A long time ago I started writing a novel about my city and a clash of cultures within its black neighborhoods. One of my characters was a young woman named April who got pregnant in highschool. She turned out to be one of the stronger characters in the story - a story in which several different factions across these neighborhoods have different interpretations of the same cultural aphorisms. One of them was “God don’t make no mistakes”.
The emphasis on this had to do with the way I loved April as a character. She was beautiful and essentially flawless, super healthy and clean. And if such a 17 year old can become pregnant a deliver a perfectly healthy child, whose fault is it that sex actually works the way it’s supposed to?
Of course people would say that it’s society’s fault and it goes directly to the question of the economy. The point I wanted to make was that if human beings can make babies the argument for birth control and abortion was not a biological one. It was an ethical one given that the overwhelming mass of 17 year olds are not capable of surviving in our economy. They NEED more years, presumably celibate years, to understand the complexity of our society and its economy. Since our leaders cannot be blatantly eugenic in their optics, the rhetoric has to twist in order to make it seem to be the fault of star-crossed lovers. But that’s not our evolutionary calendar, that’s just what kind of apologists we have for an economy that can’t afford as much sex as human beings are born to desire.
What I know now that I didn’t know then is that Westernizing countries who are propping up their economies one or two decades behind the American model are suffering a fertility crisis. Insert facts here. The case to be made for God making mistakes is only getting stronger.
Those of you who are familiar with my attitude about God, the laws of physics, and the indifferent rules of the universe also know that I’m positive on evolutionary psychology and free will. None of these facts are subject to our control, interpret them however you like. The universe is not a mistake. ‘Nuff said.
The Economy of AI
One of my favorite humorously informative channels is called Fireship. If you know, you know. Hmm. I’m thinking about how it used to be a dude named Darren Kitchen. Anyway in the latest, the Fireship dude, whose voice is the Turing benchmark requirement for AIs they still haven’t got near, did a good set on some of the brainiest scientific papers in the development of what is now LLM stuff. All of my compute heroes are in there, and my favorite is Claude Shannon.
It stands to [million monkey] reason that a proper human researcher could review those papers along with the proper LLM, proper harness and proper weights to find some heretofore impossibilities on the edge of what is known to humanity about compute hardware, software and networking. Hell, there’s probably a couple of childless bearded bros shacked up in a $10M studio apartment in Palo Alto doing just that. See what I’m getting at?
With enough money, which is always under somebody’s control, you can shift the economy in such a way that it makes you doubt the truth and beauty of 17 year old pregnant female. With just the right economy, you can asymmetrically combat the very idea of womanhood, or pregnancy. You can validate one kind of work and burn newbs to death like they used to do on Wall Street and then they used to do in the Big Five (and Enron) and I hear that they still do in medical residencies. You know what I mean. We peasants work our fingers to the bone, and all we get are bony fingers. Meanwhile fair haired Old Etonians get all of the clues and they need only work their fingers until their prints disappear. I mean nobody’s going to walk me through Claude Shannon’s ideas .. oh wait.. maybe Claudio.. nah. Too many people have already seen the Fireship video. It’s like NYC real-estate, it’s not that there’s no low-hanging fruit, but that 17,000 people are picking the same tree, and they started yesterday because they got the GPS location from the Ivy Cabal.
All of us normal humans possess the physical, emotional and mental capabilities to be able to do decent work. Yet very little of that is as exhausting and rewarding as being a decent parent. There’s a fundamental incapacity / misalignment between what kind of society and economy we inherit and what actually favors what God and the universe intended for our biological selves. I’m not trying to argue from Rousseau here. April was not a noble savage, she was just underemployed in 1990s America.
So if the AI economy is to survive, and I told you this in January, the token budgets are going to have to be very slimly profitable. The can of worms is sitting in the sun, plain as day. It’s going to be in the interest of the AI Bros to devalue common sense and to poison common knowledge so that they can create intellectual soma for the masses. You know they can do it. Just listen to Spotify for an hour. I won’t. I still haven’t lost my gag reflex.
20 Watt Bulb
The average brain burns about 260 calories per day. So how much are we going to waste on the economy of what AI might be able to do? The depends on the competition of our economies. Some folks will make bicycles, the most efficient machines for moving individuals. Some folks will make Ferrari SUVs. Some people will just walk.
There will be some difficulty getting the average mind to compete with the average artificial semi-intelligence, but the brain is many orders of magnitude more efficient and simpler to care for. Unless we keep running into more eugenicists.
All of this is rather unpersuasive until you remember that human beings are territorial and capable of horrific violence and destruction. It’s what we humans do. Let us not forget that we also have 17 year old males as well as females. If you take an unvarnished look at humanism, how does it deny what kind of animals we evolved to be? How can humanism ignore our mammalian cousins on the same branch of evolution?
It is this efficiency, our ability to survive in low-energy density environments that helps me understand why human beings will survive all of the crafted AI machinery. It’s yet another reason why, looking back on it, we still dig post-apocalyptic films and stories. We hunger to survive, even when we’re eating cake. We are born to be competitive. Every angry peasant wants a piece of the continent, a part of the main, and when they are Lefty, they want pieces and parts of Elon Musk. Never underestimate the damage a homeless bum can take out of artificial edifices, physical or social.
Once again, we have to make adjustments and considerations for this in our economies. In short, we cannot become complacent with anchoring our foundations in the cleverly crafted limbs, but in the center of gravity of the tree trunk of humanity.
BTW. The following is not fake. Maybe it’s a glitch, maybe not.
The only possible answer to the upcoming AI revolution and its destruction of jobs is a universal basic income (UBI) to ensure that everyone maintains today’s middle class economic standards. All current welfare programs and Social Security will be ended and those benefits replaced by UBI.
The second critical action will be to provide every household (even single persons) with a an AI equipped robot. People would no longer have to do daily housework, shopping or childcare and would effectively live like billionaires on their UBI.
Those who manage to have jobs can keep their individual incomes. Society’s production of goods by Ai robots will provide more than enough for all.
The money to pay for this will come from the sale of goods produced by AI run factories and delivered by robotic planes, trains and trucks. All companies will be highly profitable with virtually zero labor or management costs so they will be able to make high profits for investors while also paying the high taxes needed to finance UBI. The loss of jobs and income is going to happen with or without UBI but without that innovation society will collapse from revolution by the unemployed. It’s past time to begin serious planning for this eventuality.