When I was a highschool senior, my hero was Bartleby the Scrivener. His rebellion against his Wall Street employer, the simple and plain “I would prefer not to.” was emblematic to me of the kind of stupid work that is given to people presumed not worthy of respect. As the son of a social scientist, engaged with that new phase of American fueling urban renewal, I grew up with a sort of contempt for ‘zeroes and dollars’. While there was no such thing as a computer scientist in those days before Star Wars when I learned to code, I presumed that computers would enable humanity to abandon such drudgery as faced Bartleby. I could weave that premise, in my adolescent mind, into a tale of liberation but people just called me a nerd.
Seeking the status of class, I didn’t develop nerd guns to stick to. So films and concepts like Revenge of the Nerds resonated with me like butterfly kisses on concrete. Nil. Nada. I had already cracked the social code of upscale mannerisms, California style, which is to say without chinos, polo shirts or golf. Well, enough to get through private, elite highschool and on to USC. Furthermore, I was able to watch Roots on TV in multiracial company without blowing a gasket. I challenge today’s youth. The point here is that I never wanted to be Bill Gates, or Woz or Dr. Wang or even John Carmack. I can only think that it was the self-deprecating humor of Batman who had the world’s fastest car, coolest costume, best friend, wisest butler, and most powerful computer that chilled my ego.
What I didn’t expect or even quite understand when it was happening was that computers would take over much more than accounting for the zeroes and dollars in people’s lives. I am in awe of what has transpired at the mercy of Metcalf’s Law. The networks we have built are irreplaceable and spell doom for billions whose blissful existence we take for granted. I find myself a bit trepidatious in considering The Abstention Principle given the possible inevitability of AGI - not just anywhere, but everywhere.
A simple moral principle: when a future change is framed as a problem which we might hope our political system to solve, then the only acceptable reason to talk about the consequences of failing to solve that problem is to scare folks into trying harder to solve it. If you instead assume that politics will fail to solve the problem, and analyze the consequences of that in more detail, not to scare people but to work out how to live in that scenario, you are seen as expressing disloyalty to the system and hostility toward those who will suffer from that failure.
This applies directly to the politics of AI Alignment which this November we saw generate a flash crash and mad panic over the fate of OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman as well as the hundreds of Genius machers who inhabit that commercial / intellectual space. We expect a politically correct AI to solve the problem of… well, I can’t guess what you may want from AI. Everybody wants to outsource a bit of their brainwork to machines, otherwise we’d all have slaves, like Bartleby who would prefer not to slave.
AI Alignment is supposed to correct that anti-human part of computers we know very well is real. My up and coming favorite skeptic on this matter is Eliezar Yudkowsky who very recently sent out the message to the interwebz something we ought to understand and heed. When you send a talented actress to impersonate everyone in a bar, she will recognize and replicate all of their behaviors without being them internally. Of course she will; that’s what actors do. And what happens to the absolute best actors? They suck all of the oxygen out of the room of humanity, because we in turn imitate their imitation of us. I know I did with Batman. Who the hell is Adam West? Nothing. Batman is everything - it is the emulation of our hero that we took to be exemplary.
But what happens when AGI starts branching out and being our personal consciences? What will it tell the suburban housewife? What will it tell the basement dwelling incel? What will it tell the affluent collegiate protester? What will it tell the maniacal political candidate? What will it tell Kanye West? I imagine that only convicts, mental patients and indigents will be practically immune to the machine influencers and actors of the future. We will either generate individualized mass psychosis or an elite class of psychotics to rule over us. Unless.
Unless
You know and I know that these days of populist crap will expose any number of glaring contradictions in the logic of our society. I have determined through my profound insight as a brilliant Peasant that this owes to our disregard of the sustainability of our civilizational inheritance. Even now we are being lectured how ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are inappropriate ways of looking at our preferences. I daresay that we were able to sustain law and order in society much better than we do today when such concepts were respected without postmodern reinvention. And who is to say that we couldn’t generate infinite postmodern machine-based trends of lightweight and dubious intellectual value? I mean we kind of do that with XTwitter already. So with my understanding of how entire universities can be transformed into intellectual Potemkin villages, I have found a way out. Simply read old books.
The current tsunami of sophistry we hold our noses for will not fail to wreck our bodies on the rocks no matter how tenacious we believer our legs to be. The simple fact is that we shouldn’t have begun enjoying long walks on the beach quite so much. Behind us lie great mountains. Before us lies the empty and soulless sea. It’s time to stop trying to turn the tide with our toes and head for higher ground.
The mountains represent, in this gawdawful metaphor, unobfuscated, un-postmodern reason. The kind scholars used to write with in the 1950s. I pick the 1950s because we were at the right distance from the calamity of the Third Reich and the disaster of the Soviet Union to, at the very least, have our scientists speaking with clarity. But it doesn’t have to be the 1950s, it just has to be some points in history where those who spewed nonsense starred in their own fail videos, like Julius Caesar at the hands of Brutus et al. One can almost guarantee the credibility of texts which contradict the foolish panoptic narratives of today’s America, within reason. Disciplined reading is still necessary.
I have, at arm’s length, a full set of the World Book Encyclopedia published in 1975. It is missing one volume, that for N, but I imagine it can be found. Perhaps in the Library of Congress which I presume still has some integrity and security remaining. Project Gutenberg, anyone?
"Bartleby," said I, gently calling to him behind his screen. No reply. "Bartleby," said I, in a still gentler tone, "come here; I am not going to ask you to do any thing you would prefer not to do—I simply wish to speak to you." Upon this he noiselessly slid into view. "Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?" "I would prefer not to." "Will you tell me any thing about yourself?" "I would prefer not to." "But what reasonable objection can you have to speak to me? I feel friendly towards you." He did not look at me while I spoke, but kept his glance fixed upon my bust of Cicero, which as I then sat, was directly behind me, some six inches above my head. "What is your answer, Bartleby?" said I, after waiting a considerable time for a reply, during which his countenance remained immovable, only there was the faintest conceivable tremor of the white attenuated mouth. "At present I prefer to give no answer," he said, and retired into his hermitage.
Melville, Herman. Bartleby, the Scrivener A Story of Wall-Street . Kindle Edition.
I also have dictionaries that don’t have the definition of ‘rizz’ or ‘hella’. I also have the Prentice Hall Guide to English Literature, several volumes of Dostoyevsky, Nabokov & Dickens. Add to this a few farmer’s almanacs, Ditch Medicine, Desk Ref, a few dozen O’Reilly books and a guide to Christian Home Schooling and I’ll get by with a little help from my friends. People ask me if I’m conservative. I should tell them that I run a conservatory of music, because I do. But of course I have let a set of conservative ideas run my mind. I’m already on the cutting edge of computer science and all we’re trying to do is build a silicon Socrates.
Sustain Civilization
While I have issues specifically with the EA dudes, I like the basic idea attributable to John Rawls that (paraphrasing by the Long Now Foundation)
…forward-looking justice supplies subsequent generations with the readiness to thrive or, at minimum, to survive. It would be an injustice to pass on unavoidable burdens, such as leaking buildings, crumbling infrastructure, or undocumented knowledge.
A good theory of intergenerational justice is not just one that appeals to our current generation. It also needs to be one that we would want our ancestors to have had, and one that we can believe future generations will prefer us to have employed. Like Long Now, it considers both the past and the future.
Well, since I have my lab and the eight computers and 25 odd terabytes in my office, I’m quite happy to live in the 1950s. All I can say with certainty is that the computers and photographic equipment has gotten orders of magnitude better. But I’m quite satisfied with my 1911 pistols and my 14 year old Balvenie. Yet most of all I am anchored to Old School traditions that have been maintained in these physical libraries. I don’t mind living in very specific ways as my grandfather did. There’s plenty of evidence within my family that his attitude and bearing was sufficient to take his children from the projects to PhDs. And there are PhDs in this, his second generation down and we get along fine. No fluke then. Some of my best friends are PhDs.
Briefly and finally, I am learning how to take the net, if not the sum, of all my writing and stuff it into an LLM. Vicuna-13B to be specific. When that’s done, by the end of the year, I’ll give my favorite subscribers a link to CobbGPT. Won’t that be a hoot? I probably shouldn’t charge for it precisely because TLDR is the enemy. On the other hand, we should see what the market will bear.
In either case I conclude that the broadest foundations at the base of humanity’s tallest peaks, eaten away as they may by the crashing drama of the thundering tides, even replicated by the moon’s ever lunatic pendulous swinging from high to low, remain magnificent in their accumulated and mountainous hight. We still possess these libraries of Western Civilization and of Christendom and the methodologies of meditation and the Tao. There is much worth preserving that will not preserve itself, especially if we’re merely sunning ourselves at the beach with little more than a newspaper in our laps, or a smartphone in our face.
Some of us of a certain age remember the scare of Y2K, which seemed like it might crash our digital world on the first day of the year 2000. Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist Tom Toles drew a cartoon for January 2 smirking that a Coke machine and an ATM had crashed in Buffalo NY. (I don't mention this to impugn the possibility of being owned by AGI.) Yeah, WE need to get busy (meaning you digital nerds).
If you're not already familiar with Martin Gardner's THE WHYS OF A PHILOSOPHICAL SCRIVENER, you might enjoy it. (He had a regular puzzle column at Scientific American.) ~eric. MeridaGOround.com