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I’d never really thought about what a genuine literal hotbed is but yeah obviously it’s from gardening where you cover up a patch of land to trap heat and encourage plant growth
(This is a Great Golden Digger Wasp - Sphex ichneumoneus - doing what its name implies, digging. But you may also notice, if you turn the sound on, that she’s making some incredible noises as she does so.)
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Lest anyone accuse me of bargaining in bad faith here, let me start with this admission: I don't think AI is intelligent; nor do I think that the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques will lead to intelligence. I think worrying about what we'll do if AI becomes intelligent is at best a distraction and at worst a cynical marketing ploy:
Now, that said: among some of the "AI doomers," I recognize kindred spirits. I, too, worry about technologies controlled by corporations that have grown so powerful that they defy regulation. I worry about how those technologies are used against us, and about how the corporations that make them are fusing with authoritarian states to create a totalitarian nightmare. I worry that technology is used to spy on and immiserate workers.
I just don't think we need AI to do those things. I think we should already be worried about those things.
Last week, I had a version of this discussion in front of several hundred people at the Bronfman Lecture in Montreal, where I appeared with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (co-winner of the Turing Prize for his work creating the "deep learning" techniques powering today's AI surge), on a panel moderated by CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed:
It's safe to say that Bengio and I mostly disagree about AI. He's running an initiative called "Lawzero," whose goal is to create an international AI consortium that produces AI as a "digital public good" that is designed to be open, auditable, transparent and safe:
http://lawzero.org
Bengio said he'd started Lawzero because he was convinced that AI was going to get a lot more powerful, and, in the absence of some public-spirited version of AI, we would be subject to all kinds of manipulation and surveillance, and that the resulting chaos would present a civilizational risk.
Now, as I've stated (and as I said onstage) I am not worried about any of this. I am worried about AI, though. I'm worried a fast-talking AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job (the salesman will be pushing on an open door, since if there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers).
I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once. I'm worried that when that happens, the chatbots that badly do the jobs of the people who were fired because of the AI salesman will go away, and nothing and no one will do those jobs. I'm worried that the chaos caused by vaporizing a third of the stock market will lead to austerity and thence to fascism:
I worry that the workers who did those jobs will be scattered to the four winds, retrained or "discouraged" or retired, and that the priceless process knowledge they developed over generations will be wiped out and we will have to rebuild it amidst the economic and political chaos of the burst AI bubble:
But Bengio disagrees. He's very smart, and very accomplished, and he's very certain that AI is about to become "superhuman" and do horrible things to us if we don't get a handle on it. Several times at our events, he insisted that the existence of this possibility made it wildly irresponsible not to take measures to mitigate this risk.
Though I didn't say so at the time, this struck me as an AI-inflected version of Pascal's wager:
A rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and should strive to believe in God… if God does not exist, the believer incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries; if God does exist, the believer stands to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition, while simultaneously avoiding boundless losses associated with an eternity in Hell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager
Smarter people than me have been poking holes in Pascal's wager for more than 350 years. But when it comes to this modern Pascal's AI Wager, I have my own objection: how do you know when you've lost?
As of this moment, the human race has lit more than $1.4t on fire to immanentize this eschaton, and it remains stubbornly disimmanentized. How much more do we need to spend before we're certain that god isn't lurking in the word-guessing program? Sam Altman says it'll take another $2-3t – call it six months' worth of all US federal spending. If we do that and we still haven't met god, are we done? Can we call it a day?
Not according to Elon Musk. Musk says we need to deconstruct the solar system and build a Dyson sphere out of all the planets to completely encase the sun, so we can harvest every photon it emits to power our word-guessing programs:
So let's say we do that and we still haven't met god – are we done? I don't see why we would be. After all, Musk's contention isn't that our sun emits one eschaton's worth of immanentizing particles. Musk just thinks that we need a lot of these sunbeams to coax god into our plane of existence. If one sun won't do it, perhaps two? Or two hundred? Or two thousand? Once we've committed the entire human species to this god-bothering project to the extent of putting two kilosuns into harness, wouldn't we be nuts to stop there? What if god is lurking in the two thousand and first sun? Making god out of algorithms is like spelling "banana" – easy to start, hard to stop.
But as Bengio and I got into it together on stage at the Montreal Centre, it occurred to me that maybe there was some common ground between us. After all, when someone starts talking about "humane technology" that respects our privacy and works for people rather than their bosses, my ears grow points. Throw in the phrase "international digital public goods" and you've got my undivided attention.
Because there's a sense in which Bengio and I are worried about exactly the same thing. I'm terrified that our planet has been colonized by artificial lifeforms that we constructed, but which have slipped our control. I'm terrified that these lifeforms corrupt our knowledge-creation process, making it impossible for us to know what's true and what isn't. I'm terrified that these lifeforms have conquered our apparatus of state – our legislatures, agencies and courts – and so that these public bodies work against the public and for our colonizing alien overlords.
The difference is, the artificial lifeforms that worry me aren't hypothetical – they're here today, amongst us, endangering the very survival of our species. These artificial lifeforms are called "limited liability corporations" and they are a concrete, imminent risk to the human race:
What's more, challenging these artificial lifeforms will require us to build massive, "international, digital public goods": a post-American internet of free/open, auditable, transparent, enshittification-resistant platforms and firmware for every purpose and device currently in service:
And even after we've built that massive, international, digital public good, we'll still face the challenge of migrating all of our systems and loved ones out of the enshitternet of defective, spying, controlling American tech exports:
Every moment that we remain stuck in the enshitternet is a moment of existential risk. At the click of a mouse, Trump could order John Deere to switch off all the tractors in your country:
He doesn't need tanks to steal Greenland. He can just shut off Denmark's access to American platforms like Office365, iOS and Android and brick the whole damned country. It would be another Strait of Hormuz, but instead of oil and fertilizer, he'd control the flow of Lego, Ozempic and deliciously strong black licorice:
These aren't risks that could develop in the future. They're the risks we're confronted with today and frankly, they're fucking terrifying.
So here's my side-bet on Pascal's Wager. If you think we need to build "international digital public goods" to head off the future risk of a colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeform, then let us agree that the prototype for that project is the "international digital public goods" we need right now to usher in the post-American internet and save ourselves from the colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeforms that have already got their blood-funnels jammed down our throats.
Once we defeat those alien invaders, we may find that all the people who are trying to summon the evil god have lost the wherewithal to do so, and your crisis will have been averted. But if that's not the case and the evil god still looms on our horizon, then I will make it my business to help you mobilize the legions of skilled international digital public goods producers who are still flush from their victory over the limited liability corporation, and together, we will fight the evil god you swear is in our future.
Whenever someone starts talking about Dyson spheres I stop taking them seriously. That's make-believe space fantasy shit. That's shrink-ray magic genie stuff. Fine for thought experiments but you have to understand that it's only ever going to exist in made up stories. So when elon tries to get people excited about building Dyson spheres I feel like I'm watching a traveling medicine show mountebank shilling a cure-all magic tonic that's mostly coal tar and opium
How much more do we need to spend before we're certain that god isn't lurking in the word-guessing program?
(exactly this. jfc)
I am worried about AI, though. I'm worried a fast-talking AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job (the salesman will be pushing on an open door, since if there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers).
I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once. I'm worried that when that happens, the chatbots that badly do the jobs of the people who were fired because of the AI salesman will go away, and nothing and no one will do those jobs. I'm worried that the chaos caused by vaporizing a third of the stock market will lead to austerity and thence to fascism
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So many political posts I hate boil down to "I don't want to organize and work with people I hate and fight for small, incremental victories, I just want to start a revolution where everyone magically becomes an automaton who acts exactly the way I think they should act"
Like damn man, I want that too. Unfortunately I live in reality though so we're stuck with the first thing.
"Modern movements are too fractured, too aimless, with too much infighting and corruption among the leadership. What we need is a revolution, which famously never have any issues with those things" okay then. Good luck I guess
This whole line of thinking comes down to "the current systems and leadership are bad. What we need is a fresh start with only people who are good, and then all the systems will be good". Which is simply not how anything has ever worked!
"We don't have enough people, funding, and power to bring about changes through elections! We have to do an armed revolution instead which thankfully doesn't require people, funding, or power to pull off."
Elon Musk, the trillionaire CEO and former temporary government employee, threatened to sue Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna after the lawmaker accused Musk of “possibly” sentencing 4.5 million children to death by cutting funding to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Monday morning, Musk took to his social media platform, X, to lash out at Khanna for suggesting Musk’s deep cuts to USAID’s funding and workforce, while overseeing DOGE last year, may have led to millions of children dying.
“You know they’re celebrating that he created 4,400 millionaires, but they don’t talk about the 4.5 million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling USAID,” Khanna said on the “I’ve Had It” podcast over the weekend. [...]
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It's kind of wild that like, I'm in my 40s and I've seen the ebb and flow of patriotism in this country over the years. Having lived through the incredible post-9/11 surge especially.... so to see what it's become at this point is like... imagine telling someone from 2002 that America's 250th birthday was a giant horse flop of nothing. Like nobody cares anymore. Nobody other than the most hardcore Republican is out there waving the American flag.
Just kind of amazing how much the culture has shifted in the last 10-15 years.
A thing that bothers me about wizard schools in popular media – outside of the magic-grade-school stuff, anyway – is that they're typically depicted as being basically magic universities, but their actual curricula and pedagogical approaches look much more like those of a technical institution. Like, buddy, that's not a wizard university, that's a wizard trade school. You can't just slap university student culture on top of trade school pedagogy. It doesn't work like that – the one emerges from the other!
"Well ACTUALLY wizards are" wizards are made up. They can be analogous to whatever real-world class or vocation the author wants. Wizard-school-as-university and wizard-school-as-technical-institute are both perfectly fine; what I am grumping about is wizard-school media that doesn't seem to have a clear picture of how different sorts of educational institutions actually operate.
Okay but now I really want to know what a Wizard technician would look like. Would he wear magical overalls with all kinds of reagents and magic tools sticking out of his numerous pockets?
A guy like that walks into your tower with a toothpick in his mouth, takes one look at your summoning circle and goes
“I see yer problem. You used chalk B12 instead of S3. B12 is only for transmutation circles. Gimme a sec I think I have a piece somewhere here.”
He fixes your circle, test summons an imp and goes.
“The chalk? I always use that chalk, it’s never been a problem.”
“Ah - yes. This stuff will work just fine for most circles, but, uh - here, take a look with my loupe. You see the off-color flecks? Can’t hardly see them with the naked eye, but those are impurities. Silicates, might even be some iron in here, to be honest. Usually won’t cause a problem, but - you said you hadn’t tried this particular summons before?”
“First time trying a 5th level, yeah.”
“Those silicates will make your scribing a little fuzzy when viewed from the astral plane. You see, for example, these three fine lines here? With this chalk, on the astral that looks like one thick line with fuzzy edges. They can’t tell exactly what you want, and they’re picky lil’ critters so they just won’t do anything in response.”
“Really? Oh. I always thought the expensive chalk was just fancy to be fancy.”
“Making pure chalk is difficult, you need a dedicated production line or dust gets in the finished product. To be honest, you don’t need to bother with it for most things, but 5th and up, 5th level and up, it actually is necessary. Anything with lines within about two millimeters of each other.”
“So I need to start over?”
“Unfortunately yes. You’ll have to erase all this, but with some good chalk it should work just fine. Next new moon your summons should go off without a hitch.”
“Dang. At least it’s not my sigils, I was worried it was my sigils.”
“Nah Your sigils look good. Even and balanced. You know what you’re doing, it’s just an equipment problem.”
“Thanks for the help, sorry to make you come all the way out here.”
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“My emperor is fine” your emperor has commissioned over 8000 life-sized terracotta soldiers and buried them facing east, in the direction of his recently conquered enemies in the hopes that they will protect him in the afterlife.
On April 4, 1841, William Henry Harrison, our 9th POTUS, became shortest serving President in US history by dying in office from pneumonia wildly believed to be have been caused by his decision to give a two hour inaugural address in the pouring rain without a coat or hat. Just a fun fact unrelated to this tweet.
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