the notion of
continuous exponential human growth is nonsense. And if thats true, it doesnt
in and of itself disprove the narrative that ChatGPT is the Mahdi and will
usher us into paradise, but it does make the overarching narrative of a simple
exponential climb into a godlike metahuman future harder to maintain. If human
development has already slowed significantly, shouldnt that suggest that it
may very well slow further?
I will again refer people to Robert J. Gordons [27]The Rise & Fall of American
Growth, which is where the 1870-1970 and then 1970-current split is best
articulated. I read it, and its a classic academic book that ponderously pours
data on to the same basic observations over and over again. (Just like, for
example, Capital in the Twenty-First Century and many many others.) Thats what
an academic book of that type is meant to do; Its just that I dont expect
anyone else to feel moved to read it. What makes it so valuable, though, is
that Gordon spends so much time looking at very specific economic segments and
not just demonstrating that productivity and growth have slowed but why theyve
slowed in very specific terms. And I cant point to a single piece of evidence
that does a better job than that book. I would, however, suggest that some
common sense would be useful here. Ill spare you from doing my “time traveler
from 1910 traveling to 1960 vs a time traveler from 1960 traveling to 2010” bit
in the main text, but you can read it in a footnote below.[28]1 The fundamental
observation is simply that beyond the various productivity and growth numbers,
the lived experience of being human changed dramatically more from 1870ish
through 1970ish than in the 50ish years since then. To repeat myself, a vast
majority of what we call the advances of modernity stem directly from the
development of cheap, stable, relatively safe, reliable refined fossil fuels,
from electricity generation to cars to planes to modern heating systems to
fertilizers.
[29]
[https]
[30]source
What Im suggesting is that people trying to insist that we are on the verge of
a species-altering change in living conditions and possibilities, and who point
to this kind of chart to do so, are letting the scale of these charts obscure
the fact that the transition from the original iPhone to the iPhone 14 (fifteen
years apart) is not anything like the transition from Sputnik to Apollo 17
(fifteen years apart), that they just arent remotely comparable in human
terms. The internet is absolutely choked with these dumb charts, which would
make you think that the technological leap from the Apple McIntosh to the
hybrid car was dramatically more meaningful than the development from the
telescope to the telephone. Which is fucking nutty! If you think this chart is
particularly bad, go pick another one. Theyre all obviously produced with the
intent of convincing you that human progress is going to continue to scale
exponentially into the future forever. But a) it would frankly be bizarre if
that were true, given how actual history actually works and b) weve already
seen that progress stall out, if were only honest with ourselves about whats
been happening. It may be that people are correct to identify contemporary
machine learning as the key technology to take us to Valhalla. But I think the
notion of continuous exponential growth becomes a lot less credible if you
recognize that we havent even maintained that growth in the previous
half-century.
And the way we talk here matters a great deal. I always get people accusing me
of minimizing recent development. But of course I understand how important
recent developments have been, particularly in medicine. If you have a young
child with cystic fibrosis, their projected lifespan has changed dramatically
just in the past year or two. But at a population level, recent improvements to
average life expectancy just cant hold a candle to the era that saw the
development of modern germ theory and the first antibiotics and modern
anesthesia and the first “dead virus” vaccines and the widespread adoption of
medical hygiene rules and oral contraception and exogenous insulin and heart
stents, all of which emerged in a 100 year period. This is the issue with
insisting on casting every new development in world-historic terms: the
brick-and-mortar chip-chip-chip of better living conditions and slow progress
gets devalued.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I listened to the [31]latest episode of Derek Thompsons (highly recommended)
Plain English podcast, with DeepMind researcher Pushmeet Kohli. Kohli and his
colleagues are using machine learning in drug discovery, particularly through
the [32]protein folding thats such an essential element of developing new
medicines. This work, they demonstrate, is well-suited to what modern large
language models can do. Its also one of the very, very few places where the
hype for these systems might actually be warranted; the vast majority of
breathlessly-discussed “AI” possibilities would not even be particularly
transformative if they came to pass, which most of them wont. (AI doomerism
relies on the idea that consciousness, superintelligence, and ill intent will
prove to be “emergent” properties of LLMs, which no one can articulate in
remotely rigorous terms and which most actual LLM researchers dismiss as
nonsense.) Drug discovery is definitely a big deal and these tools seem very
promising. The question Derek didnt ask is, I think, a central one: why call
this “artificial intelligence” at all? Nothing that DeepMind is working on
requires “emergence.” Their tools are not agentic/choice-making. They have no
consciousness, nor are they required to in order to fulfill their purpose.
Theyre very powerful systems built on very powerful algorithms but thats
fundamentally what they are, systems built on algorithms. So where does
intelligence come in at all, and why is it necessary?
This is part of the basic poverty of the current “AI” discourse - the core
concept of agentic, self-directed, learning, and conscious computer technology
has given way to just any instance of “a computer doing complicated stuff.”
DeepMind is developing a potentially profoundly-useful technology built on
algorithms that appear to work. Why is that not enough? Algorithms that work
are good enough.
In the podcast, Derek says that GPT has mapped human language. I would push
back against that, forcefully - a map is not probabilistic. You can have a
better or a worse map, but a map is not fundamentally stochastic and GPTs
understanding of language will always have error bars, due to its basic
architecture. This is why “AI” has conspicuously failed in one of the many
tasks it is confidently asserted to be on the brink of solving, which is
producing a complete and functioning syntax for the grammar of a human
language. This was exactly Chomskys point when he and colleagues [33]critiqued
ChatGPT; the modern era of linguistics began precisely when he and his
generation came to understand that language is rule-bound in a way that is
fundamentally neurological and probably genetic. (Which is to say, it does not
rely on the ingestion of data, hence the [34]poverty of the stimulus.) And
thats precisely what LLMs dont do, proceed from a list of static rules and
build understanding step-wise. If they did, tech companies wouldnt be where
they are now, which is trying to somehow ingest more language data than has
ever been produced by all human beings combined in the history of the world.
What unites the two preceding paragraphs is simply this: my confusion as to why
reality itself is never good enough. Why does our culture insist on overselling
and overhyping when there are genuinely impressive developments happening? Is
it just literally about stock prices? I think it might literally be about stock
prices.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Heres some things I think, without any particular qualifications to think
them.
• The speed of light is an actual hard speed limit; various sci-fi tricks
like warp drive and traveling through wormholes have immense practical and
theoretical barriers to being usable and I dont think theyll ever be
overcome
• Time travel into the past actually is impossible, which is why no one has
ever come back to tell us about it
• Even if we achieve speeds on the order of (say) 10% of the speed of light,
which we almost certainly cant for simple relativity reasons, traveling to
potentially habitable stars will take hundreds of years; we have no reason
to believe that cryofreeze/stasis/etc technologies are actually achievable;
multigenerational interstellar travel is likely impossible for all the
reasons Kim Stanley Robinson lays out [35]here; we will therefore never
colonize the stars and in the exceedingly unlikely event that we survive to
see it, well die when our sun expands to become a red giant; we might mine
or colonize planets or moons in our solar system, but that wont
fundamentally change human life
• Theres very likely other life in the universe, even intelligent life, but
given that the cosmic speed limit will apply to them too, well never meet
with any of them physically, and given the distances involved synchronous
communication is essentially impossible
• Quantum entanglement wont allow for faster-than-light communication for
the reasons enumerated in [36]this video
• We dont live in a simulation
• Even if there are many worlds/multiple dimensions well never experience
them directly and thus theyll have no practical impact on our lives
• Well never “upload” our consciousness into computers to live forever,
which suggests that there is some such thing as our consciousness separate
from the physiological structures that contain it, which is a dualist
fantasy
• Artificial intelligences of various kinds will develop and emerge and have
meaningful consequences for humans and improve quality of life, but they
wont somehow enable us to transcend the physical limitations of the
material world, that is, no free energy, no breaking the laws of physics,
no eternal life
• Were all going to die, and its going to feel far too soon for almost all
of us.
Look, stuff is gonna happen. Technology is going to grow. A lot of it will be
good and some of it will be bad. I dont doubt, for example, that in a hundred
years the science of human genomic editing will fundamentally transform many
elements of human life and, in particular, undermine basic human notions of
“meritocracy” and just deserts. Obviously, that could go do a lot of bad as
well as a lot of good. I could also easily see a world, even in a decade or
two, where a significant chunk of the human population spends almost all of its
time in virtual reality and essentially disconnects from actual human life;
that sounds straightforwardly bad, to me, and would justify [37]anti-tech
terrorism. One way or another life is gonna change. Human beings will change.
Life expectancy is going to increase. Were gonna have a lot of cool new toys.
But, fundamentally, we live in a mundane universe and that will never change.
And, crucially, its our nature to adapt to make the extraordinary seem
mundane. Im a big believer in a steady state/thermostatic concept of
happiness, which suggests that we mostly have our own individual levels of
default life satisfaction and we tend to gravitate to that level over time.
Its not that events just dont matter for how we feel; if you fall in love
youll feel more happy and if you go to prison youll feel more unhappy. Of
course you can make your life better and be an incrementally happier person. I
have, over the course of my own life. But we reliably, slowly adapt to change
and float back towards our baseline level of life satisfaction. And with
technology, particularly, things that seem remarkable come to seem boring at a
relentless pace. Smartphone sales have slowed because weve wrung all the
innovation out of them that we can and people now see them as commodities.
Whos excited to upgrade from a Galaxy Sx to a Galaxy Sx+1, no matter how
remarkable the underlying technology? The PlayStation 5 Pro is an absolutely
remarkable piece of human ingenuity, and yet many people feel cynical and
underwhelmed about it, and I dont blame them. The Nintendo64, now, that felt
revolutionary. Is that fair, the ever-ratcheting expectations game? Doesnt
matter. Its human nature.
Ultimately, I do want to tell people to please try and chill out, yes. No, I
dont think AI Jesus is about to come and initiate the Rapture, and the desire
for that to be true seems to be derived from very naked psychological needs. We
live in a mundane world, a world of homework and waiting for the bus and
sorting the recyclables and doing the laundry and holding your shirt over your
nose when you enter a public bathroom and trying to find a credit card that
offers a slightly better points program. It just keeps going, day after day
after grinding day. You never get removed from it, never escape it. And yes,
theres transcendence and beauty and fun and satisfaction and growth and
meaning, all of it! But you find that all in the mundane, generally; those few
who spend their lives in a state of constant stimulation and novelty, well, God
bless them. Most of the time they didnt get there through their choices but
through random chance. Im saying all of this because I think a lot of people
spend their time yearning for some great fissure in their lives where theres a
massive and permanent division between the before and the after, and all of
this AI stuff is giving rational people an excuse to be irrational. (Of course,
this is the number two fantasy behind the great American civic religion,
“Someday, Ill be a celebrity.”)
You have to imagine a life you can live with, where you are, when you are. If
you dont, youll never be satisfied. Neither AI nor anything else is coming to
save you from the things you dont like about being a person. The better life
you absolutely can build isnt going to be brought to you by ChatGPT but by
your own steady uphill clawing and through careful management of your own
expectations. You live here. This is it. Thats what I would tell to everyone
out there: this is it. This is it. This is it. Youre never going to hang out
with Mr. Data on the Holodeck. I know that, for a lot of people, mundane
reality is everything they want to escape. But it could be so much worse.
[38]1
A person living in the United States the 1910s would be someone who
• Very likely did not have indoor plumbing, meaning they used an outhouse,
got water from a well, could not routinely bathe or wash their hands, and
was subject to all manner of illness for these reasons, to say nothing of
the unpleasant nature of lacking these amenities
• Almost certainly did not have an electrified home, the consequences of
which are obviously numerous and significant compared to modern existence
• Had no artificial refrigeration at all and relied on blocks of delivered
ice where possible, which when combined with a lack of modern food
production regulation and hygienic storage led to vastly higher rates of
foodborne illness
• Got around by horse and cart for anything nearby, taking hours to go more
than a few miles; got around by train for anything domestic and far away,
remarkably fast in many ways but still slow compared to plane travel and on
set schedules and from and to a certain set number of places; got around by
steamship if having to travel over water, which was very expensive for
ordinary people and glacially slow compared to modern methods
• Could expect to see their children die at a rate of about 15% in the first
year of life and could expect to die themselves (as the mother) or their
partner to die (as the father) at a rate of about 1%
• Had a life expectancy of about 45 to 50 years if a man and about 50 to 55
years if a woman, and faced the looming threat of the 1918 influenza
pandemic (which killed something like 700,000 Americans) to say nothing of
the constant threats of polio (27,000 cases in the 1916 outbreak alone),
tuberculosis (200,000 new American cases a year and 100,000-150,000 deaths
a year in the 1910s), and all manner of infectious diseases that are now
eminently treatable
• Did not yet have commercial radio, though ham radio technology existed (for
those with access to electricity); nor was there television, obviously;
only 10% of households had a telephone; telegraph technology existed and
was remarkably sophisticated but not very accessible
I could go on. Lets say we teleport our 1910 fellow to 1960.
• Outside of a few stubborn places in the deep South and some truly
out-of-the-way rural locales, almost all American homes have indoor
plumbing, which allows for using a flush toilet, washing your hands,
regularly taking showers or baths, and having handy access to clean water
for drinking and cooking
• The vast majority of American homes are electrified, allowing for indoor
artificial lighting without the fumes or dangers of oil-based light, along
with a myriad of household gadgets and devices
• Most American homes have refrigerators, expanding the kinds of foods that
are practical accessible (with help from modern supply lines and
transportation) and seriously reducing the risks of food poisoning and
similar ills
• 80+% of American households have a car, dramatically expanding the
geographical range that can be traveled, reducing transportation time in
all manner of contexts, and making long commutes for work practically
possible, albeit with major consequences for safety and the environment
• The infant mortality rate in the first year of life has plunged to 2.6%,
while the maternal mortality rate has fallen to less than .05%.
• Mens life expectancy has grown to more than 65 years and womens to about
73 years; the incidence of new cases of polio had fallen to about 3,000 by
1960 and in the next several years the disease would be essentially
eradicated from the United States; there were some 84,000 new cases of
tuberculosis, almost all of them in rural and impoverished areas, and the
survival rate was meaningfully higher; ordinary Americans now had a decent
shot at having access to chemotherapy, antibiotics, heart bypass surgery….
• 90% of American households have a radio, better than 85% have a television,
bringing information and entertainment into the homes of millions; 90% have
a telephone, enabling instant peer-to-peer communication with a vast
network and dramatically improving the capability of emergency services,
practical access to information, the ability to socialize and connect with
those who are geogrpahically distance, etc etc….
Again, I could go on. The 1910 person would find the world utterly transformed.
The interstate highway system, in and of and by itself, is a change thats
absolutely massive in the most practical and physical and meaningful terms.
Every aspect of life has changed in deep, obvious, material ways. Now lets
take someone from 1960 to 2010.
• It is still the case that almost all American households have indoor
plumbing; the number without has fallen, but because of ceiling effects the
amount of change is vastly smaller than from 1910 to 1960; indoor plumbing
has already been accomplished
• It is still the case that almost all American households have electricity;
the number without has fallen, but because of ceiling effects the amount of
change is vastly smaller than from 1910 to 1960; electrification has
already been accomplished
• Most American homes still have refrigerators; theyre nicer and bigger and
more energy efficient but they do the same thing; regulatory standards are
maybe, maybe, maybe a little better?; the range of foods available has
increased, maybe the quality, but the change is vastly smaller than from
1910 to 1960
• The percentage of American households with cars has risen to 90%. That
increase is meaningful but doesnt represent any revolutionary change to
average living conditions. The cars are way, way safer and nicer than those
in 1960, but theyre still almost exclusively burning fossil fuels and
otherwise function in the same way that they did in the 1960s. The
interstate system has expanded but someone driving on it in 2010 might not
even notice any difference since 1960
• The infant mortality rate has fallen from 26 per 1000 in 1960 to 6 per 1000
in 2010. Thats a lot! But its very small compared to the improvement from
1910 to 1960. Similarly, the maternal mortality rate has improved but from
next to nothing to even closer to nothing
• Mens life expectancy has grown to about 76.2 years for men and 81 for
women; again, meaningful and important but simply not at the same scale as
from 1910 to 1960
• Almost everybody has a telephone, but that was true in 1960; almost
everybody has a television, but that was true in 2010. They are much more
sophisticated and now portable and can access far more content, but in both
cases the changes are a matter of refinement and development, not dramatic
innovation. In general, information technology has proceeded at a
remarkable pace, but in terms of the actual lived experience of human
beings, its very difficult to argue that the introduction of the internet
etc can keep pace with the immense practical and material changes
introduced in the previous era.
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[51]
Feral Finster
[52]Feral Finster
[53]Sep 16·edited Sep 16
1. Scott and ACX readers seem to have a beef with you.
2. I suspect that we are living in revolutionary times, not merely
[50] because of impending technological advances, but because the likelihood
[https] that the tools we already have will be abused approaches 1:1.
What we have now would make a Himmler, a Goebbels, a Vyshinskii weep
hopt satly pony tears of joy and envy. Already, people of influence and
authority are licking their chops.
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[55]21 replies by Freddie deBoer and others
[57]
BronxZooCobra
[58]Sep 16
There is also the other side of the argument where people are
[56] incredibly uncomfortable with all the magic and wonder that will occur
[https] after they are gone. Its more comforting to think the future will
resemble the now than to think of all that will be that one wont be
around to experience.
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[24] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-temporal-copernicanism
[25] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-temporal-copernicanism#footnote-6-148609720
[26] https://orbilu.uni.lu/bitstream/10993/55043/1/s40797-023-00221-x%20%281%29.pdf
[27] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691175805/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-growth
[28] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/to-learn-to-live-in-a-mundane-universe#footnote-1-148918222
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[30] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353714693_A_Technology_Countdown_Approach_To_Historical_Timelines
[31] https://open.spotify.com/episode/49QLyJeU56X1DYRhFk0x2S?si=5ebcb656a9f245b7
[32] https://comis.med.uvm.edu/VIC/coursefiles/MD540/MD540-Protein_Organization_10400_574581210/Protein-org/Protein_Organization8.html
[33] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html
[34] https://web.archive.org/web/20130921205122id_/http://www.philosophy.dept.shef.ac.uk/papers/POS.pdf
[35] https://boingboing.net/2015/11/16/our-generation-ships-will-sink.html
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[37] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/ants-in-the-server-racks-21st-century
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