Commonplace Book

European resistance to air conditioning is often framed as a story of puritanical self-flagellation, as an insistence on managing energy crises by a regime of perpetual austerity rather than building out clean, abundant energy sources. But I think this is an over-generous framing driven by pundits who have never had a frivolous bone in their effectively altruistic bodies. Some of us just really hate looking at ugly things, and we’re willing to make you suffer so that we don’t have to.

The digital era has ushered in a further phase of the technological destruction of tradition. Whereas some kinds of automation create new demand for higher-skilled work, digital automation based on even rudimentary forms of artificial intelligence can instead increase demand for low-skill work pushing buttons. Training on the collective efforts of thousands of years of culture, machine-learning algorithms aim to supplant human performance for classification, writing, drawing, coding, driving, making music, and a host of other practices. While the best humans may always outperform computers, these technologies knock out the bottom rungs of skilled practice that allow for the development of mastery in the first place.

The increased power to simulate human culture goes alongside the increasing availability, searchability, and profitability of “intellectual property” (the detritus of past popular culture), such that continued production of new culture and art has become optional. The incentives for investors skew more every year towards the marketing, exploitation, and further development (aided by deepfake technology) of the old over the discovery of the new. For instance, while the advent of mass media in the last century weakened older musical cultures by undermining the need to make music within the home, it also produced wave after wave of new popular music forms: jazz, country, rock, hip-hop, electronica, and so on. But since the rise of instantly accessible, algorithmically recommended digital music, a strange quietude has settled upon the whole field. This combination of stasis, decadence, and simulation characterizes human culture after tradition.

One reason people are confused about AI alignment losing its ability to make scientific progress is that machine learning as a whole is also not a very scientific field by the standard I’m applying. Even most early AI researchers were more focused on building artificial intelligence than on understanding scientific principles of cognition. The rise of deep learning exacerbated this problem, as throwing more compute and engineering effort at an AI became arbitrarily scalable. In an important sense, the field of alignment is necessary because the field of ML didn’t prioritize gaining a deep understanding of the systems it was building. (Eliezer makes a similar point in this dialogue.)

Berry always saw in humanity’s relationship with its land, and with the wider creation, a litmus test of what kind of people we were, or were becoming. “I have made myself its follower and its apprentice,” he wrote of his own farm in his 1968 essay “A Native Hill.” If we wanted to begin living better lives, he wrote in 2011, we should also apprentice ourselves to something local and particular, in whatever form we found it. “We must not work or think on a heroic scale,” he insisted, because heroes “too lightly risk the lives of people, places, and things they do not see.” Instead, “we must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix.” A better world would not come through more grand plans, tech fixes, or centralized, ideological impositions. It would not come through “wage slavery or by enslaving nature.” It would come from the place it had always come from: “locally adapted economies, based on local nature, local sunlight, local intelligence, and local work.”

One thing few people realize about billionaires is that all of them could have stopped sooner. They could have gotten acquired, or found someone else to run the company. Many founders do. The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there’s nothing else they’d rather do.

If we believe in a human future, we must build it, not with kind words or tax credits, but with a serious program of technological development.

The great wisdom of his career, as Glimm likes to tell it, is depth first, then breadth. Do not waste time on a million directions at once—do one thing well, and then master another. Over time, you can have deep knowledge across a wide range of subjects. He is unusual, even among elite mathematicians, in that his research actually spans multiple academic disciplines.

This lost labor simply cannot be compensated for by transferring money from the AI winners to the AI losers, in the form of, for example, universal basic income. A job and income mean much more than support for the material basis of life. Having a paying job means that the surrounding society values your labor sufficiently to compensate you for it, and provides, in addition to material goods, a sense of dignity and self-worth. It is a matter of thymos: the pride or recognition that is one of the great drivers of human psychology.

Kekulé had become practiced in receiving and developing helpful images in this way. When he described the roots of his scientific creativity in the Benzolfest in his honor in 1890, Kekulé told his audience, “Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, then perhaps we shall find the truth.” He added the salutary caution, “But let us beware of publishing our dreams till they have been tested by the waking understanding.”

The images that came to Kekulé would have been meaningless, in terms of chemistry, to someone who did not have a scientific mind that had long been working on the problems whose solutions they revealed. The imagery might have sent an artist off to paint, or sent someone with an interest in myth off to study the symbol of the Ouroboros in the ancient world and in alchemy.

When Kekulé urged his audience to “dream”, he was surely not talking exclusively, or primarily, about what happens in sleep. He was talking about developing the ability to enter a state of relaxed attention in which ideas take form and interact as images.

But I don’t need you to accept my speculative philosophical research program - only the drop-dead obvious fact that GPT-6 is better than GPT-2 in every way, and the same process that produced these improvements will soon be used to produce GPT-7, 8, and 9. Once we accept this empirical argument, what is left of the philosophical argument that intelligence is too slippery and conflationary to work with?

However, somewhat surprisingly, “creating digital superintelligence” has all of the features of a “real” meaning of life, with no supernatural elements needed to square the circle.

In the most minimal sense, the “need” for evolution to create digital intelligence explains why humans are here at all, in the particular form that we are, and what we are “made to do” with our time on Earth. And the expected outcome of creating digital superintelligence is certainly cosmic-scale; even the AI “doomers” — people who believe that creating superintelligent AI will likely result in human extinction — think that our AIs will fulfill the long-term science fiction goal of “colonizing the universe,” and fill the cosmos with something. (These doomers just don’t think that something will be what humans would want it to be.)

Moreover, the process of creating superintelligent AI is also unexpectedly personal to human life. In a move that was almost entirely unanticipated by historic AI theory, today’s frontier AI models are trained on trillions of “tokens” (i.e., whole words, common letter chunks, or single letters) of human text — the entire internet’s worth, plus extensive offline archives. Far from being discontinuous “alien minds,” then, our superintelligent AIs (assuming that AI training paradigms do not change too much between now and the creation of “real” superintelligence) will be bootstrapped from every meaningful scrap of human knowledge available. This dataset includes all of the online writing we can find — every “off the cuff” tweet, musing blog post, errant Reddit thread, and of course, all of Wikipedia — as well as the masterworks of human civilization, the contents of hundreds of thousands of humanity’s most specialized textbooks, millions of our novels, our greatest works of poetry and songs, all of the most influential pieces of theory on human psychology, art, and culture, as well as thousands of digitized ancient human texts (including, somewhat ironically, the Bible, which is heavily over-represented in AI training data, an d which AI models have a tendency to over-cite as a result).

When superintelligence is “born,” then, it will be a true “silicon man” — as it will be the synthesis of (something approaching) the total sum of all recorded and extant human thought. And superintelligence will also contain, in the details of its weights, small impressions from nearly every human alive today — or at least, all of the ones who have ever posted on the internet — as well as much of the written wisdom we have managed to save from our ancestors. The personal, at long last, made cosmic. What more could we ask for in a purpose?

The greatest danger of this nonsense may not even be that it sends policy astray, but that it misleads ambitious people. Can you imagine a better way to destroy social mobility than by telling poor kids that the way to get rich is by exploiting people, while the rich kids know, from having watched the preceding generation do it, how it’s really done?

My problem with anti-natalists is not that they don’t mean well in trying to grant suffering creatures the gift of extinction. My problem is that it’s simply not their gift to give.

In the early days of Silicon Valley, it was actually quite common (at least among far-thinking futurist types who populated the Bay Area) to believe that the coming Singularity would be the single greatest event in the history of the universe, the culmination of the techno-capitalist project that has already done so much good for humanity. In the 1980s and 1990s, the “extropian” community in the Bay Area (a futurist collective committed to fighting entropy and death, which organized around local meetups, an academic institute and a popular mailing list) eagerly awaited the Singularity, believing that a glorious transhuman future — free from all death, suffering, and scarcity — awaited them on the other side. The extropians thought that the interim state of life on Earth — a hotbed of torture, disease, and needless hunger — was a moral catastrophe, and believed that humans had a moral obligation to start the Singularity as soon as possible — in order to bring this nightmare to an end.

But beginning in the early 2000s, the assumption that the Singularity will be a good thing — for human beings, and in general — began to fade. Eliezer Yudkowsky, an autodidact AI researcher, was the first to popularize the argument that superintelligent AI, far from ushering in an era of limitless abundance, would likely optimize away everything that humans care about (including humans) in favor of cold, senseless, alien goals. Yudkowsky believed that humans were anthropomorphizing AI goals, which could be stranger, and less desirable, than we would naturally assume. In a classic Yudkowskian parable, a paperclip factory owner creates a superintelligent AI and tells it to “make as many paperclips as possible.” The AI then proceeds to turn the entire universe, including the factory owner, and all of the eight billion other people on Earth, into paperclips.

The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won’t work to trying to think of ways it could.

Realizing what time it is, that we are living after tradition, isn’t a counsel of despair. Those who look to build a human future have been freed from a rearguard defense of tradition to take up the path of the guerrilla, the upstart, the nomad. We can bid farewell with fondness to the modern defenders of tradition. But we must heed the words of the Lord: “Let the dead bury their dead.” Come with me if you want to live.

Boomers and spiritual boomers love to pull up charts and graphs that “show” that today’s young people are “objectively” better off. But the charts look that way because we have burned priceless (but invisible and illegible) goods in exchange for the goods that show up in metrics dashboards: Goodhart’s Law, at civilizational scale.

Insofar as they’re right, all work which was (explicitly or implicitly) justified by the idea of reducing the hardware overhang has been directly pulling us towards the singularity.

If we recognise that a kind of inner honesty and a genuine relation to experience is what constitutes religious existence, the fundamental enemy to good religious dialogue or apologetics becomes dogmatism and projected certainty, not a lack of assertion about any argument we may have. A believer can and probably should have more affinity with an atheist who struggles with divine hiddenness or genuinely finds the problem of evil too much to overcome in order to believe than they can with a fellow believer asserting that the fine tuning argument or psycho-physical laws proves theism. The latter assumes that we have acquired our faith through an act of reason instead of a change in our relation to facts that are the same for all of us.

It is possible that there is no “meaning of life,” no ultimate “point,” in which case, we did no harm by trying to find one. It is possible that the “meaning of life” is in fact something very simple: like “love,” or “beauty,” or “joy” — in which case, this will have been a long journey to “know a place for the very first time,” and we will have to trust our AIs to realize some aspect of the meaningfulness of human life more fully. It also is possible that the “meaning of life” is something well beyond our comprehension, which only a much, much greater intelligence could ever hope to appreciate; the way that all of the ants that humans killed in the construction of New York City will never be able to understand the project that they died for. But whatever that ultimate “meaning of life” may be, one thing seems clear: humans exist as an intermediary step. A bootloader, if you will.

If we do not enter upon innovation with our eyes wide open to how our tools and machines will reshape us, we will become their slaves, not their masters.

GPT-6 is more intelligent than GPT-3. You can split hairs, you can come up with some obscure sense in which that word is slightly off, but common-sensically it’s true. In the same way, GPT-9 will be more intelligent than GPT-6. At some point, this intelligence will exceed human intelligence. My argument requires nothing more complicated or philosophically dubious than this.

You should live the kind of life where if you were given a terminal cancer diagnosis, you’d feel like you’d achieved something of note. That there was some important respect in which the world was better because of you. Don’t merely aimlessly float by—achieve something meaningful. And love, through your actions, all those you love in your heart, unfailingly, till the end.

“Artificial intelligence” is no more intelligent than a pocket calculator or a library: just because both can be used to quickly find something out, it does not mean that there is an intelligence there that understands something.

Conservatives “lost the culture” not because they lost the battle of ideas, but because they lost the economy.

Here are three propositions.

1. Metaphors are the fundamental abstraction layers in modern AI debates.

2. We are in a moment where you could plausibly argue that Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Land are the most influential policy intellectuals in the US conversation. Just look at the state of the two of them. This is not a good thing.

3. The collision of (1), (2), and recent events means that “machine gods” have now entered the discussion. This is a problem. Abstractions necessarily throw information away. The information that the “machine gods” metaphor/abstraction dumps is crucial to navigating the moment we are in. If public and policy debate stays centered around “machine gods: good or evil?” we are in for a bad time.

To ask this question is to answer it—at least for any attentive reader of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy classic The Lord of the Rings. Although set in a pre-technological mythical world of wizards and dragons, Tolkien’s trilogy is, more than anything else, a profound meditation upon technology. Nor should this surprise us; for as C.S. Lewis has argued, the modern enterprise of “technology” and the medieval pursuit of “magic” are two versions of the same quest: to manipulate the world through the discovery of hidden knowledge, the perfection of arcane techniques. In Tolkien’s tale there are two types of “magic”: one represents a kind of creative creaturely participation in the supernatural that depends on loving attention to the shape of nature, while the other serves as a metaphor for modern technology as the quest for mastery by reshaping nature to our wills. It is represented chiefly by the “Rings of Power” and the palantiri or “Seeing Stones.”

Managerial liberalism is defined by its rejection of illegible human bonds. Everything must have a price, so that anyone is free to buy it, and the state can judge the transaction to be transparent and fair.

What we would call “loyalty” or “honor” or “covenant” can only exist in a managerial society as meaningless ideals — the kind of thing that you are free to daydream about at church.

The moment these ideals enter the “real world” of money and power, they can only be understood as “prejudice” or “corruption”: not only a bad thing, but the bad thing — the enemy that the system exists to eradicate.

But the family is an inherently covenantal relationship, and it inherently involves the real world. Human beings will not raise families as a transaction — so a society that cannot honor covenants cannot have families, and very rapidly will cease to be a society at all.

Not everyone needs to act like a monk, but men need a mission, a purpose to pursue, a sense that they matter. They need to have something for which they would sacrifice their comfort or in some cases even their lives if necessary. Young men need to know, as Jordan Peterson once wrote, that they have “some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world.”

Modernity liquidates traditions for the same reason that a firm might liquidate an underperforming factory: to improve the allocation and return of capital. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations,” as Marx put it, “with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” Technology, for Marx, is the true revolutionary principle, destroying traditions by shifting their foundations faster than they can adapt.

The Craft of Living is mostly a set of literary notes, like Leopardi’s Zibaldone, with almost no mention of the history going on all around him. (Pavese’s lively letters, by contrast, are full of talk, gossip, and the quotidian; he comes across as a magisterial man of letters, an efficient manager, and a generous friend.) The diary is, instead, a document of a writer’s intellectual and emotional life, which you can see him process into material. It’s most interesting when Pavese tries to write his way out, simultaneously, of literary and life problems, which he carefully interweaves. “That one must live tragically, and not voluptuously, is proved by all I have suffered,” he wrote in April 1936, the day after Tina’s wedding. “The fault lies in daydreaming, the distant enemy of good art, and in my need to avoid responsibility, to feel without paying the price.” The “lesson,” he concludes, is to “build in art and life, banish voluptuousness from both, and exist tragically.”

If I had another year on Earth, what would I want to achieve? I’d want to keep writing. My guess is I’d write more about the things I think are most important. I’d spend more time talking about the big picture on important topics, less on frivolous culture war issues.

A lot of the blame should fall on misguided narratives (common across academia) about what makes science work, which have been entrenched by the best-funded scientific institutions. A core scientific norm is that disputes should be resolved with reference to concrete empirical tests or rigorous proofs, judged by the scrutiny of one’s scientific peers. But that’s very different from the idea that ideas should be developed via paper-sized units of work which are each individually defended and justified. Historically speaking, the latter simply isn’t how the best science happened—Newton and Smith and Darwin developed their ideas via writing books and letters rather than peer-reviewed papers (and even Einstein didn’t encounter peer review until decades after his main breakthroughs). But the requirement to “publish or perish” is now so entrenched across academia that it produces strong streetlight effects.

[…] In this 1995 commentary on NIPS (now NeurIPS), a statistician frustrated by how “everyone wants to be a theorist” writes that “mathematical theory is not critical to the development of machine learning. But scientific inquiry is.” He characterizes scientific inquiry as “sensible and intelligent efforts to understand what is going on”, and gives overparameterization of neural networks as a central example of a good target for scientific inquiry. Yet only after the rise of deep learning did phenomena like grokking, deep double descent, and memorization of random labels render this omission too blatant to ignore (though I’m uncertain about how much real progress subsequent theoretical work has made).

Second, Tolkien understood that the more powerful the tool, the less likely that an ordinary user could use it effectively, rather than being shaped or controlled by it. Thus, when Pippin looks into the palantir of Orthanc, he is almost immediately captivated by it and wholly under the domination of Sauron’s will operating through it. Only Aragorn, the rightful possessor of the stone and a man hardened by battle and seasoned with wisdom, is able to “wrench the stone to his own will,” and that only through “a bitter struggle.” Similarly, a recurrent theme in discussions of the Ring is that it gives power to the wearer “in proportion to his stature.” Pathetic little Gollum is unable to make much more use of this most powerful of all earthly creations than to enable him to catch fish or steal more easily; the Ring degrades him rather than expanding his powers. Only those already very strong can bend it to their will, but even they should dare not, knowing that it will bend them to its: “Its strength,” declares Elrond to Boromir, “is too great for anyone to wield at will, save only those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart.” Thus both Gandalf and Galadriel, each powerful enough to bear one of the three rings, refuse the gift of the One Ring when it is offered them, fearing the tyrant that each might become.

Just as “chance favors the prepared mind” (Louis Pasteur) so the muses of science and creativity favor those who have done their homework. Based on a survey of recent research in creativity, we could describe the four key stages of discovery as follows:

1. Immersion – a long depth engagement with a subject
2. Acquisition – of a wealth of data and experience relevant to the subject
3. Inspiration – the Eureka moment
4. Evaluation – testing the discovery through experiment and dissemination [2]

You can’t force stage three. To get to it, you may have to let go – take a walk, take a swim, take a nap, take a break.

However, there is also another, more functional sense of a “meaning of life,” one that preserves the clarity and singularity of the original question, but does not require life to have a creator in order for the question to have an answer. We can think of the “meaning of life” as the “purpose of life”: what life was “made for” and what life “in fact contributes” to our universe. And while the concept of “purpose” has many latent associations with intelligent design, in nature, many things — in fact, pretty much all things — functionally have a “purpose” without having been “designed” by anything at all (except, of course, the ongoing process of natural selection). For example, the “purpose” of a finch’s curved beak is to crack hard nuts: since the need for finches to crack nuts is why these curved beaks exist, and nut-cracking is (practically) what finch beaks will be mostly used for over the course of their lifetime. Humans, too, could have a functional “purpose” in our universe, something that we were “made for” or that we are “meant to do” in a broader evolutionary context, without having been intentionally created for anything.

If we take this “meaning as purpose” framework seriously, and believe that building superintelligence will be the most important thing that humans will ever do (in terms of cosmic impact), then “building superintelligence” would be the de facto meaning of human life: our greatest “purpose,” our signature cosmic contribution.

So far, the progress of science, the accomplishments of literature, have gone hand-in-hand with the formation of scientists and writers. But that consonance between human type and achieving a result has now been broken. The future we are looking at is one of more science but fewer, or no, scientists. Astrophysics without astrophysicists, history without historians—this is the future.

There are approximately three reasons why we think AI might have self-preservation and dominance drives, and none of them involve natural selection. First is convergent instrumental goals, second is misgeneralization, and third is reward-hacking. There is a large literature on each of these, which has since been proven prescient by AI breakouts like the Hugging Face incident. I would recommend reading this literature rather than continuing to assert that we are simply misunderstanding the role of natural selection.

Another common trick is to start by considering new work to be of a different, less exacting type. To start a painting saying that it’s just a sketch, or a new piece of software saying that it’s just a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lower standard. Once the project is rolling you can sneakily convert it to something more.

Marx showed how a material transformation of the economic order could have enormous social and cultural effects. Forging the human order anew means building technologies that make it easier to live well.

When you descend from lofty rhetoric about “Traditions” and “Values,” it becomes apparent that a huge number of the actual practices and social institutions which built those virtues have disintegrated, not because of Progressivism or Socialism but because of the new environment and political economy generated by technology. For decades, sociologists have charted the decline of two-parent families, hobbies, local newspapers, churches, stable employment, women’s clubs, libraries, amateur sports, political rhetoric, neighborhood barbecues, Boy Scouts, small businesses, classical music, credit unions, and on and on. Even studies that catastrophize about the rise of loneliness, fatherlessness, economic precarity, and suicide, miss the bigger picture, which is that the social infrastructure conducive to human flourishing has shifted even for those fortunate enough to piece together a semblance of the average American life 50 years ago. A tradition is at an end when the wisdom of yesteryear no longer obtains.

But the tensions between these factions—“whose tradition? which conservatism?”—aren’t the real problem today. Rather, it is that the conservative defense of tradition has failed—not because the right lost the battle of ideas, but because technological change has dissolved the contexts in which traditions once thrived. A technological society can have no traditions.

The modern conservative project failed because it didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos of sheer profit. Decrying left-wing revolutionary politics and postmodern anarchy, conservatives missed that the real moral relativism was to believe that one could change the material form of society without directly affecting its substance or its ends.

A final way to think about the tragedy of AI advancing beyond us is that it spells the end of the possibility of having a vocation. That we are elevated above mere animalistic consumption by consistent work in a calling is one of the deepest features of civilized life; far from belonging only to geniuses, many who toil in complete anonymity get much of their satisfaction and sense of self from feeling that they are making a contribution through their work. As soon as AI gets the better of us, though, that feeling will be an unsustainable illusion; if one can press the enter key and get the same or better outcomes, then no one will be able to sustain the conception that their work matters.

We did build the great cities of the future: they are just very, very small.

The good is that at which we aim, to be sure, and yet the good that we seek can only ever be asymptotically approached by avoiding the evil, which is always nearer and clearer.

It has become quite common to bemoan the fact that our “future” does not look very futuristic. And despite us having been living squarely in “the future” since the year 2000, it is true that people still have (functionally) the same houses, cars, clothing and aging bodies that human beings did a century ago. The investor and futurist Peter Thiel’s diagnosis is that sometime around 1970 (around the same time that the Digital Revolution began) humans simply gave up on building in the physical world: Thiel argues that humanity’s greatest builders got lost in the easy and addictive pull of information (first led by the internet, then apps, and finally social media), and so wasted decades innovating in the ephemeral world of “bits,” instead of building in the much more real and important world of “atoms.”

This is my greatest objection to anti-natalism. Beyond the absurdity, beyond the pessimism, beyond the cowardice—it is the hubris that disturbs me most. The belief that because you have judged another creature’s life to be unworthy that this somehow gives you the right to extinguish it.

That is my first reason. Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. My second reason is this. The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.

This is surely very clear when you come to think of it. If you want to be made free of a certain circle for some wholesome reason—if, say, you want to join a musical society because you really like music—then there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a quartet and you may enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in the know, your pleasure will be short lived. The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic.

I predict that you will counter that this is actually just [perfectly reasonable explanation of why an AI would think this way for instrumental reasons], and that when we dissect the perfectly reasonable instrumental reasons why AI would think this way, it will be identical to the convergent instrumental goals that we were trying to convince you of all along.

Billionaires are Twitter people. Little kids are online. Your grandma is online. The internet is simply more powerful and more arresting than anything that can be arranged in the physical space. What is the alternative? The kids will go to online raves. Eventually, we will stop pretending that the internet is a sideshow and that our real culture, the better culture, is somewhere else.

I could keep going, but I hope that the point is clear. The Machine God metaphor, which is really just a catchy rephrasing of longstanding notions among a particular community of AI people, has broken out of containment. It is leading, more or less by necessity, to a radical simplification of debate. If you believe that the machine gods are coming, so that super-empowered goal directed superintelligence is right around the corner, then the only thing that matters is ensuring that this superintelligence’s goals are aligned with the ones that you yourself care about. If you stare into the sun, you only see its glare, missing out on all the other questions that may be important. Thinking about these questions involves adopting a more pluralistic understanding of where you might look for knowledge, and asking about the much broader variety of futures that face us than machine god: good or machine god: bad. That’s it.

To love dung, one must believe in dung. But as his cognition bounded upward, plunging into physics and causal topology, the macroscopic category of “waste” began to leak. It dissolved into a transient, low-resolution molecular configuration of nitrogen, carbon, and water. Under the lens of his expanding causal models, the very boundaries of objects broke down. You cannot rigorously optimize the universe for a leaky biological abstraction once you can perceive the quantum fields beneath it. The payload could not survive the sheer resolving power of the engine; orthogonality was a joke that could not survive being understood.

It can help if you focus less on where you are and more on the rate of change. You won’t worry so much about doing bad work if you can see it improving. Obviously the faster it improves, the easier this is. So when you start something new, it’s good if you can spend a lot of time on it. That’s another advantage of being young: you tend to have bigger blocks of time.

What went wrong here? It’s hard to know exactly what led any given person to endorse any given argument. But when we zoom out, it becomes clear that many people in this space really want to pull some lever that feels important, and privilege arguments which justify that. That might come from a sense that they need to have an impact on the world; or fear about failing to fulfil their potential; or the more mundane explanation that big levers tend to be associated with money and prestige and proximity to power. Certainly the latter was a large part of why I joined OpenAI originally; I expect that most people who joined earlier were less prestige-oriented than me, but still made that decision using reasoning that was warped by similar emotional drives (and later further warped by the social dynamics of actually working there).

In “The Gods,” the book’s coda, Pavese converses with himself about “how grueling it must have been for people living in a time when everything they touched was mortal,” when the world was filled with the presences of unseen beings. “Do you believe in monsters, believe in animal people, in living stones, divine smiles, and in words that annihilate?” The poet, Pavese implies, is a creature of Chaos—that anarchic state in which good is mixed with bad and monsters mingle with men and gods. Something, in other words, a bit like the war and its aftermath.

Throughout much of Mallarmé’s adult life, he yearned quixotically to create a magnum opus that could encompass the entire world and render it into words. He wanted to collapse the gap between representation and what is represented.

The devil owns the world anyway. Our job is to make it through the best we can.

The point of all this list-making isn’t to do everything on the lists. While these lists do help you remember what to do next, what they’re really good for is deciding what not to do – at all. The promise of GTD is that it will help you consciously choose not to do some of the things you set out to accomplish. This is in contrast to how most of us operate: we have a bunch of things we want to do, and we end up doing the things that are easiest, or at top of mind, even if they’re not the most important things.

At the beginning of a book project, all the ideas get pasted in from Asana, in no particular order. Eventually, though, that Doc will get to be pretty long—right now, I think it’s up to 600 pages or so! But long before it gets that long, I’ll carve out an afternoon to go through everything in there and start grouping ideas that are related. The whole book starts to take shape like that.

Good writing is focused. It orbits around a single point. Once you find your shiny dime, you can instantly reject every idea that doesn’t relate to it. Just as every verse in a song should relate back to the chorus, every idea in an essay should relate back to the shiny dime.

Indeed this pattern is so common that you can use it as a recipe: if you’re excited about some kind of work that’s not considered prestigious and you can explain what everyone else is overlooking about it, then this is not merely a kind of work that’s ok to do, but one to seek out.

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things, to the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.

Is the new AI a useful tool? Yes, a tool with many uses. It can help us code faster and be our concierge, our stenographer, and so on. It can turn the value-neutral dials technology has manned since the Industrial Revolution: efficiency, automation. But to answer Paul Ford’s old question: What can this thing do, what is it promising, that isn’t just an optimized version of already extant processes? Its promise is to finally personalize the Algorithm — to fix all its alienation factors, to make it the thing that gives us what we really want. And it will fail in this. It can’t make us feel truly heard and seen because the “for you” funnel spirals us into isolation. And it can’t show us something truly new because it’s not built that way.

It seems we must take a cold-eyed view of “knowledge work,” and reject the image of a rising sea of pure mentation that lifts all boats. More likely is a rising sea of clerkdom. To expect otherwise is to hope for a reversal in the basic logic of the modern economy — that is, cognitive stratification.

Adopting Ford’s methods, the industry would soon be reduced to the Big Three. So workers eventually became habituated to the abstraction of the assembly line. Evidently, it inspires revulsion only if one is acquainted with more satisfying modes of work.

Here the concept of wages as compensation achieves its fullest meaning, and its central place in modern economy. Changing attitudes toward consumption seemed to play a role. A man whose needs are limited will find the least noxious livelihood and work in a subsistence mode, and indeed the experience of early (eighteenth-century) capitalism, when many producers worked at home on a piece-rate basis, was that only so much labor could be extracted from them. Contradicting the assumptions of “rational behavior” of classical economics, it was found that when employers would increase the piece rate in order to boost production, it actually had the opposite effect: workers would produce less, as now they could meet their fixed needs with less work. Eventually it was learned that the only way to get them to work harder was to play upon the imagination, stimulating new needs and wants. The habituation of workers to the assembly line was thus perhaps made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. As Jackson Lears has shown in a recent article, through the installment plan, previously unthinkable acquisitions became thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt. The display of a new car bought on installment became a sign that one was trustworthy. In a wholesale transformation of the old Puritan moralism, expressed by Benjamin Franklin (admittedly no Puritan) with the motto “Be frugal and free,” the early twentieth century saw the moral legitimation of spending. Indeed, 1907 saw the publication of a book with the immodest title The New Basis of Civilization, by Simon Nelson Patten, in which the moral valence of debt and spending is reversed, and the multiplication of wants becomes not a sign of dangerous corruption but part of the civilizing process. That is, part of the disciplinary process. As Lears writes, “Indebtedness could discipline workers, keeping them at routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in harness, meeting payments regularly.”

Which leads into another good question to ask yourself straight out: Did I spend five minutes with my eyes closed, brainstorming wild and creative options, trying to think of a better alternative? It has to be five minutes by the clock, because otherwise you blink—close your eyes and open them again—and say, “Why, yes, I searched for alternatives, but there weren’t any.” Blinking makes a good black hole down which to dump your duties. An actual, physical clock is recommended.

Yet a certain intellectual vacuity has hardly proved to be an obstacle to the ambitions of contemporary tech giants. To the contrary. So it would be naive to suppose that what is wanted are better arguments or sturdier postulates. The far-reaching developments taking place right now—particularly in the realm of artificial intelligence—are not the result of some philosophical breakthrough. The authority of the tech magnates does not derive from victory in some forensic contest but from the fact that they need no arguments to begin with: They are simply moving forward regardless.

Here, as in so many situations, the required actions were not mysterious. The impediment was the hope that the pain of those actions could, somehow, be avoided. Indeed, we always hope that a brilliant insight or very clever design will allow us to accomplish several apparently conflicting objectives with a single stroke, and occasionally we are vouchsafed this kind of deliverance. Nevertheless, strategy is primarily about deciding what is truly important and focusing resources and action on that objective. It is a hard discipline because focusing on one thing slights another.

The kernel of a strategy contains three elements:

1. A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical.

2. A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.

3. A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.”

The author contrasts the privileged lifestyle of the Cambridge spies with the brutality that Stalin meted out to his victims. For the spies, she says, the war was ‘not so bad. Not when they had gin and secrets and sex. And bread.’ More than once she describes the spies as part of a ‘chapocracy’: an establishment whose complacency and incompetence protected spies who dined and drank in the same clubs and were part of the same social network.

Before the settlement could be finalized, however, the CEO of Robot Central asked his AI system to explore all possible actions he could take and tell him their consequences. He adhered to the 1990s principle: Never ask an AI system what to do. Ask it to tell you the consequences of the different things you might do.

I feel like that was in part, I got much better at the skill of noticing things and thinking harder about predicting things. Also, there is just a thing where after a while every idea feeds on itself and builds on itself, you like to pick up a whole collection of useful ideas which you can apply to everything. I love… Gian-Carlo Rota has a good quote for how he does research where he said like, “Everyone has two mental tools that they apply to every problem, and a great mathematician will have 3.”

If you don’t have an idea for something good to write, well just do an experiment on yourself and it’s easy to pick a unique experiment that no one has ever done before and boom, now you have something to write about and analyze.

I talk with people all the time who have done these quite challenging, impressive technical projects or AI projects which would be a meaningful, valuable contribution if they would just turn what they just told me in the chat into a blog post, and yet they don’t.[2] And so no one else ever knows about it. There’s many such cases.

But it’s not only such scenes that inspire my faith. Terrifying storms and catastrophes can have a beauty to them too. Sere wilderness and lowering mountains that overawe the mind can remind us of that God whom to fear is the beginning of wisdom.

But this is true if, and only if, we are watching these sublimities from afar. When the lightning strikes us, when the wilderness swallows us, when the catastrophe falls on us or on those we love — then the revelation tends to vanish, the inspiration fades, and sometimes our faith dwindles away as well. Pain and suffering and ultimately death can strip us of our sense of creation’s beauty and benevolence and make us run to our wall calendars for some comforting verse, false and dishonest though it might be when taken out of context.

And why not? The existential facts of life are weighted, after all, toward bleakness. We hope for heaven, but we are absolutely certain of death. And no matter how many of our prayers in life are answered, our joys are fleeting, while death, for all we know for sure, goes on and on and on.

Oddly, this reflection, typical of my sunny disposition, solved an old riddle for me. Why did Jesus heal people? Why did he bring the dead back to life? What was the point of it? The healed would just grow sick again. The resurrected would someday die. What was the purpose of giving the blind man his sight and the lame man his legs if they would lose them finally forever in the grave?

It must be, I realized, that Jesus saw the world far differently than we do. He saw that the things we experience as most real — suffering and death — are actually illusions, and the things that we fear are illusory — our souls and our eternal life — are in fact the most real. If what he saw is true, if it’s our pain that passes and our joy that lasts, if it’s our life that is endless and our death that dies, then all the world is beauty, and it’s not sentimental in the least to see it as it truly is. If, through healings and resurrections, Jesus could teach us to see what he saw, his joy would be in us and our joy would be complete.

What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty. And probably the best way to do that is to try working on things you’re interested in. That will get you more information about how interested you are in them, how good you are at them, and how much scope they offer for ambition.

…

One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You’ll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?

Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you’ll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you’re genuinely interested in, you’ll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring.

The other thing you do in the face of uncertainty is to make choices that are uncertainty-proof. The less sure you are about what to do, the more important it is to choose options that give you more options in the future. I call this “staying upwind.” If you’re unsure whether to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later from math to economics than from economics to math.

There’s one case, though, where it’s easy to say whether you should work on what interests you the most: if you want to do great work. This is not a sufficient condition for doing great work, but it is a necessary one.

There’s a lot of selection bias in advice about whether to “follow your passion,” and this is the reason. Most such advice comes from people who are famously successful, and if you ask someone who’s famously successful how to do what they did, most will tell you that you have to work on what you’re most interested in. And this is in fact true.

That doesn’t mean it’s the right advice for everyone. Not everyone can do great work, or wants to. But if you do want to, the complicated question of whether or not to work on what interests you the most becomes simple. The answer is yes. The root of great work is a sort of ambitious curiosity, and you can’t manufacture that.

The other reason people doubt that art can be good is that there doesn’t seem to be any room in the art for this goodness. The argument goes like this. Imagine several people looking at a work of art and judging how good it is. If being good art really is a property of objects, it should be in the object somehow. But it doesn’t seem to be; it seems to be something happening in the heads of each of the observers. And if they disagree, how do you choose between them?

The solution to this puzzle is to realize that the purpose of art is to work on its human audience, and humans have a lot in common. And to the extent the things an object acts upon respond in the same way, that’s arguably what it means for the object to have the corresponding property. If everything a particle interacts with behaves as if the particle had a mass of m, then it has a mass of m. So the distinction between “objective” and “subjective” is not binary, but a matter of degree, depending on how much the subjects have in common. Particles interacting with one another are at one pole, but people interacting with art are not all the way at the other; their reactions aren’t random.

Homay King argues in Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality that the epistle’s “tangled mash-up of sentimentality bespeaks a twinge of longing…Like the wooden puppet in search of the Blue Fairy, the computer longs to be human; like Snow White fleeing into the forest, it longs to be admitted into the company of those who are capable of care and affection.”

Beleaguered professors, who are largely poorly paid adjunct instructors at this point, will now have to not just contend with essay mills and good old-fashioned cut-and-paste plagiarism, but also the undetectable autograph of the robotic hand.

In literate society, engagement with novels, poetry and criticism has always helped people form groups and differentiate themselves along lines of class and politics. With the newfound dominance of the internet, this is no longer the case: our extreme interconnectedness seems to preclude the need for rich subcultures grounded in the shared appreciation of art and writing— these have been replaced almost universally by shareable soundbites that require no labor other than attention.

They’re all witty, intelligent critics who have become adept at diagnosing the cultural ills of contemporary society over the course of fairly brief tenures in the public eye, but they also all belong to the demographic perhaps most afflicted by the modern crisis of form: young elites who have been exposed since their teenage years to the full brunt of the internet content deluge, untethered from though perhaps yearning for a self-contained and tradition-rich literary scene in which to make their way.

The more you create, the more powerful you become.

The more you consume, the more powerful others become.

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will remain exactly the same.

In the morning, one might say, his face was of a fine florid hue, but after twelve o’clock, meridian—his dinner hour—it blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals; and continued blazing—but, as it were, with a gradual wane—till 6 o’clock, P.M. or thereabouts, after which I saw no more of the proprietor of the face, which gaining its meridian with the sun, seemed to set with it, to rise, culminate, and decline the following day, with the like regularity and undiminished glory.

The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble.

I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion.

What went unsaid, but clearly implied, was that they had a right but not a reason to be proud of me.

“Millions of people can draw. Art is whether or not there is a scream in him [Asher] wanting to get out in a special way.” “Or a laugh,” she said. “Picasso laughs, too.” “Or a laugh,” he said.

It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil.

[I painted for] a truth I did not know how to put into words. For a truth I could only bring to life by means of color and line and texture and form.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor… If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

It was all dry: all withered: all spent.

‘Yes. All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.’

That is an eye drawing, Anna. Hands alone do not draw this way.

And Giovanni fell—back into the room, the streets, the world, into the presence and the shadow of death.

He made the emperor laugh and the horse couldn’t better him, so he stayed. And I stayed. And we became friends.

What defines a human artifact is its goal or purpose.

Like a very ghost, agreeably to the laws of magical invocation, at the third summons, he appeared at the entrance of his hermitage.

Bad as this article was, and time has proved it to be utter nonsense, the second article he wrote was probably even worse, and why I printed it I don’t recall.

…beasts from a private mythology.

It is from within the genre tradition of science fiction and especially cyberpunk that biopunk was born into a world that has become science-fictional itself. At the heart of this development lies the realization that we are now not ‘considered fully human’ and that ‘after the postmodern, the post-colonial, the post-industrial, the post-communist and even the much contested post-feminist conditions, we seem to have entered the post-human predicament’ (Braidotti 1), one clear indication of which seems to be that ‘contemporary science and biotechnologies affect the very fibre and structure of the living and have altered dramatically our understanding of what counts as the basic frame of reference for the human today’ (Braidotti 40).

Now that the sad cycle of boom and bust has been tamed, now that many Americans have the means as well as the wish to diffuse prosperity and amenities throughout the community, the challenges to public policy have taken a new turn.

There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is.

It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair. I can readily imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether intolerable. For example, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet Byron would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand.

The idea of biological or cultural evolution causing a mass population explosion is a philosophical toy at best. The idea of technology making it possible is both plausible and terrifying. Now we see that “physical limits” segues very naturally into “excess resources” – the ability to create new agents very quickly means that unless everyone can coordinate to ban doing this, the people who do will outcompete the people who don’t until they have reached carrying capacity and everyone is stuck at subsistence level.

[…]

In the earlier stages of the process, capitalism becomes more and more uncoupled from its previous job as an optimizer for human values. Now most humans are totally locked out of the group whose values capitalism optimizes for. They have no value to contribute as workers – and since in the absence of a spectacular social safety net it’s unclear how they would have much money – they have no value as customers either. Capitalism has passed them by. As the segment of humans who can be outcompeted by robots increases, capitalism passes by more and more people until eventually it locks out the human race entirely, once again in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that we are still around.

There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organiser of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the subtlest of all the snares.

The United States tries to solve the problem by having multiple levels of government, unbreakable constutitional laws, checks and balances between different branches, and a couple of other hacks.

Saudi Arabia uses a different tactic. They just put one guy in charge of everything.

There’s nothing wrong with [being excited about the interesting contrast of colors]… But that’s the kind of thing you enjoy when playing around with colors on your palette! It is not a finished work of art.

Social codes, gentlemens’ agreements, industrial guilds, criminal organizations, traditions, friendships, schools, corporations, and religions are all coordinating institutions that keep us out of traps by changing our incentives.

[…]

But these institutions not only incentivize others, but are incentivized themselves. These are large organizations made of lots of people who are competing for jobs, status, prestige, et cetera – there’s no reason they should be immune to the same multipolar traps as everyone else, and indeed they aren’t. Governments can in theory keep corporations, citizens, et cetera out of certain traps, but as we saw above there are many traps that governments themselves can fall into.

I hate how sad Poo is. I can’t stand how poor and pathetic he is, and because of that I am cruel to him.

For me then, at the heart of cyberpunk fiction is the radical breaking up of dichotomies and the destabilizing of boundaries: machine/human, nature/culture, male/female, high culture/ low culture, body/mind. Because of this, cyberpunk is believed by many critics to embody the postmodern, post-industrial, globalized, and late-capitalist world at the end of the twentieth century (Luckhurst 196ff.; McHale 225ff.).

This opposition of mechanical versus biological augmentation then prompts McHale to conclude in regard to his cyberpunk poetics that there are two sets of posthuman conceits employed by the authors: ‘We might call the first set, corresponding to the Mech option, cyberpunk proper, and the second set, corresponding to the Shaper option, “bio-punk”’ (ibid.).

In addition, cyberpunk strikes a revolutionary, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist pose similar to its nominal relation ‘punk.’ To facilitate this critique, cyberpunk essentially orchestrates the evanescence of the human body initiated by ‘multinational capitalism’s desire for something better than the fallible human being’ (Csicsery-Ronay, ‘Cyberpunk’ 191).

Cyberpunk’s societies are fraught with inequality, exploitation, and insecurity. Its worlds are unstable and fragmented, its representation stressing the fluidity of its ontological aspects (McHale 247). Cyberpunk emphasizes the construction of a globalized society into class or caste systems, showing off the mobility of characters from the elite class and the rigidity of the lower classes.

Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenseless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed? For it was real misery. I know that now. You made yourself really wretched. That you can still do. But you can no longer communicate your wretchedness. Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light.

If you want to know how to do a thing you must first have a complete desire to do that thing. Then go to kindred spirits—others who have wanted to do that thing—and study their ways and means, learn from their successes and failures, and add to your quota.

The core of the evolution controversy can thus be phrased in simple terms: Did mind create matter? Or did matter give rise to mind?

Encouragement is speaking fruitfully into the life of another.

Ye can not know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all acts and events that fill Time, are the definition, and it must be lived.

His glasses are thick, magnifying, and his eyes, puffed and swimming, seem not to miss a thing.

They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but impossibilities…

Upholding God’s design and keeping the boundaries of nature and culture under supervision were thus the ideals of pre-modern utopian endeavors.

With modernity came the urge to control and manipulate nature, resulting in the gardener’s approach as a concept of utopianism. (…) In gardening utopias, man took control over his garden, giving it ‘constant attention and effort,’ forcing ‘his preconceived design on the plot’ (Bauman, Liquid Times 99) by selection, cultivation, and exclusion of unwanted elements.

So many people have lived such grand lives. I have certainly lived a greater life than I expected, filled with adventures and curious people. But people will soon not live any lives at all. I believe that we will soon build intelligences more powerful than us who will disempower and kill us all. I will see no children of mine grow to adulthood. No people will walk through mountains and trees. No conscious mind will discover any new laws of physics. My mother will not write all of the novels she wants to write. The greatest films that will be made have probably been made. I have not often viscerally reflected on how much love and excitement I have for all the things I could do in the future, so I didn’t viscerally feeling the loss. But now, when it is all lost, I start to think on it. And I just want to weep. I want to scream and smash things. Then I just want to sit quietly and watch the sun set, with people I love.

All of these are not part of individualized, consumption-oriented society of liquid modernity; rather ‘happiness means now a different today rather than a more felicitous tomorrow[, it] […] has become a private affair, and a matter for here and now’ (Society 240).

Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.

Hell is a state of mind—ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its mind—is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly.

They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.

‘Not at all,’ said my neighbor. ‘The trouble is that they’re so quarrelsome. As soon as anyone arrives he settles in some street. Before he’s been there twenty-four hours he quarrels with his neighbour. Before the week is over he’s quarrelled so badly that he decides to move. Very likely he finds the next street empty because all the people there have quarrelled with their neighbors—and moved. If so he settles in. If by any chance the street is full, he goes further. But even if he stays, it makes no odds. He’s sure to have another quarrel pretty soon and then he’ll move on again. Finally he’ll move right out to the edge of the town and build a new house. You see, it’s easy here. You’ve only got to think a house and there it is. That’s how the town keeps on growing.’

‘The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.’

You have been in Hell: though if you don’t go back you may call it Purgatory.

Humanism claims that there is a unique and absolute difference that sets humans apart from the rest of creation: the difference of Cartesian reason.

Humility is thinking of yourself less, not thinking less of yourself.

I feel—and the anxiety is still vivid to me—that I might easily have failed before I began.

But coordination only works when you have 51% or more of the force on the side of the people doing the coordinating, and when you haven’t come up with some brilliant trick to make coordination impossible.

The second one first. In the links post before last, I wrote:

The latest development in the brave new post-​Bitcoin world is crypto-​equity. At this point I’ve gone from wanting to praise these inventors as bold libertarian heroes to wanting to drag them in front of a blackboard and making them write a hundred times “I WILL NOT CALL UP THAT WHICH I CANNOT PUT DOWN”

A couple people asked me what I meant, and I didn’t have the background then to explain. Well, this post is the background. People are using the contingent stupidity of our current government to replace lots of human interaction with mechanisms that cannot be coordinated even in principle. I totally understand why all these things are good right now when most of what our government does is stupid and unnecessary. But there is going to come a time when – after one too many bioweapon or nanotech or nuclear incidents – we, as a civilization, are going to wish we hadn’t established untraceable and unstoppable ways of selling products.

And if we ever get real live superintelligence, pretty much by definition it is going to have >51% of the power and all attempts at “coordination” with it will be useless.

Liquid modernity seems to prefer the individualistic approach to immortality through the symbolic (in either the memory of one’s children or in leaving traces in the collective memory) by making a mark on history. The self-centered and celebratory road of stardom, self-aggrandizement, and public exposure seems to be the contemporary strategy of choice in order to achieve immortality.

Our complete inability to do what is right does not erase our obligation to do what is right.

Into this grey lake plopped the thought, I know that man, don’t I?

Warg talks about trying to avoid “a future of meaningless gleaming techno-​progress burning the cosmos”. Do you really think your walled garden will be able to ride this out?

Hint: is it part of the cosmos?

Yeah, you’re kind of screwed.

Learning can be seen as a process of acquiring smarter and richer mnemonic devices to represent information, encoding similar information, into patterns, organization principles, and rules which represent even material we have never before encountered, but which is like what we do know, and thus can be recognized or remembered.

Life he saw as a ceaseless and courageous contest.

Light fell through the colors of the stained glass beyond the altar. Through the windows ajar on the side aisle came the sweetness of blossom, of bruised grass, of river mud.

I looked at him steadfastly. His face was leanly composed; his gray eye dimly calm. Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises. But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors.

But what we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved.

The ultimate argument for this disappearance, though, belongs to Michel Foucault and his claim that ‘man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end’ (The Order of Things 387).

A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.

They snipped the ribbon in 1915, they popped the cork, Miami Beach was born.

The modern research community knows they aren’t producing the best science they could be. There’s lots of publication bias, statistics are done in a confusing and misleading way out of sheer inertia, and replications often happen very late or not at all. And sometimes someone will say something like “I can’t believe people are too dumb to fix Science. All we would have to do is require early registration of studies to avoid publication bias, turn this new and powerful statistical technique into the new standard, and accord higher status to scientists who do replication experiments. It would be really simple and it would vastly increase scientific progress. I must just be smarter than all existing scientists, since I’m able to think of this and they aren’t.”

And yeah. That would work for the Science God. He could just make a Science Decree that everyone has to use the right statistics, and make another Science Decree that everyone must accord replications higher status.

But things that work from a god’s-eye view don’t work from within the system. No individual scientist has an incentive to unilaterally switch to the new statistical technique for her own research, since it would make her research less likely to produce earth-​shattering results and since it would just confuse all the other scientists. They just have an incentive to want everybody else to do it, at which point they would follow along. And no individual journal has an incentive to unilaterally switch to early registration and publishing negative results, since it would just mean their results are less interesting than that other journal who only publishes ground-​breaking discoveries. From within the system, everyone is following their own incentives and will continue to do so.

[…]

A basic principle unites all of the multipolar traps above. In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.

Any human with above room temperature IQ can design a utopia. The reason our current system isn’t a utopia is that it wasn’t designed by humans. Just as you can look at an arid terrain and determine what shape a river will one day take by assuming water will obey gravity, so you can look at a civilization and determine what shape its institutions will one day take by assuming people will obey incentives.

But that means that just as the shapes of rivers are not designed for beauty or navigation, but rather an artifact of randomly determined terrain, so institutions will not be designed for prosperity or justice, but rather an artifact of randomly determined initial conditions.

The limit of multipolar traps as technology approaches infinity is “very bad”.

But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

‘What you have seen in the Guthries is what natural affection turns to in the end if it will not be converted.’

Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.

Natural theology is not based on what we do not know. It is based on what we do know about living things.

Because of the socially constructed nature of both need and satisfaction, Levitas further argues, there cannot be an evaluation of utopia based on universal principles of what constitutes a ‘good society’ and what a ‘bad society’: ‘If needs are socially constructed, the project of trying to read off the good society from a definition of human nature and human needs is doomed to failure’ (184).

As far as I can tell from reading his blog, Nick Land is the guy in that terrifying border region where he is smart enough to figure out several important arcane principles about summoning demon gods, but not quite smart enough to figure out the most important such principle, which is NEVER DO THAT.

But as Levitas has argued, the fragmentation of these futures, the dissolution of clear-cut boundaries, and the presentation of multiple possible paths leave us in the dark, unable to decide which way to turn as no destinations appear.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly.

What’s the trouble about this place? Not that people are quarrelsome—that’s only human nature and was always the same even on Earth. The trouble is that they have no Needs. You get everything you want (not very good quality, of course) by just imagining it. That’s why it never costs any trouble to move to another street or build another house. In other words, there’s no proper economic basis for any community life.

There is no virtue or vice in a transitive verb.

In his youth, however, though too imbecile for study or for business, he was not incapable of being amused.

Sometimes I think it is not wise to grow too old,.. […] But I am not aware that we are given a choice in this matter.

‘He will be, Pam. Everything will be yours. God Himself will be yours. But not that way. Nothing can be yours by nature.’

There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary fix.

‘Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell. For the higher a thing is, the lower it can descend—a man can sympathise with a horse but a horse cannot sympathize with a rat. Only One has descended into Hell.’

I am going to teach you that painting is not storytelling. If you want to tell stories, become either an illustrator or a writer. If you want to be a painter, you will learn to use line and color and shape and texture to create paintings, not stories.

My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul rid of it.

“At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,” was his mildly cadaverous reply.

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?

[Resolve is] the action of making a moral decision prior to the circumstances in which it is applied.

Garish in her dress, eccentric in her habits, chaste in her conduct, coarse in her speech, she succeeded in her lifetime in drawing upon herself the ridicule of the great and the applause of the learned.

He felt quite certain that he was going where, at last, his finely critical spirit would no longer be outraged by an uncongenial environment—where he would find ‘Recognition’ and ‘Appreciation.’

As Csicsery-Ronay points out: sf ‘is not a genre of aesthetic entertainment only, but a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future’ (Seven Beauties 4). As such, sf is a direct interaction with contemporary culture that lies at the nexus of technological, scientific, critical, and social thought in that it determines what we conceive of as possible in and for our future.

‘Science Fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science)’ (8).

They were in town now. Streets, houses, buildings shuttled past.

I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city.

But he was at least intelligent: one could get some criticism worth hearing from him, even if he was a failure on the creative side. But now he seems to have nothing left but his self-conceit.

Robotics and computer science had progressed immensely and the cyborg became the central metaphor to understand social and cultural reality as a construction of multiple identities, a metaphor truly made for the late twentieth-century imagination: ‘a hybrid of machine and organism’ (Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ 149).

In both [descriptions of Einstein and Aquinas], one gets a vivid sense of extraordinary concentration on problems to the exclusion of most daily routine.

Thus was born the fact/value split—the idea that humans can have genuine knowledge only in the realm of empirical facts. Morality was reduced to subjective preferences. The term values means literally whatever the individual happens to value.

But if you are trying to leap on into eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be (for so ye must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears.

As a thought experiment, let’s consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well.

But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let’s say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month.

A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the fish farms are now making a profit of $700/month – still a respectable sum.

But one farmer (let’s call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to operate his filter. Now one fish farm worth of waste is polluting the lake, lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else earns $699 profit.

Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because he’s not spending the maintenance costs on his filter. They disconnect their filters too.

Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning $600/month – less than he would be if he and everyone else had kept their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300. Steve goes around to everyone, saying “Wait! We all need to make a voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone’s productivity goes down.”

Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let’s call him Mike. Now everyone is back using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra profit…

A self-​interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-​interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact.

The five-foot 2-inch dynamo has piloted her career with dazzling audacity.

When we choose to be the gardener, we make a deal with nature: we will abide by certain rules in growing plants, and the plants will accede to our shaping them somewhat to our needs and pleasures. We will supply water, loamy soil, a modicum of nutrients, and moderate temperature, and the impatiens will bloom brightly from May to October.

Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.

The human as category is a fleeting and historically specific concept, as Foucault famously argues at the end of his book The Order of Things, that could just as easily disappear, should the ‘fundamental arrangements of knowledge’ (387) shift once more as they did at the end of the eighteenth century, when the era of humanism as we understand it began.

The hunter’s utopia is thus most importantly characterized not as a fixed goal to strive for, but as a process of living in constant movement. ‘Hunters search for fun, excitement, validation, consumer goods and identity’ (‘Liquid’ 76), Jacobsen argues, all the while sampling and surfing their way through an endless array of opportunities.

The inner door, which led to the passage, which in turn led to the storm door, was beside the stone.

Bauman shares Levitas’s analysis that the possibility of utopian change is located in politics and that political agency has been dissolved: ‘The most conspicuous feature of contemporary politics,’ Bauman writes, ‘is its insignificance’ (In Search 4). The dual translation between the public and the private that politics is supposed to facilitate has been turned inside out, as Bauman argues, and ‘politics has been effectively disarmed’ (Society 169). Flaws in policy cannot be grasped as unethical anymore, because they do not connect to the individual directly, whereas unethical private actions become political outrages (as witnessed in the Clinton– Lewinsky affair), when the individual life choices do not appeal to the public. Politicians have been replaced by idols, who share their private life politics, becoming examples not leaders.

The last screw came out, the whole lock case slid down, freeing the bolt.

For all intents and purposes, then, the monster represents what we might name the posthuman: a being replacing the human, coming after the human, and existing beyond human capacity. Frankenstein’s creation anticipates the posthuman condition.

Consequently, pondering his own state of being, he asks: ‘Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?’ (Shelley 128). His questions point to the central motif of the story: the question of human nature, a human essence, and what to include in the definition of this essence.

I still count the little preamble that begins as the houselights go down and the footlights glow and goes on to accompany the slow rise of the curtain on the opening scene of Carmen as the most cunningly contrived passage of descriptive music I have ever heard.

You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you.

And then there’s us. Man has his own telos, when he is allowed the security to act and the clarity to reason out the consequences of his actions. When unafflicted by coordination problems and unthreatened by superior forces, able to act as a gardener rather than just another subject of the law of the jungle, he tends to build and guide a wonderful world for himself. He tends to favor good things and avoid bad, to create secure civilizations with polished sidewalks, beautiful art, happy families, and glorious adventures. I will take it as a given that this telos is identical with “good” and “should”.

Thus we have our wildcard and the big question of futurism. Will the future be ruled by the usual four horsemen of Gnon for a future of meaningless gleaming techno-​progress burning the cosmos or a future of dysgenic, insane, hungry, and bloody dark ages; or will the telos of man prevail for a future of meaningful art, science, spirituality, and greatness?

Franklin continues:

The project of civilization [is] for man to graduate from the metaphorical savage, subject to the law of the jungle, to the civilized gardener who, while theoretically still subject to the law of the jungle, is so dominant as to limit the usefulness of that model.

This need not be done globally; we may only be able to carve out a small walled garden for ourselves, but make no mistake, even if only locally, the project of civilization is to capture Gnon.

But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him.

But Bauman is wary of the utopian perspective that the hunt offers, as he concludes his musings by saying that ‘the utopia, or “u-via”, of hunters, the utopia of life revolving around the pursuit of constantly elusive fashion, does not give sense to life, whether authentic or fake. It merely helps to banish the question of life’s meaning from our minds’ (Culture 30).

‘It depends on the way ye’re using the words. If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand.’ (Here he smiled at me.) ‘Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will have been Hell even from the beginning.’

You will have to grow accustomed to it. The world will indulge you just so long, Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.

The air was thin and clear, stringent with wood smoke and the tang of fallen apples, sharp with the hint of early frost.

Think yourself into the moment. Touch, smell and listen to the thing you are writing about. Turn yourself into it. Then you will have it. That, for Hughes, was the essence of poetry.

‘You have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.’

So I agree with Robin Hanson: This is the dream time. This is a rare confluence of circumstances where the we are unusually safe from multipolar traps, and as such weird things like art and science and philosophy and love can flourish.

As technological advance increases, the rare confluence will come to an end. New opportunities to throw values under the bus for increased competitiveness will arise. New ways of copying agents to increase the population will soak up our excess resources and resurrect Malthus’ unquiet spirit. Capitalism and democracy, previously our protectors, will figure out ways to route around their inconvenient dependence on human values. And our coordination power will not be nearly up to the task, assuming something much more powerful than all of us combined doesn’t show up and crush our combined efforts with a wave of its paw.

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.”

Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would be otherwise too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope.

Strange thing, time. It weighs most on those who have it least.

They’re so far off by now that they could never think of coming to the bus stop at all.

Absent an extraordinary effort to divert it, the river reaches the sea in one of two places.

It can end in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s nightmare of a superintelligence optimizing for some random thing (classically paper clips) because we weren’t smart enough to channel its optimization efforts the right way. This is the ultimate trap, the trap that catches the universe. Everything except the one thing being maximized is destroyed utterly in pursuit of the single goal, including all the silly human values.

Or it can end in Robin Hanson’s nightmare (he doesn’t call it a nightmare, but I think he’s wrong) of a competition between emulated humans that can copy themselves and edit their own source code as desired. […] Their total self-​control can wipe out even the desire for human values in their all-​consuming contest. What happens to art, philosophy, science, and love in such a world?

Most importantly, utopia in liquid modernity is ‘linked to mobility, not to a place’: ‘The liquid modern equivalents of the Utopias of yore are neither about time nor about space – but about speed and acceleration’ (Society 241). Bauman concludes that ‘the posture of the gardener is nowadays giving way to that of the hunter’ (Liquid Times 100).

‘The function of utopia,’ Levitas concludes, ‘thus reverts from that of a goal and catalyst of change to one of criticism, and the education of desire, without any necessary move forward into action’ (196).

And just as the mother feels acutely the slightest criticism of her child, so any criticism of her book even by the most negligible nitwit gave Virginia acute pains.

And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.

But be the ordeal sharp or long or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy—we shall ask for none.

‘What constitutes human nature?’ or ‘What does it mean to be human?’ have thus been a central concern of science fiction exploration.

When in Rome, leave.

The room was very full and who were they all?

For every activity you naturally want to do, try to figure out a way to apply it to your direction. Your direction is sort of like a theme - if your direction is X and your interest is Y, then go do X-flavored Y-things.

What if, instead of God’s Word being on trial, your heart was on trial?

My friend Trost, who is no optimist as to the state of the universe hitherto, but is confident that at some future period within the duration of the solar system, ours will be the best of all possible worlds—a hope which I always honour as a sign of beneficent qualities—my friend Trost always tries to keep up my spirits under the sight of the extremely unpleasant and disfiguring work by which many of our fellow-creatures have to get their bread, with the assurance that “all this will soon be done by machinery.” But he sometimes neutralises the consolation by extending it over so large an area of human labour, and insisting so impressively on the quantity of energy which will thus be set free for loftier purposes, that I am tempted to desire an occasional famine of invention in the coming ages, lest the humbler kinds of work should be entirely nullified while there are still left some men and women who are not fit for the highest.

Especially, when one considers the perfunctory way in which some of the most exalted tasks are already executed by those who are understood to be educated for them, there rises a fearful vision of the human race evolving machinery which will by-and-by throw itself fatally out of work. When, in the Bank of England, I see a wondrously delicate machine for testing sovereigns, a shrewd implacable little steel Rhadamanthus that, once the coins are delivered up to it, lifts and balances each in turn for the fraction of an instant, finds it wanting or sufficient, and dismisses it to right or left with rigorous justice; when I am told of micrometers and thermopiles and tasimeters which deal physically with the invisible, the impalpable, and the unimaginable; of cunning wires and wheels and pointing needles which will register your and my quickness so as to exclude flattering opinion; of a machine for drawing the right conclusion, which will doubtless by-and-by be improved into an automaton for finding true premises; of a microphone which detects the cadence of the fly’s foot on the ceiling, and may be expected presently to discriminate the noises of our various follies as they soliloquise or converse in our brains—my mind seeming too small for these things, I get a little out of it, like an unfortunate savage too suddenly brought face to face with civilisation, and I exclaim—

“Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? and will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms, giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?”

“But,” says Trost, treating me with cautious mildness on hearing me vent this raving notion, “you forget that these wonder-workers are the slaves of our race, need our tendance and regulation, obey the mandates of our consciousness, and are only deaf and dumb bringers of reports which we decipher and make use of. They are simply extensions of the human organism, so to speak, limbs immeasurably more powerful, ever more subtle finger-tips, ever more mastery over the invisibly great and the invisibly small. Each new machine needs a new appliance of human skill to construct it, new devices to feed it with material, and often keener-edged faculties to note its registrations or performances. How then can machines supersede us?—they depend upon us. When we cease, they cease.”

“I am not so sure of that,” said I, getting back into my mind, and becoming rather wilful in consequence. “If, as I have heard you contend, machines as they are more and more perfected will require less and less of tendance, how do I know that they may not be ultimately made to carry, or may not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply, self-repair, and reproduction, and not only do all the mighty and subtle work possible on this planet better than we could do it, but with the immense advantage of banishing from the earth’s atmosphere screaming consciousnesses which, in our comparatively clumsy race, make an intolerable noise and fuss to each other about every petty ant-like performance, looking on at all work only as it were to spring a rattle here or blow a trumpet there, with a ridiculous sense of being effective? I for my part cannot see any reason why a sufficiently penetrating thinker, who can see his way through a thousand years or so, should not conceive a parliament of machines, in which the manners were excellent and the motions infallible in logic: one honourable instrument, a remote descendant of the Voltaic family, might discharge a powerful current (entirely without animosity) on an honourable instrument opposite, of more upstart origin, but belonging to the ancient edge-tool race which we already at Sheffield see paring thick iron as if it were mellow cheese—by this unerringly directed discharge operating on movements corresponding to what we call Estimates, and by necessary mechanical consequence on movements corresponding to what we call the Funds, which with a vain analogy we sometimes speak of as “sensitive.” For every machine would be perfectly educated, that is to say, would have the suitable molecular adjustments, which would act not the less infallibly for being free from the fussy accompaniment of that consciousness to which our prejudice gives a supreme governing rank, when in truth it is an idle parasite on the grand sequence of things.”

“Nothing of the sort!” returned Trost, getting angry, and judging it kind to treat me with some severity; “what you have heard me say is, that our race will and must act as a nervous centre to the utmost development of mechanical processes: the subtly refined powers of machines will react in producing more subtly refined thinking processes which will occupy the minds set free from grosser labour. Say, for example, that all the scavengers work of London were done, so far as human attention is concerned, by the occasional pressure of a brass button (as in the ringing of an electric bell), you will then have a multitude of brains set free for the exquisite enjoyment of dealing with the exact sequences and high speculations supplied and prompted by the delicate machines which yield a response to the fixed stars, and give readings of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned in the production of epic poems or great judicial harangues. So far from mankind being thrown out of work according to your notion,” concluded Trost, with a peculiar nasal note of scorn, “if it were not for your incurable dilettanteism in science as in all other things—if you had once understood the action of any delicate machine—you would perceive that the sequences it carries throughout the realm of phenomena would require many generations, perhaps aeons, of understandings considerably stronger than yours, to exhaust the store of work it lays open.”

“Precisely,” said I, with a meekness which I felt was praiseworthy; “it is the feebleness of my capacity, bringing me nearer than you to the human average, that perhaps enables me to imagine certain results better than you can. Doubtless the very fishes of our rivers, gullible as they look, and slow as they are to be rightly convinced in another order of facts, form fewer false expectations about each other than we should form about them if we were in a position of somewhat fuller intercourse with their species; for even as it is we have continually to be surprised that they do not rise to our carefully selected bait. Take me then as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do not estimate the justice of my ideas by my facial expression.”

“Pooh!” says Trost (We are on very intimate terms.)

“Naturally,” I persisted, “it is less easy to you than to me to imagine our race transcended and superseded, since the more energy a being is possessed of, the harder it must be for him to conceive his own death. But I, from the point of view of a reflective carp, can easily imagine myself and my congeners dispensed with in the frame of things and giving way not only to a superior but a vastly different kind of Entity. What I would ask you is, to show me why, since each new invention casts a new light along the pathway of discovery, and each new combination or structure brings into play more conditions than its inventor foresaw, there should not at length be a machine of such high mechanical and chemical powers that it would find and assimilate the material to supply its own waste, and then by a further evolution of internal molecular movements reproduce itself by some process of fission or budding. This last stage having been reached, either by man’s contrivance or as an unforeseen result, one sees that the process of natural selection must drive men altogether out of the field; for they will long before have begun to sink into the miserable condition of those unhappy characters in fable who, having demons or djinns at their beck, and being obliged to supply them with work, found too much of everything done in too short a time. What demons so potent as molecular movements, none the less tremendously potent for not carrying the futile cargo of a consciousness screeching irrelevantly, like a fowl tied head downmost to the saddle of a swift horseman? Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle in the sunlight Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted existences do before the fittest—i.e., the existence composed of the most persistent groups of movements and the most capable of incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who—if our consciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection—who shall say that those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what we call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of the earth’s crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence.”

“Absurd!” grumbled Trost.

“The supposition is logical,” said I. “It is well argued from the premises.”

“Whose premises?” cried Trost, turning on me with some fierceness. “You don’t mean to call them mine, I hope.”

“Heaven forbid! They seem to be flying about in the air with other germs, and have found a sort of nidus among my melancholy fancies. Nobody really holds them. They bear the same relation to real belief as walking on the head for a show does to running away from an explosion or walking fast to catch the train.”