As you ought to know, the people warning about AI posing a risk of human extinction are not "a few online rationalists" but rather a lot of computer scientists and engineers, because the arguments are solid and the counterarguments unconvincing. https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk
I agree with you on most kinds of technological progress, but AI is different.
I would add that all of the “reasonable“ critiques of vax rollout you just laid out were, at the time, considered straight up anti-VAX statements. Meaning a lot of the anti-VAX “invective” was actually fueled by a total mainstream unwillingness to have a nuanced conversation, which refusal presented itself as rightly suspect, which, then further fueled suspicions.
Noah, should we really scorn warnings from AI's top research scientists and CEOs -- Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei? Each is on record that AI worst-case risks deserve the same care as preventing pandemics or nuclear war.
Shouldn't we trust experts when they caution their field has dangers? Lead poisoning is real. Antibiotic resistance is real. Global warming from fossil fuels is real.
Failing to be careful around real technology risks isn't "owning the decels." It's being as childish and destructive as they are.
I'd like to know why you so contemptuously disagree with the people who actually make cutting-edge AI. Or I'd like to be reassured that you don't.
I'm broadly in sympathy but... (and here goes nothing...)
There's a reason why "Don't Create the Torment Nexus" became a meme.
In the case of AI, we're getting endless search engine spam, faked revenge porn as a service, chat bots that strip-mine the past efforts of millions of knowledge workers of various types to produce answers that are maybe 95% correct but 100% convincing to the credulous - and sufficiently good at generating passable essays that schools and universities will have to go back to examinations in many cases to test that students actually know enough to be able to use the outputs of LLMs wisely.
Next up, I'm sure IVR vendors are already working out how to use LLMs to avoid connecting customers to humans who can actually solve their problem.
I'm not suggesting for a moment that we should abandon recent developments in AI. But I do believe that libertarian techbros should pull their heads in and accept that sometimes society is going to tell you "no, don't do that" or "do that within these guardrails".
Accelerationism is a fundamentally nihilistic and misanthropic ideology—Nick Land is not, and never will be, a positive and optimistic person. Why do you provide cover for people who want to replace all life with that which most efficiently maximises entropy? It feels like you’re operating purely based on vibes, and I find that pretty disappointing.
There are some really deep flaws in this analysis, beyond the specifics, to do with how you're defining progress and acceleration. From the perspective of the people you're attacking all this is mirror world logic. To them, you are the anti-science ideologically motivated decelerationist, and they are the progressives.
For example, insisting on 100% renewables when there are no workable solutions for intermittency results in a DEceleration and a reduction of the rapid progress that has come from using nuclear, coal and gas. Germany has slammed into this at full speed and is now sharply decelerating, due to sky-high energy prices. Renewables haven't avoided this outcome. Instead in a desperate attempt to avert grid instability they have reopened coal plants. All this was predicted years ago by the so-called "decels" who warned that this strategy would slam the breaks on progress. They were ignored by self-proclaimed "progressives" and the resulting actual economic deceleration is now evident to see.
Likewise, the mRNA vaccines will forever be associated in many people's mind with anti-science pseudo-progress. Dozens of claims about these things were presented as 100% proven undisputable science and then walked back within months. Science done properly makes gradual but solid forward progress. It doesn't randomly jump around the map making an endless stream of bold claims with 100% confidence that turn out to be completely wrong. That isn't science and it's definitely not progress: it's pseudo-science and anti-progress.
The problem here is that you classify these things are progress because progressives tell you they are progress, therefore anyone who disagrees is just inexplicably confused. But to normal people (non-progressives), a thing is not automatically progress just because it's new. It must be shown to actually improve people's lives first. Only then does it get to be classed as progress. All the examples you picked are contentious because they fail this basic test. For example 100% renewables all the time would yield no progress in normal people's lives, because electricity is fungible and how it was generated makes no difference. The argument that it will yield progress is actually an argument it will avoid a regression due to catastrophic weather, not that it would itself yield better living conditions than today. So the argument that renewables = progress is already on thin ice, because merely preserving what we've got isn't strictly speaking what progress means. But then if you don't think climatologists are honest/competent, their predictions aren't convincing and so the claim that renewables = progress falls apart completely. At that point renewables are anti-progress because the huge efforts made to replace generation capacity is just wasted time and money that could have been spent on things that actually improve people's lives.
As for AI, that's obviously only progress if you're the one replacing other people with it. If you're the one getting replaced it represents a significant deceleration in your life prospects. No surprise that it's not universally viewed as progress.
Great point about embracing tech advancement, but the examples chosen are positively tribal.
Solar cost is a product of Moore’s law and lightly regulated Chinese manufacturing. I live in CA and use passive and active solar and know its advantages and limitations. One could easily use Solar as an example of why governments shouldn’t force choices and disrupt markets to please donors and activists (though fundamentally that is government’s prime objective) as California (a perfect spot for solar given air con demand spikes on sunny summer days and excess generation in summer afternoons/ early evenings could be directed east to time zones where the sun is already setting but the air con is still on) has completely mismanaged its grid and power generation infrastructure and has the highest electricity costs in the continental US.
As for Covid, you cannot disassociate people’s vax stance from the governments actions (lockdowns, school closings, masking, massive subsidies, vax passports and mandates). All tied up in civil liberties. And if one were to do a cost/benefit or harm analysis, I am not sure the first example I would pick is one comparing a 99.97 pct survival rate to a 99.995 pct survival rate.
For that difference was it worth sacking tens of thousands of soldiers and first responders from their jobs? Was it worth possibly permanently damaging the academic confidence and psyches of tens of millions of kids? Was it worth the spike in deaths from alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, undiagnosed cancers? Was it worth trillions in economic damage followed by massive debt and inflation?
Personally, I think I’d steer very clear of Covid as an example for the brilliance of “science” and of our government’s ability to use it to make sensible decisions. There are many better examples, and if I were to choose to mock anyone for extremely costly and unscientific beliefs it would be the fearful white progressive pro-lockdown, vax passport tribe who made vaccination a wedge issue (for instance the Biden admin forcing a vax mandate for employment when evidence was in that the vax didn’t prevent transmission and the majority of people had already had Covid). Is that science or divisive politics to please one’s base? By the way I have had 4 MRNA vaxxes, am not anti-vax and during Covid worked on a project for a state government forecasting infections, deaths hospitalizations.
The best argument for tech is simple. Our lives are more comfortable, longer/healthier, easier and more data enriched due to tech. I grew up seeing how my grandparents lived in the 1960s with early 20th century tech (coal furnace, wringer washer, amputation for diabetes) and it wasn’t pretty. Not that all of todays tech would have made them happier but it would have made life a lot easier. And of course they grew up in an era where people rode horses.
That our society and culture have poorly adapted to tech and have hollowed out social and economic life for a large percentage of the population is not tech’s problem- it is our problem.
As with Covid vaxxes, though, one should not look at the declinist or Luddite issue in isolation but enmeshed with everything else going on (culture plus tech). I’ve done a lot of reading from the late 1800s and early 1900s on the issue of tech and society - there were a lot of smart people thinking about those issues back then. Some of the ideas were crack pot (some gave us nice craftsman furniture and architecture) but many took the social and cultural issues seriously while not being anti-progress.
Tech advancement is going to happen. We can’t control that (though we will make some temporarily bad decisions on subsidy and regulation)
Tech will take care of itself. Personally I think we need to devote more time and attention to social and cultural issues. Not that I have any answers.
I think you are a cheerleader for the right side here. It's true, we must move forward technologically. It's just that there is an actual reason why, and then there is the popular reason why. You focus on the latter.
The truth is that any civilization's place in the world depends heavily on its technological advancement. Fall behind our rivals in tech, and we will fall behind militarily and economically. Since this isn't a video game, we cannot fine tune the aims of our technological explorations; we either promote or we dampen, and either way we live with the results.
Bottom line is that support for science and technology is one of the most important ways that we act patriotically. But this is rarely stated.
Instead, we get a lot of happy talk about how science and technology is improving the lives of everyday people. Certainly entertainment, communication, medicine, energy, transportation, etc. have come a long ways since I was a child, and most people would be outraged if told to give up their favorite specific items from that list. Life is easier, safer, and more fun. That's a big deal.
However, technological advances always change life, typically in ways that are almost never foreseen, often not thought about much in retrospect.
They worried that the automobile would scare the horses, but in the end it hollowed out cities.
If anything is clear from history, it is that technological change brings unpredictable societal change, and that there will be winners and losers. Whether you are looking at global warming, inner city blight, small town decline, the death of family owned farms, political polarization, rising economic inequality, the rise in emotional problems including suicide -- the list goes on and on -- technological progress has its fingerprints all over them all.
Thus, we are in a bind. As technological progress accelerates, the number of people disadvantaged by that progress is rising. The disaffected portion of society is rising, and many of them sense that progress has not been good for them. As this number rises into the neighborhood of half the population, both democracy and technology are put at risk.
Yet, the obvious solution -- slow down the technology -- is a certain loser for our civilization because others on the planet will not slow down. And would use their advantage to gleefully stomp on us, particularly after all these years of our lording it over them.
So yes, Noah, you are on the right side on tech development, but I am uneasy with the "tech is obviously good for everyone" cheerleading. Simply the fact that we would need to force people to use the technology ought to clue us in to the way this particular message is faltering.
Another really simple reason for decelism might be that America is aging. Maybe old people are more fearful of change and less enthusiastic about the future.
Can you explain how we definitely know that AI isn't going to take away some people's jobs? And, a bit more far-fetched but as far as I know entirely possible, how do we definitely know AI won't trigger some sort of disaster (Skynet, etc)? I don't like being a "decel" but I've never heard any coherent arguments that AI is safe.
FWIW, as someone with an MPhil (all-but-thesis) in AI (1984, under Roger Schank), allow me to point out that the current round of AI is pure BS. There's no there there. For example. How do LLMs do multiplication? They look up the particular problem at hand in the database. If the particular problem at hand (e.g 1024 x 365) isn't in its data set, it says something stupid. The LLM technology is not capable of identifying abstract operations, recognizing that such an operation is being discussed, and performing such an operation when a specific answer is required. (Long story short: LLM's are template instantiation programs, not reasoning programs.)
You've been told "Neural nets are a model of neurons", right? That's a lie. A "neural net" "neuron" has under 10 inputs, under 10 outputs, and all those are to adjacent "neurons". An average mammalian neuron has hundreds of inputs, thousands of outputs, and accepts inputs from, and provides outputs to enormously distant other neurons. Oh, yes, and real neurons perform logical operations, not just sum-and-threshold, on subsets of their inputs. "Neural nets" are trivial, real neurons are enormously complex. You;'ve been lied to.
Of course, like my advisor, I do believe that computers can "become intelligent". But that will require our understanding what "intelligence" is, and we're not working on that.
This isn't "decelarationism", it's calling BS BS. Which is a rather different thing.
As you ought to know, the people warning about AI posing a risk of human extinction are not "a few online rationalists" but rather a lot of computer scientists and engineers, because the arguments are solid and the counterarguments unconvincing. https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk
I agree with you on most kinds of technological progress, but AI is different.
I would add that all of the “reasonable“ critiques of vax rollout you just laid out were, at the time, considered straight up anti-VAX statements. Meaning a lot of the anti-VAX “invective” was actually fueled by a total mainstream unwillingness to have a nuanced conversation, which refusal presented itself as rightly suspect, which, then further fueled suspicions.
Noah, should we really scorn warnings from AI's top research scientists and CEOs -- Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei? Each is on record that AI worst-case risks deserve the same care as preventing pandemics or nuclear war.
Shouldn't we trust experts when they caution their field has dangers? Lead poisoning is real. Antibiotic resistance is real. Global warming from fossil fuels is real.
Failing to be careful around real technology risks isn't "owning the decels." It's being as childish and destructive as they are.
I'd like to know why you so contemptuously disagree with the people who actually make cutting-edge AI. Or I'd like to be reassured that you don't.
I'm broadly in sympathy but... (and here goes nothing...)
There's a reason why "Don't Create the Torment Nexus" became a meme.
In the case of AI, we're getting endless search engine spam, faked revenge porn as a service, chat bots that strip-mine the past efforts of millions of knowledge workers of various types to produce answers that are maybe 95% correct but 100% convincing to the credulous - and sufficiently good at generating passable essays that schools and universities will have to go back to examinations in many cases to test that students actually know enough to be able to use the outputs of LLMs wisely.
Next up, I'm sure IVR vendors are already working out how to use LLMs to avoid connecting customers to humans who can actually solve their problem.
I'm not suggesting for a moment that we should abandon recent developments in AI. But I do believe that libertarian techbros should pull their heads in and accept that sometimes society is going to tell you "no, don't do that" or "do that within these guardrails".
Accelerationism is a fundamentally nihilistic and misanthropic ideology—Nick Land is not, and never will be, a positive and optimistic person. Why do you provide cover for people who want to replace all life with that which most efficiently maximises entropy? It feels like you’re operating purely based on vibes, and I find that pretty disappointing.
There are some really deep flaws in this analysis, beyond the specifics, to do with how you're defining progress and acceleration. From the perspective of the people you're attacking all this is mirror world logic. To them, you are the anti-science ideologically motivated decelerationist, and they are the progressives.
For example, insisting on 100% renewables when there are no workable solutions for intermittency results in a DEceleration and a reduction of the rapid progress that has come from using nuclear, coal and gas. Germany has slammed into this at full speed and is now sharply decelerating, due to sky-high energy prices. Renewables haven't avoided this outcome. Instead in a desperate attempt to avert grid instability they have reopened coal plants. All this was predicted years ago by the so-called "decels" who warned that this strategy would slam the breaks on progress. They were ignored by self-proclaimed "progressives" and the resulting actual economic deceleration is now evident to see.
Likewise, the mRNA vaccines will forever be associated in many people's mind with anti-science pseudo-progress. Dozens of claims about these things were presented as 100% proven undisputable science and then walked back within months. Science done properly makes gradual but solid forward progress. It doesn't randomly jump around the map making an endless stream of bold claims with 100% confidence that turn out to be completely wrong. That isn't science and it's definitely not progress: it's pseudo-science and anti-progress.
The problem here is that you classify these things are progress because progressives tell you they are progress, therefore anyone who disagrees is just inexplicably confused. But to normal people (non-progressives), a thing is not automatically progress just because it's new. It must be shown to actually improve people's lives first. Only then does it get to be classed as progress. All the examples you picked are contentious because they fail this basic test. For example 100% renewables all the time would yield no progress in normal people's lives, because electricity is fungible and how it was generated makes no difference. The argument that it will yield progress is actually an argument it will avoid a regression due to catastrophic weather, not that it would itself yield better living conditions than today. So the argument that renewables = progress is already on thin ice, because merely preserving what we've got isn't strictly speaking what progress means. But then if you don't think climatologists are honest/competent, their predictions aren't convincing and so the claim that renewables = progress falls apart completely. At that point renewables are anti-progress because the huge efforts made to replace generation capacity is just wasted time and money that could have been spent on things that actually improve people's lives.
As for AI, that's obviously only progress if you're the one replacing other people with it. If you're the one getting replaced it represents a significant deceleration in your life prospects. No surprise that it's not universally viewed as progress.
Great point about embracing tech advancement, but the examples chosen are positively tribal.
Solar cost is a product of Moore’s law and lightly regulated Chinese manufacturing. I live in CA and use passive and active solar and know its advantages and limitations. One could easily use Solar as an example of why governments shouldn’t force choices and disrupt markets to please donors and activists (though fundamentally that is government’s prime objective) as California (a perfect spot for solar given air con demand spikes on sunny summer days and excess generation in summer afternoons/ early evenings could be directed east to time zones where the sun is already setting but the air con is still on) has completely mismanaged its grid and power generation infrastructure and has the highest electricity costs in the continental US.
As for Covid, you cannot disassociate people’s vax stance from the governments actions (lockdowns, school closings, masking, massive subsidies, vax passports and mandates). All tied up in civil liberties. And if one were to do a cost/benefit or harm analysis, I am not sure the first example I would pick is one comparing a 99.97 pct survival rate to a 99.995 pct survival rate.
For that difference was it worth sacking tens of thousands of soldiers and first responders from their jobs? Was it worth possibly permanently damaging the academic confidence and psyches of tens of millions of kids? Was it worth the spike in deaths from alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, undiagnosed cancers? Was it worth trillions in economic damage followed by massive debt and inflation?
Personally, I think I’d steer very clear of Covid as an example for the brilliance of “science” and of our government’s ability to use it to make sensible decisions. There are many better examples, and if I were to choose to mock anyone for extremely costly and unscientific beliefs it would be the fearful white progressive pro-lockdown, vax passport tribe who made vaccination a wedge issue (for instance the Biden admin forcing a vax mandate for employment when evidence was in that the vax didn’t prevent transmission and the majority of people had already had Covid). Is that science or divisive politics to please one’s base? By the way I have had 4 MRNA vaxxes, am not anti-vax and during Covid worked on a project for a state government forecasting infections, deaths hospitalizations.
The best argument for tech is simple. Our lives are more comfortable, longer/healthier, easier and more data enriched due to tech. I grew up seeing how my grandparents lived in the 1960s with early 20th century tech (coal furnace, wringer washer, amputation for diabetes) and it wasn’t pretty. Not that all of todays tech would have made them happier but it would have made life a lot easier. And of course they grew up in an era where people rode horses.
That our society and culture have poorly adapted to tech and have hollowed out social and economic life for a large percentage of the population is not tech’s problem- it is our problem.
As with Covid vaxxes, though, one should not look at the declinist or Luddite issue in isolation but enmeshed with everything else going on (culture plus tech). I’ve done a lot of reading from the late 1800s and early 1900s on the issue of tech and society - there were a lot of smart people thinking about those issues back then. Some of the ideas were crack pot (some gave us nice craftsman furniture and architecture) but many took the social and cultural issues seriously while not being anti-progress.
Tech advancement is going to happen. We can’t control that (though we will make some temporarily bad decisions on subsidy and regulation)
Tech will take care of itself. Personally I think we need to devote more time and attention to social and cultural issues. Not that I have any answers.
We live better than kings did 100 years ago thanks to technological progress, and decels want to slow it down?
I think you are a cheerleader for the right side here. It's true, we must move forward technologically. It's just that there is an actual reason why, and then there is the popular reason why. You focus on the latter.
The truth is that any civilization's place in the world depends heavily on its technological advancement. Fall behind our rivals in tech, and we will fall behind militarily and economically. Since this isn't a video game, we cannot fine tune the aims of our technological explorations; we either promote or we dampen, and either way we live with the results.
Bottom line is that support for science and technology is one of the most important ways that we act patriotically. But this is rarely stated.
Instead, we get a lot of happy talk about how science and technology is improving the lives of everyday people. Certainly entertainment, communication, medicine, energy, transportation, etc. have come a long ways since I was a child, and most people would be outraged if told to give up their favorite specific items from that list. Life is easier, safer, and more fun. That's a big deal.
However, technological advances always change life, typically in ways that are almost never foreseen, often not thought about much in retrospect.
They worried that the automobile would scare the horses, but in the end it hollowed out cities.
If anything is clear from history, it is that technological change brings unpredictable societal change, and that there will be winners and losers. Whether you are looking at global warming, inner city blight, small town decline, the death of family owned farms, political polarization, rising economic inequality, the rise in emotional problems including suicide -- the list goes on and on -- technological progress has its fingerprints all over them all.
Thus, we are in a bind. As technological progress accelerates, the number of people disadvantaged by that progress is rising. The disaffected portion of society is rising, and many of them sense that progress has not been good for them. As this number rises into the neighborhood of half the population, both democracy and technology are put at risk.
Yet, the obvious solution -- slow down the technology -- is a certain loser for our civilization because others on the planet will not slow down. And would use their advantage to gleefully stomp on us, particularly after all these years of our lording it over them.
So yes, Noah, you are on the right side on tech development, but I am uneasy with the "tech is obviously good for everyone" cheerleading. Simply the fact that we would need to force people to use the technology ought to clue us in to the way this particular message is faltering.
Another really simple reason for decelism might be that America is aging. Maybe old people are more fearful of change and less enthusiastic about the future.
excellent- and would only add some other popular decel phobias: GMOs, EVs, and SSRIs
GMOs- safe and provides cheap food abundance
EVs- clean and more performant than gasoline cars
SSRIs- the best we’ve got for depression and anxiety… for now!
This was a great read. Thank you for putting this together, I enjoyed it thoroughly. Are you on Threads by any chance?
Good article. Thanks very much.
Can you explain how we definitely know that AI isn't going to take away some people's jobs? And, a bit more far-fetched but as far as I know entirely possible, how do we definitely know AI won't trigger some sort of disaster (Skynet, etc)? I don't like being a "decel" but I've never heard any coherent arguments that AI is safe.
FWIW, as someone with an MPhil (all-but-thesis) in AI (1984, under Roger Schank), allow me to point out that the current round of AI is pure BS. There's no there there. For example. How do LLMs do multiplication? They look up the particular problem at hand in the database. If the particular problem at hand (e.g 1024 x 365) isn't in its data set, it says something stupid. The LLM technology is not capable of identifying abstract operations, recognizing that such an operation is being discussed, and performing such an operation when a specific answer is required. (Long story short: LLM's are template instantiation programs, not reasoning programs.)
You've been told "Neural nets are a model of neurons", right? That's a lie. A "neural net" "neuron" has under 10 inputs, under 10 outputs, and all those are to adjacent "neurons". An average mammalian neuron has hundreds of inputs, thousands of outputs, and accepts inputs from, and provides outputs to enormously distant other neurons. Oh, yes, and real neurons perform logical operations, not just sum-and-threshold, on subsets of their inputs. "Neural nets" are trivial, real neurons are enormously complex. You;'ve been lied to.
Of course, like my advisor, I do believe that computers can "become intelligent". But that will require our understanding what "intelligence" is, and we're not working on that.
This isn't "decelarationism", it's calling BS BS. Which is a rather different thing.
Congrats on finding a new chart for the reduction in Solar costs!