What do you think he’s getting wrong about our predicament? AI wasn’t really a focus in this talk, just showing how we knowingly develop dangerous tools and act against our collective interests because of our system of incentives and multipolar traps.
I just don’t think that the “exponential tech curve” is all that exponential or all that relevant a factor compared to for example the pretty low-tech way in which we’re burning ungodly quantities of fossil fuels and using the energy thus produced to eat the whole planet. It’s not only AI that I think is over-hyped, it’s many of the things I saw when scanning through the video transcript. Finely-tuned supply chains, genetically modified crops, ridiculous financial system fuckery, and other such things are increasingly required to keep it all barely chugging along, but it seems to me that they and “Tech” in general are not the cause of or the solution to our problems unless you go back to technology and modes of social organization invented in the 19th century and before. Crooked Timber: “As Cosma said, the true Singularity began two centuries ago at the commencement of the Long Industrial Revolution.”
But then again a substantial part of my reaction was prompted by things I read on searxing the word “metacrisis”, so perhaps not entirely fair to this video.
Fair enough all good points, but the reason we’re all here beyond the natural carrying capacity and eating the planet is because of the exponential tech curve (Haber-Bosch and others) that we’ve been in since discovering fossil fuels. If the energy is there, we will use it to grow at the detriment to everything else, it’s in our nature. If we somehow manage to complete the green energy transition that’s probably even worse for our long term survival, because instead of running out of accessible fossil fuels and being forced to degrow, we’ll keep the growth machine running and accelerate this mass extinction and knock down the rest of the planetary boundaries. All new technologies will allow us to increase the scale of our impacts to the planet.
Thanks for the link, I haven’t read it yet but it looks interesting.
Yeah it’s the “tech curve” being exponential that I don’t see happening. The Haber-Bosch process (after the end of the 19th century, but only by a few years) was revolutionary, and a fine example of the kind of rapid increase in our ability to exploit the hell out of everything that hasn’t been happening so much lately. The increase in technologically-enabled power may have started looking exponential at a certain point, but I don’t believe it has continued like that all the way to the present. The gains today are more incremental, less momentous. The rise and fall of Moore’s law shows a similar pattern in microcosm: Great new invention, rapid improvement, exponential growth that people assume will last forever, then its limits are approached and further progress in that direction is slow and complicated. When I try to imagine how the total curve of technological power has gone I can’t avoid the impression that its rate of growth topped out somewhere mid 20th century at the latest.
Sure it’d be disastrous if we somehow kept up for any great length of time the exponential growth in energy use, production, and population even without fossil fuels, but the idea that this might actually happen starting from this level seems more like a techno-optimist fantasy than any kind of realistic scenario worth considering. Like some other ideas of the Consilience Project it seems to me as if it might be more relevant to some future post-collapse civilisation that needs to avoid making the same mistakes that will bring down ours.
