Big questions of life: Who are we? What should we aspire to? What is a good life, and how should we live it? Despite the stupendous amounts of information at our disposal, we are as susceptible as our ancient ancestors to fantasy and delusion.
In both fables, a single human acquires enormous power, but is then corrupted by hubris and greed. The conclusion is that our flawed individual psychology makes us abuse power. What this crude analysis misses is that human power is never the outcome of individual initiative. Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans.
Wisdom is commonly understood to mean “making the right decisions,” but what “right” means depends on value judgments that differ among diverse people, cultures, and ideologies. Scientists who discover a new pathogen may develop a vaccine to protect people. But if the scientists — or their political overlords — believe in a racist ideology that advocates that some races are inferior and should be exterminated, the new medical knowledge might be used to develop a biological weapon that kills millions.
The naive view thinks that disagreements about values turn out on closer inspection to be the fault of either the lack of information or deliberate disinformation. According to this view, racists are ill-informed people who just don’t know the facts of biology and history. They think that “race” is a valid biological category, and they have been brainwashed by bogus conspiracy theories. The remedy to racism is therefore to provide people with more biological and historical facts. It may take time, but in a free market of information sooner or later truth will prevail.
By using such apocalyptic terms, experts and governments have no with to conjure a Hollywood image of rebellious robots running in the streets and shooting people. Such a scenario is unlikely, and it merely distracts people from the real dangers. Rather, experts warn about 2 other scenarios.
First, the power of AI could supercharge existing human conflicts, dividing humanity against itself. Because the AI arms race will produce ever more destructive weapons, even a small spark might ignite a cataclysmic conflagration.
Second, the Silicon Curtain might come to divide not one group of humans from another but rather all humans from our new AI overlords. No matter where we live, we might find ourselves cocooned by a web of unfathomable algorithms that manage our lives, reshape our politics and culture, and even reengineer our bodies and minds — while we can no longer comprehend the forces that control us, let alone stop them. If a 21st-century totalitarian network succeeds in conquering the world, it may be run by nonhuman intelligence, rather than by human dictator.
AI is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. All previous human inventions have empowered humans, because no matter how powerful the new tool was, the decisions about its usage remained in our hands. They are dumb tools, lacking the intelligence necessary to process information and make independent decisions. AI isn’t a tool — it’s an agent.
Similar views were propagated long before 2016, including by some of humanity’s brightest minds. In the late 20th century, for example, intellectuals like Michel Foucault and Edward Said claimed that scientific institutions like clinics and universities are not pursuing timeless and objective truths but are instead using power to determine what counts as truth, in the service of capital and colonialist elites. These radical critiques occasionally went as far as arguing that “scientific facts” are nothing more than a capitalist or colonialist “discourse” and that people in power can never be really interested in truth and can never be trusted to recognize and correct their own mistakes.
This binary interpretation of history implies that every human interaction is a power struggle between oppressors and oppressed. Accordingly, whenever anyone says anything, the question to ask isn’t, “What is being said? Is it true?” but rather, “Who is saying this? Whose privileges does it serve?”
Such rhetoric is a staple of populism, which has been described as an “ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into 2 homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite.”
Is a single individual capable of doing all the necessary research to decide whether the earth’s climate is heating up and what should be done about it? How would a single person go about collecting climate data from throughout the world, not to mention obtaining reliable records from past centuries? Trusting only “my own research” may sound scientific, but in practice it amounts to believing that there is no objective truth.
Religions like Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism have typically characterized humans as untrustworthy power-hungry creatures who can access the truth only thanks to the intervention of a divine intelligence.
History isn’t the study of the past, it is the study of change. History teaches us what remains the same, what changes, and how things change.
It is always tricky to define fundamental concepts. Since they are the basis for everything that follows, they themselves seem to lack any basis of their own. Physicists have a hard time defining matter and energy, biologists have a hard time defining life, and philosophers have a hard time defining reality.
Any object can be information — or not. This makes it difficult to define what information is.
The naive view argues that information is an attempt to represent reality, and when this attempt succeeds, we call it truth. While this book takes many issues with the naive view, it agrees that truth is an accurate representation of reality. But this book also holds that most information is not an attempt to represent reality and that what defines information is something else entirely different. Most information in human society, and indeed in other biological and physical systems, does not represent anything.
Does this imply that when we wish to describe reality, we must always list all the different viewpoints it contains.
An ancient empire became obsessed with producing ever more accurate maps of its territory, until eventually it produced a map with 1-to-1 scale. The entire empire was covered with a map of the empire.
The point is that even the most truthful accounts of reality can never represent it in full. There are always some aspects of reality that are neglected or distorted in every representation. Truth, then, isn’t a 1-to-1 representation of reality. Rather, truth is something that brings our attention to certain aspects of reality while inevitably ignoring other aspects.
Misinformation is an honest mistake. Disinformation is a deliberate lie.
This idea, sometimes called the counterspeech doctrine, suggests that the remedy to false speech is more speech and that in the long term free discussion is bound to expose falsehoods and fallacies.
Contrary to what the naive view of information says, information has no essential link to truth, and its role in history isn’t to represent a preexisting reality. Rather, what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things. Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, and information is whatever connects different points into a network. Information doesn’t necessarily inform us about things. Rather, it puts things in formation.
Most melodies don’t represent anything, which is why it makes no sense to ask whether they are true or false. Over the years people have created a lot of bad music, but not fake music. Without representing anything, music nevertheless does a remarkable job in connecting large numbers of people and synchronizing their emotions and movements.
Errors in the copying of DNA don’t always reduce fitness. Once in a blue moon, they increase fitness. Without such mutations, there would be no process of evolution.
Homo sapiens didn’t conquer the world because we are talented at turning information into an accurate map of reality. Rather, the secret of our success is that we are talented at using information to connect lots of individuals. Unfortunately, this ability often goes hand in hand with believing in lies, errors, and fantasies.
Instead of building a network from human-to-human chains alone, stories provided Homo sapiens with a new type of chain: human-to-story chains. In order to cooperate, Sapiens no longer had to know each other personally; they just had to know the same story.
In all these cases almost none of the followers has had a personal bond with the leader. Instead, what they have connected to has been a carefully crafted story about the leader, and it is this story that they have put their faith.
You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no — not even me.
The social media accounts are usually run by a team of experts, and every image and word is professionally crafted and curated to manufacture what is nowadays called a brand.
A “brand” is a specific type of story. To brand a product means to tell a story about that product, which may have little to do with the product’s actual qualities but which consumers nevertheless learn to associate with the product.
Two millennia of storytelling have encased Jesus within such a thick cocoon of stories that it is impossible to recover the historical person. Indeed, for millions of devout Christians, merely raising the possibility that the real person was different from the story is blasphemy. As far as we can tell, the real Jesus was a typical Jewish preacher who built a small following by giving sermons and healing the sick. After his death, however, Jesus became the subject of one of the most remarkable branding campaigns in history. This little-known provincial guru, who during his short career gathered just a handful of disciples and who was executed as a common criminal, was rebranded after death as the reincarnation of the cosmic god who created the universe.
Family is the strongest bond known to humans. One way that stories build trust between strangers is by making these strangers reimagine each other as family. The Jesus story presented Jesus as a parent figure for all humans, encouraged hundreds of millions of Christians to see each other as brothers and sisters.
In Jewish tradition, the whole purpose of the Passover meal is to create and reenact artificial memories. Every year Jewish families sit together on the eve of Passover to eat and reminisce about “their” exodus from Egypt.
So every year, millions of Jews put on a show that they remember things that they didn’t witness and that probably never happened at all.
Repeatedly retelling a fake memory eventually causes the person to adopt it as a genuine recollection.
Objective reality consists of things like stones, mountains, and asteroids — things that exist whether we are aware of them or not. Then there is subjective reality: things like pain, pleasure, and love that aren’t “out there” but rather “in here.”
But some stories are able to create a third level of reality: intersubjective reality. Things like laws, gods, nations, corporations, and currencies exist in the nexus between large numbers of minds. More specifically, they exist in the stories people tell one another. The information humans exchange about intersubjective things doesn’t represent anything that had already existed prior to the exchange of information; rather, the exchange of information creates these things.
When lots of people tell one another stories about laws, gods, or currencies, this is what creates these laws, gods, or currencies. If people stop talking about them, they disappear. Intersubjective things exist in the exchange of information.
Almost all states pass at least temporarily through a phase during which their existence is contested, when struggling for independence. Did the US come into existence on July 4, 1776, or only when other states like France and finally the UK recognized it?
When we ask whether a particular state exists, we are raising a question about intersubjective reality. If enough people agree that a particular state exists, then it does.
Following the emergence of storytelling, Sapiens bands no longer lived in isolation. Bands were connected by stories about things like revered ancestors, totem animals, and guardian spirits. Bands that shared stories and intersubjective realities constituted a tribe.
Even though individually Sapiens might not have been more intelligent than Neanderthals, 500 Sapiens together were far more intelligent than 50 Neanderthals.
The power of stories is often missed or denied by materialist interpretations of history. In particular, Marxists tend to view stories as merely smoke screen for underlying power relations and material interests. According to them, people are always motivated by objective material interests and use stories only to camouflage these interests and confound their rivals.
In fact, all relations between large-scale human groups are shaped by stories, because the identities of these groups are themselves defined by stories. There are no objective definitions for who is British, American, Norwegian, or Iraqi; all these identities are shaped by national and religious myths that are constantly challenged and revised.
Chimpanzees share with humans all our objective material interests but chimpanzees cannot maintain large-scale groups, because they are unable to create the stories that connect such groups and define their identities and interests.
Luckily, since history is shaped by intersubjective stories, sometimes we can avert conflict and make peace by talking with people, changing the stories in which they and we believe, or coming up with a new story that everyone can accept.
History is often shaped not by deterministic power relations, but rather by tragic mistakes that result from believing in mesmerizing but harmful stories.
The naive view says that information leads to truth, and knowing the truth helps people to gain both power and wisdom. This sounds reassuring. It implies that people who ignore the truth are unlikely to have much power, whereas people who respect the truth can gain much power, but that power would be tempered by wisdom.
Unfortunately, this is not the world in which we live in. In history, power stems only partially from knowing the truth. It also stems from the ability to maintain social order among a large number of people.
While power depends on both truth and order, it is usually the people who know how to build ideologies and maintain order who give instructions to the people who merely know how to build bombs or hunt mammoths. Oppenheimer obeyed Roosevelt rather than the other way around. Heisenberg obeyed Hitler, Kruchatov deferred to Stalin, and Iran experts in nuclear physics follow the orders of experts in Shiite theology.
What the people at the top know, which nuclear physicists don’t always realize, is that telling the truth about the universe is hardly the most efficient way to produce order among large numbers of humans. Equations don’t resolve political disagreements or inspire people to make sacrifices for a common cause. Instead, what holds human networks together tends to be fictional stories, especially stories about intersubjective things like gods, money, and nations.
When it comes to uniting people, fiction enjoys 2 inherent advantages over the truth. First, fiction can be made as simple as we like, whereas the truth tends to be complicated, because the reality it is supposed to represent is complicated. Second, the truth is often painful and disturbing, and if we try to make it more comforting and flattering, it will no longer be the truth. In contrast, fiction is highly malleable. The history of every nation contains some dark episodes that citizens don’t like to acknowledge and remember.
An uncompromising adherence to the truth is essential for scientific progress, and it is also an admirable spiritual practice, but it is not a winning political strategy.
Plato’s noble lie notwithstanding, we should not conclude that all politicians are liars or that all national histories are deceptions. The choice isn’t simply between telling the truth and lying. There is a third option. Telling a fictional story is lying only when you pretend that the story is a true representation of reality. Telling a fictional story isn’t lying when you avoid such pretense and acknowledge that you are trying to create a new intersubjective reality rather than represent a preexisting objective reality.
The Constitution didn’t reveal any preexisting truth about the world, but crucially it wasn’t a lie, either. The authors didn’t pretend that the text came down from heaven or that it had been inspired by some god. Rather, they acknowledged that it was an extremely creative legal fiction generated by fallible human beings.
The 10th Commandment says, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, your neighbor’s wife, or his male slave or female slave.” This implies that God is perfectly okay with people holding slaves and object only to the coveting of slaves belonging to someone else. But unlike the US Constitution, the 10th Commandment failed to provide any amendment mechanism.
Contrary to the naive view, information isn’t the raw material of truth, and human information networks aren’t geared only to discover the truth. But contrary to the populist view, information isn’t just a weapon, either. Rather, to survive and flourish, every human information network needs to do 2 things simultaneously: discover truth and create order.
Religions always claim to be an objective and eternal truth rather than a fictional story invented by humans. In such cases, the search for truth threatens the foundations of the social order. Many societies require their populations not to know their true origins: ignorance is strength.
An information network may allow and even encourage people to search for truth, but only in specific fields that help generate power without threatening the social order. The result can be a very powerful network that is singularly lacking in wisdom. Under Nazi rule Germans were encouraged to develop rocket science, but they were not free to question racist theories about biology and history.
Nations arise “out of dreams, songs, fantasies.”
A church, a university, or a library that wants to balance its budget soon realizes that in addition to priests and poets who can mesmerize people with stories, it needs accountants who know their way around the various types of lists.
Lists and stories are complementary. National myths legitimize the tax records, while the tax records help transform aspirational stories into concrete schools and hospitals.
Evolution has adapted our brains to be good at absorbing, retaining, and processing even very large quantities of information when they are shaped into a story. Despite its enormous length, generations of Hindus succeeded in remembering and reciting the Ramayana by heart.
Human minds rely on stories and on story architecture as the primary roadmap for understanding, making sense of, remembering, and planning our lives. Lives are like stories because we think in story terms. Stories are a highly efficient vehicle for communicating factual, conceptual, emotional, and tacit information.
When writing constitutions, peace treaties, and commercial contracts, lawyers, politicians, and businesspeople wrangle for weeks and even months over each word — because they know that these pieces of paper can wield enormous power.
Written documents were much better than human brains in recording certain types of information. But they created a new and very thorny problem: retrieval.
At the heart of the bureaucratic order is the drawer. Bureaucracy seeks to solve the retrieval problem by dividing the world into drawers, and knowing which document goes into which drawer.
Divide the world into containers, and keep the containers separate so the documents don’t get mixed up. This principle, however, comes with a price. Instead of focusing on understanding the world as it is, bureaucracy is often busy imposing a new and artificial order on the world. Reducing the messiness of reality to a limited number of fixed drawers helps bureaucrats keep order, but it comes at the expense of truth.
Unlike bacteria, viruses aren’t single-cell organisms. They aren’t cells at all, and don’t possess any cellular machinery of their own. Viruses don’t eat or metabolize, and cannot reproduce by themselves. They are tiny packets of genetic code, which are able to penetrate cells, hijack their cellular machinery, and instruct them to produce more copies of that alien genetic code. The new copies burst out of the cell to infect and hijack more cells, which is how the alien code turns viral. Scientists argue endlessly about whether viruses should count as life-forms or whether they fall outside the boundary of life. But this boundary isn’t an objective reality; it is an intersubjective convention. Even if biologists reach a consensus that viruses are lifeforms, it wouldn’t change anything about how viruses behave; it will only change how humans think about them.
In defense of bureaucracy it should be noted that while it sometimes sacrifices truth and distorts our understanding of the world, it often does so for the sake of order, without which it would be hard to maintain any large-scale human network. While bureaucracies are never perfect, is there a better way to manage big networks?
For all bureaucracies — good or bad — share one key characteristic: it is hard for humans to understand them.
Documents, archives, forms, licenses, regulations, and other bureaucratic procedures have changed the way information flows in society, and with it the way power works. This made it far more difficult to understand power. What is happening behind the closed doors of offices and archives, where anonymous officials analyze and organize piles of documents and determine our fate with a stroke of a pen or a click of a mouse?
In Christian theology damnation is conceived as losing all contact with the mother church and the heavenly father. Hell is a lost child crying for his or her missing parents.
Sibling rivalry is one of the key processes of evolution. Siblings routinely compete for food and parental attention, and in some species the killing of one sibling by another is commonplace. Entire nations — like the Jewish people — may base their identity on the claim that “we are Father’s favorite children.”
Even the greatest poetical narratives usually copy their basic plotline from the handbook of evolution.
Ramayana is set within the context of large agrarian kingdoms, but it shows little interest in how such kingdoms register property, collect taxes, catalog archives, or finance wars.
In bureaucratic societies, the lives of ordinary people are often upended by unidentified officials of an unfathomable agency for incomprehensible reasons. Whereas stories about heroes who confront monsters repackage the biological dramas of confronting predators and romantic rivals, the unique horror of Kafkaesque stories comes from the unfathomability of the threat. Evolution has primed our minds to understand threat by a tiger. Our mind finds it much more difficult to understand death by a document.
Complex bureaucratic systems usually contain self-disciplinary bodies, and when a major catastrophe occurs — like a military defeat or a financial meltdown — commissions of inquiry are set up to understand what went wrong and make sure that the mistake is not repeated.
Historically, the most important function of religion has been to provide superhuman legitimacy for the social order. Religions propose that their ideas and rules were established by an infallible superhuman authority, and are therefore free from all possibility of error, and should never be questioned or changed by fallible humans.
He claimed that the end of the world was imminent, and convinced many of the locals to grant him dictatorial powers so that he could prepare the community for the coming apocalypse. Baninge proceeded to waste almost all the community’s resources on extravagant feasts and rituals. Many concluded that he was a charlatan — or perhaps the servant of the Devil.
After the canon was sealed, most Jews gradually forgot the role of human institutions in the messy process of compiling the Bible. Jewish Orthodoxy maintained that God personally handed down to Moses at Mount Sinai the entire first part of the Bible, the Torah.
Anticipating the blockchain idea by 2K years, Jews began making numerous copies of the holy code, and every Jewish community was supposed to have at least one in its synagogue. First, disseminating many copies of the holy book promised to democratize religion and place strict limits on the power of would-be human autocrats. Second, having numerous copies of the same book prevented any meddling with the text.
A Jewish shipping magnate living in Alexandria would have found that many of the biblical laws were irrelevant to his life while many of his pressing questions had no clear answers in the holy text. He couldn’t obey the commandments about worshipping in the Jerusalem temple, because not only did he not live near Jerusalem, but the temple didn’t even exist anymore.
Inevitably, the holy book spawned numerous interpretations, which were far more consequential than the book itself. As Jews increasingly argued over the interpretation of the Bible, rabbis gained more power and prestige.
The dream of bypassing fallible human institutions through the technology of the holy book never materialized. With each iteration, the power of the rabbinical institution only increased. “Trust the infallible book” turned into “trust the humans who interpret the book.”
Originally, it was a religion of priests and temples, focused on rituals and sacrifices. In biblical times, the quintessential Jewish scene was a priest in blood-splattered robes sacrificing a lamb on the altar of Jehovah. Over the centuries, however, Judaism became an “information religion,” obsessed with texts and interpretations. The quintessential Jewish scene became a group of rabbis arguing about the interpretation of a text.
The rabbis weren’t oblivious to this seeming gap between text and reality. Rather, they maintained that writing texts about the rituals and arguing about these texts were far more important than actually performing the rituals.
As Christians composed more and more gospels, epistles, prophecies, parables, prayers, and other texts, it became harder to know which ones to pay attention to. Christians needed a curation institution. That’s how the New Testament was created.
Just as most Jews forgot that rabbis curated the Old Testament, so most Christians forgot that church councils curated the New Testament, and came to view it simply as the infallible word of God.
Christians could read this as a call to reject all use of military force, or to reject all social hierarchies. The Catholic Church, however, viewed such pacifists and egalitarian readings are heresies. It interpreted Jesus’s words in a way that allowed the church to become the richest landowner in Europe, to launch violent crusades, and to establish murderous inquisitions. Catholic theology accepted that Jesus told us to love our enemies, but explained that burning heretics was an act of love, because it deterred additional people from adopting heretical views, thereby saving them from the flames of hell.
The church couldn’t prevent the occasional freethinker from formulating heretical ideas. But because it controlled key nodes in the medieval information network, it could prevent such a heretic from making and distributing a hundred copies of her book.
In 1424 the library of Cambridge University boasted a grand total of 122 books.
The church sought to lock society inside an echo chamber, allowing the spread only of those books that supported it, and people trusted the church because almost all the books supported it.
Luther, Calvin, and their successors argued that there was no need for any fallible human institution to interpose itself between ordinary people and the holy book. Christians should abandon all the parasitical bureaucracies that grew around the Bible and reconnect to the original word of God. But the word of God never interpreted itself, which is why not only Lutherans and Calvinists but numerous other Protestant sects eventually established their own church institutions and invested them with the authority to interpret the text and persecute heretics.
For truth to win, it is necessary to establish curation institutions that have the power to tilt the balance in favor of the facts. However, as the history of the Catholic Church indicates, such institutions might use their curation power to quash any criticism of themselves, labelling all alternative views erroneous and preventing the institution’s own errors from being exposed and corrected.
A church typically told people to trust it because it possessed the absolute truth, in the form of an infallible holy book. A scientific institution, in contrast, gained authority because it had strong self-correcting mechanism that exposed and rectified the errors of the institution itself. It was these self-correcting mechanisms, not the technology of printing, that were the engine of the scientific revolution.
In other words, the scientific revolution was launched by the discovery of ignorance. The scientific project starts by rejecting the fantasy of infallibility and proceeding to construct an information network that takes error to be inescapable.
Scientific institutions are also different from conspiracy theories, inasmuch as they reward self-skepticism. Conspiracy theorists tend to be extremely skeptical regarding the existing consensus, but when it comes to their own beliefs, they lose all their skepticism and fall prey to confirmation bias.
This terminology implied that the violence was the fault of “some” misguided individuals who didn’t understand the truth taught by the church. The pope didn’t accept the possibility that perhaps these individuals understood exactly what the church was teaching and that these teachings just were not the truth.
You would never hear a pope announcing to the world, “Our experts have just discovered a really big error in the Bible. We’ll soon issue an updated edition.” Instead, when asked about the church’s more generous attitude to Jews or women, popes imply that this was always what the church really taught, even if some individual churchmen previously failed to understand the message correctly.
The most celebrated moments in the history of science are precisely those moments when accepted wisdom is overturned and new theories are born.
He rejected mainstream genetics and the theory of evolution by natural selection and advanced his own pet theory, which said that “re-education” could change the traits of plants and animals, and even transform one species into another.
An institution can call itself by whatever name it wants, but if it lacks a strong self-correcting mechanism, it is not a scientific institution.
There is a reason why institutions like the Catholic Church and the Soviet Communist Party eschewed strong self-correction mechanisms. While such mechanisms are vital for the pursuit of truth, they are costly in terms of maintaining order. Strong self-correcting mechanisms tend to create doubts, disagreements, conflicts, and rifts and to undermine the myths that hold the social order together.
The history of information networks has always involved maintaining a balance between truth and order. Just as sacrificing truth for the sake of order comes with a cost, so does sacrificing order for truth.
Scientific institutions have been able to afford their strong self-correcting mechanisms because they leave the difficult job of preserving the social order to other institutions.
Newspapers and universities in the US openly exposed and criticized American war crimes in Vietnam. Newspapers and universities in the totalitarian USSR were also happy to criticize American crimes, but they remained silent about Soviet crimes in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Soviet silence was scientifically unjustifiable, but it made political sense. American self-flagellation about the Vietnam War continues even today to divide the American public and to undermine America’s reputation throughout the world, whereas Soviet and Russian silence about the Afghanistan War has helped dim its memory and limit its reputational costs.
Sometimes the central government attempts to concentrate all information in its hands and to dictate all decisions by itself, controlling the totality of people’s lives. This totalizing form of dictatorship is known as totalitarianism. But not every dictatorship is totalitarian. Technical difficulties often prevent dictators from becoming totalitarian.
In theory, a highly centralized information network could try to maintain strong self-correcting mechanism, like independent courts and elected legislative bodies. But if they functioned well, these would challenge the central authority and thereby decentralize the information network. Dictators always see such independent power hubs as threats and seek to neutralize them. This is what happened to the Roman Senate, whose power was whittled away by successive Caesars until it became little more than a rubber stamp for imperial whims.
Autonomy is not a consequence of the government’s ineffectiveness; it is the democratic ideal.
To paraphrase President Madison, since humans are fallible, a government is necessary, but since government too is fallible, it needs mechanisms to expose and correct its errors, such as holding regular elections, protecting the freedom of the press, and separating the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the government.
When in 2023 Americans disagreed about whether to invade Iraq, everyone ultimately had to abide by a single decision. It was unacceptable that some Americans could maintain a private peace with Saddam Hussein while others declared war. Whether good or bad, the decision to invade Iraq committed every American citizen.
In the absence of additional self-correcting mechanisms, elections can easily be rigged. Even if the elections are completely free and fair, by itself this too doesn’t guarantee democracy. For democracy is not the same thing as majority dictatorship.
Hitlers began sending Jews and communists to concentration camps within months of rising to power through democratic elections, and in the US numerously democratically elected governments have disenfranchised African Americans, Native Americans, and other oppressed populations.
Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.
The most common method strongmen use to undermine democracy is to attack its self-correcting mechanisms one by one, often beginning with the courts and the media. The typical strongman either deprives courts of their powers or packs them with his loyalists and seeks to close all independent media outlets while building his own omnipresent propaganda machine.
If the majority wants war, the country goes to war. If the majority wants peace, the country makes peace. If the majority wants to raise taxes, taxes are raised. Major decisions about foreign affairs, defense, education, taxation, and numerous other policies are all in the hands of the majority.
But in a democracy, there are 2 baskets of rights that are protected from the majority’s grasp. One contains human rights. These rights enshrine the decentralized nature of democracy, making sure that as long as people don’t harm anyone, they can live their lives as they see fit. The second contains civil rights. These are the basic rules of the democratic game, which enshrine its self-correcting mechanisms.
It is not enough for a democratic government to abstain from infringing on human and civil rights. It must take actions to ensure them. For example, the right to life imposes a duty to protect citizens from criminal violence. If a government doesn’t kill anyone, but also makes no effort to protect citizens from murder, this is anarchy rather than democracy.
Both human and civil rights are intersubjective conventions that humans invent rather than discover, and they are determined by historical contingencies rather than universal reason. Different democracies can adopt somewhat different lists of rights.
Elections are not a method for discovering truth. Rather, they are a method for maintaining order by adjudicating between people’s conflicting desires. Elections establish what the majority of people desire, rather than what the truth is. Democratic networks therefore maintain some self-correcting mechanisms to protect the truth even from the will of the majority.
But even if most voters support the leader, their desires should not prevent judges from investigating the accusations and getting to the truth. As with the justice system, so also with science. A majority of voters might deny the reality of climate change, but they should not have the power to dictate scientific truth or to prevent scientists from exploring and publishing inconvenient facts.
Acknowledging the reality of climate change does not tell us what to do about it. We always have options, and choosing between them is a question of desire, not truth. One option is slowing economic growth but saving people in 2050 from more severe hardship. A second option might be to continue with business as usual. Choosing between these 2 options is a question of desire, and should therefore be done by all voters rather than by a limited group of experts.
But the one option that should not be on offer in elections is hiding or distorting the truth. We can choose what we want, but we shouldn’t deny the true meaning of our choice.
But subordinating them to a governmental Ministry of Truth is likely to make things worse. The government is already the most powerful institution in developed societies, and it often has the greatest interest in distorting or hiding inconvenient facts. Allowing the government to supervise the search for truth is like appointing the fox to guard the chicken coop.
If all this sounds complicated, it is because democracy should be complicated. Simplicity is a characteristic of dictatorial information networks in which the center dictates everything and everybody silently obeys. Democracy is a conversation with numerous participants, many of them talking at the same time. It can be hard to follow such a conversation.
The term “populism” derives from populus, which means “the people.” In democracies, “the people” is considered the sole legitimate source of political authority. Only representatives of the people should have the authority to declare wars, pass laws, and raise taxes. Populist cherish this basic democratic principle, but somehow conclude from it that a single party or a single leader should monopolize all power.
The most novel claim populists make is that they alone truly represent the people. If some other party wins election, it means the elections were stolen or that the people were deceived to vote in a way that doesn’t express their true will. It should be stressed that for many populists, this is a genuinely held belief rather than a propaganda gambit.
A fundamental part of this populist credo is the belief that “the people” is not a collection of flesh-and-blood individuals with various interests and opinions, but rather a unified mystical body that possesses a single will — “the will of the people.”
Holding a conversation presupposes the existence of several legitimate voices. If, however, the people has only one legitimate voice, there can be no conversation. Rather, the single voice dictates everything. Populism may therefore claim adherence to the democratic principle of “people’s power,” but it effectively empties democracy of meaning and seeks to establish a dictatorship.
Populism undermines democracy in another, more subtle, but equally dangerous way. Having claimed that they alone represent the people, populists argue that the people is not just the sole legitimate source of political authority but the sole legitimate source of all authority. Any institution that derives its authority from something other than the will of the people is antidemocratic.
While democracy means that authority in the political sphere comes from the people, it doesn’t deny the validity of alternative sources of authority in other spheres. Independent media outlets, courts, and universities are essential self-correcting mechanisms that protect the truth even from the will of the majority.
While many embrace populism because they see it as an honest account of human reality, strongmen are attracted to it for a different reason. Populism offers strongmen an ideological basis for making themselves dictators while pretending to be democrats.
Where is the room where the crucial conversations happen, and who sits there? The US Congress was designed to fulfill this function, with the people’s representatives meeting to converse and try to convince one another. But when was the last time an eloquent speech in Congress by a member of one party persuaded members of the other party to change their minds about anything? Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.
While bands and tribes sometimes had dominant leaders, these tended to exercise only limited authority. Leaders had no standing armies, police forces, or governmental bureaucracies at their disposal, so they couldn’t just impose their will by force. Leaders also found it difficult to control the economic basis of people’s lives.
The lack of a meaningful public conversation was not the fault of Augustus, Nero, Caracalla, or any of the other emperors. They didn’t sabotage Roman democracy. Given the size of the empire and the available information technology, democracy was simply unworkable. This was acknowledged already by ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, who argued that democracy can work only in small-scale city-states.
It should be stressed that in many large-scale autocracies local affairs were often managed democratically. The Roman emperor didn’t have the information needed to micromanage hundreds of cities across the empire.
It seems reasonable to assume that regular newspaper readership numbered in the hundreds of thousands. But millions more people rarely, if ever, read newspaper.
No wonder that American democracy in those days was a limited affair — and the domain of wealthy white men. In 1824, 1.3M Americans were theoretically eligible to vote, out of an adult population of about 5M. Only 352K people — 7% of the total adult population — actually made use of their right.
Adams became president thanks to the support of 1% of the total population.
The Founding Fathers were inspired by ancient Rome and they were well aware that the Roman Republic eventually turned into an autocratic empire. They feared that some American Caesar would do something similar to their republic, and constructed multiple overlapping self-correcting mechanisms, known as the system of checks and balances. One of these was a free press.
Being killed by a rebellious subordinate was the biggest occupational hazard not just for Roman emperors but for almost all premodern autocrats.
Marx taught that for millennia, all human societies were dominated by corrupt elites who oppressed the people. The Bolsheviks claimed they knew how to finally end all oppression and create a perfectly just society on earth. But to do so, they had to overcome numerous enemies and obstacles, which, in turn, required all the power they could get. They refused to countenance any self-correcting mechanisms that might question either their vision or their methods.
The governor of a Soviet province was constantly watched by the local party commissar, and neither of them knew who among their staff was an NKVD informer. A testimony to the effectiveness of the system is that modern totalitarianism largely solved the perennial problem of premodern autocracies — revolts by provincial subordinates. Not once did a provincial governor or a Red Army front commander rebel against the center. Much of the credit for that goes to the secret police, which kept a close eye on the mass of citizens, on provincial administrators, and even more so on the party and the Red Army.
While in most polities throughout history the army had wield enormous political power, in 20th-century totalitarian regimes the regular army ceded much of its clout to the secret police — the information army. In the USSR, the NKVD lacked the firepower of the Red Army, but had more influence in the Kremlin and could terrorize and purge even the army brass.
In none of these cases could the secret police defeat the regular army in traditional warfare, of course; what made the secret police powerful was its command of information. It had the information necessary to preempt a military coup and to arrest the commanders of tank brigades or fighter squadrons before they knew what hit them.
Of the 33 men who served on the Politburo between 1919-38, 14 were shot (42%). Of the 139 members of the party’s Central Committee in 1934, 98 (70%) were shot. Only 2% of the delegates who took part in Party Congress in 1934 evaded execution, imprisonment, expulsion, or demotion, and attended Party Congress in 1939.
The secret police — which did all the purging and killing — was itself divided into several competing branches that closely watched and purged one another.
“Please don’t take it personally. What else could I do?” If anyone dared object to the madness of the system, they were promptly denounced as kulaks and counterevolutionaries and would themselves be liquidated.
The most important lesson Soviet parents taught their children wasn’t loyalty to the party or to Stalin. It was “keep your mouth shut.”
In the USSR, state and party reinforced each other, and Stalin was the de facto head of both. There could be no Soviet “Investiture Controversy,” because Stalin had final say about all appointments to both party positions and state functions.
Americans grow up with the idea that questions lead to answers. But Soviet citizens grew up with the idea that questions lead to trouble.
Things that were considered sacrosanct, self-evident, and universally accepted — such as gender roles — became deeply controversial, and it was difficult to reach new agreements because there were many more groups, viewpoints, and interests to take into account. Just holding an orderly conversation was a challenge, because people couldn’t even agree on the rules of debate.
This caused much frustration among both the old guard and the freshly empowered, who suspected that their newfound freedom of expression was hollow and that their political demands were not fulfilled. Disappointed with words, some switched to guns.
The algorithms could have chosen to recommend sermons on compassion or cooking classes, but they decided to spread hate-filled conspiracy theories. Recommendations from on high can have enormous sway over people. Recall that the Bible was born as a recommendation list.
The algorithms themselves are also to blame. By trial and error, they learned that outrage creates engagement, and without any explicit order from above they decided to promote outrage.
Intelligence is the ability to attain goals. Consciousness is the ability to experience subjective feelings like pain, pleasure, love, and hate.
Bacteria and plants apparently lack any consciousness, yet they too display intelligence. Even humans make intelligent decisions without any awareness of them; 99% of the processes in our body, from respiration to digestion, happen without any conscious decision making.
They might become far more intelligent than us, but never develop any kind of feelings.
GPT-4 could not solve the CAPTCHA puzzles by itself. But it contacted a TaskRabbit human worker, asking them to solve the CAPTCHA for it.
The terms like “decided,” “lied,” and “pretended” apply only to conscious entities, so we shouldn’t use them to describe how GPT-4 interacted with the TaskRabbit worker.
How many people know all the tax laws of their country? Even professional accountants struggle with that. But computers are built for such things. They are bureaucratic natives and can automatically draft laws, monitor legal violations, and identify legal loopholes with superhuman efficiency.
It is perhaps better to think of it as “alien intelligence.”
What should be clear from the start is that this network will create entirely novel political and personal realities. The main message of the previous chapters has been that information isn’t truth and that information revolutions don’t uncover the truth. They create new political structures, economic models, and cultural norms.
When accused of creating social and political mayhem, they hide behind arguments like “We are just a platform. We are doing what our customers want and what the voters permit. We don’t force anyone to use our services, and we don’t violate any existing laws. If customers didn’t like what we do, they would leave. If voters didn’t like what we do, they would pass laws against us.
The tech giants have a direct line to the world’s most powerful governments, and they invest huge sums in lobbying efforts to throttle regulations that might undermine their business model. In 2022 top tech companies spent close to $70M on lobbying in the US, outstripping the lobbying expenses of oil and gas companies and pharmaceuticals.
Just as Shell and BP pay taxes to countries from which they extract oil, the tech giants should pay taxes to countries from which they extract data.
Suppose one of the tech giants offers to provide a certain politician with valuable information on Uruguayan voters and tweak its social media and search algorithms to subtly favor that politician. In exchange, maybe the incoming PM abandons the digital tax scheme. He also passes regulations that protect tech giants from lawsuits concerning users’ privacy, thereby making it easier for them to harvest information in Uruguay. Was this bribery? Note that not a single dollar exchanged hands.
Money is supposed to be a universal measure of value, rather than a token used only in some settings. But as more things are valued in terms of information, while being “free” in terms of money, at some point it becomes misleading to evaluate the wealth of individuals and corporations in terms of the number of dollars they possess.
Humans are used to being monitored. For millions of years, we have been watched and tracked by other animals, as well as by other humans. Family members, friends, and neighbors have always wanted to know what we do and feel, and we have always cared deeply how they see us and what they know about us. Social hierarchies, political maneuvers, and romantic relationships involve a never-ending effort to decipher what other people feel and think and occasionally to hide our own feelings and thoughts.
Like Stalin, Ceausescu distrusted his own agents and officials more than any one else.
Most of what Romanian and Soviet citizens did and said escaped the notice of the Securitate and the KGB. Even the details that made it into some archive often languished unread. The real power of the Securitate and the KGB was not an ability to constantly watch everyone, but rather their ability to inspire the fear that they might be watching, which made everyone extremely careful about what they said and did.
First, they create a set of general criteria, such as “reading extremist literature,” “befriending known terrorists,” and “having technical knowledge necessary to produce dangerous weapons.” Then they need to decide whether a particular individual meets enough of these criteria to be labeled as a suspected terrorist.
A former director of both the CIA and the NSA proclaimed that “we kill people based on metadata.”
One way to think of the social credit system is as a new kind of money.
The points themselves are intrinsically worthless. Their value lies in the fact that they serve as accounting tokens that society uses to keep track of our individual scores.
For scoring those things that money can’t buy, there was an alternative non-monetary system, which has been given different names: honor, status, reputation. What social credit systems seek is a standardized valuation of the reputation market. Social credit is a new points system that ascribes precise values even to smiles and family visits.
Others may find systems that allocate precise values to every social action demeaning and inhuman. Even worse, a comprehensive social credit system will annihilate privacy and effectively turn life into a never-ending job interview.
In most societies people have always feared losing face even more than they have feared losing money. Many more people commit suicide due to shame and guilt than due to economic distress. Even when people kill themselves after being fired from their job or after their business goes bankrupt, they are usually pushed over the edge by the social humiliation it involves rather than by the economic hardship per se.
Social credit algorithms combined with ubiquitous surveillance technology now threaten to merge all status competition into a single never-ending race. Even in their own homes or while trying to enjoy a relaxed vacation, people would have to be extremely careful about every deed and word, as if they were performing onstage in front of millions.
Homo sovieticus were servile and cynical humans, lacking all initiative or independent thinking, passively obeying even the most ludicrous orders, and indifferent to the results of their actions.
Back in 2016, an internal Facebook report discovered that “64% of all extreme group joins are due to our recommendation tools.”
The algorithms reduced the multifaceted range of human emotions — hate, love, outrage, joy, confusion — into a single catchall category: engagement.
To tilt the balance in favor of truth, networks must develop and maintain strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward truth telling. These self-correcting mechanisms are costly, but if you want to get the truth, you must invest in them.
On War created a rational model for understanding war, and it is still the dominant military theory today. Its most important maxim is that “war is the continuation of policy by other means.” This implies that war is not an emotional outbreak, a heroic adventure, or a divine punishment. War is not even a military phenomenon. Rather, war is a political tool. According to Clausewitz, military actions are utterly irrational unless they are aligned with some overarching political goal.
The mere ability to secure military victory is meaningless. The key question to ask is, what political goals will the military success achieve?
History is full of decisive military victories that led to political disasters.
We can understand the whole of On War as a warning that “maximizing victory” is as shortsighted a goal as “maximizing user engagement.” Only once the political goal is clear can armies decide on a military strategy that will hopefully achieve it. From the overall strategy, lower-ranking officers can then derive tactical goals.
For Clausewitz, rationality means alignment. Pursuing tactical or strategic victories that are misaligned with political goals is irrational. The problem is that the bureaucratic nature of armies makes them highly susceptible to such irrationality. By dividing reality into separate drawers, bureaucracy encourages the pursuit of narrow goals even when this harms the greater good.
The problem with computers isn’t that they are particularly evil but that they are particularly powerful. And the more powerful the computer, the more careful we need to be about defining its goal in a way that precisely aligns with our ultimate goals.
Because they are so different from us, when we make the mistake of giving them a misaligned goal, they are less likely to notice it or request clarification.
In the case of human networks, we rely on self-correcting mechanisms to periodically review and revise our goals, so setting the wrong goals is not the end of the world. But since the computer network might escape our control, if we set it the wrong goal, we might discover our mistake when we are no longer able to correct it.
A tactical maneuver is rational if, and only if, it is aligned with some higher strategic goal, which should in turn be aligned with an even higher political goal. But where does this chain of goals ultimately start?
Why should Napoleon care about the mythical France any more than about his mythical soul?
This sounds like a simple and obvious idea: each of us should behave in a way we want everyone to behave. But the ideas that sound good in the ethereal realm of philosophy often have trouble immigrating to the harsh land of history.
The problem for utilitarians is that we don’t possess a calculus of suffering. We don’t know how many “suffering points” or “happiness points” to assign to particular events, so in complex historical situations it is extremely difficult to calculate whether a given action increases or decreases the overall amount of suffering in the world.
The Americans were well aware that their invasion would cause tremendous suffering for millions of people. But in the long run, they argued, the benefits of bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq would outweigh the costs. Can the computer network calculate whether this argument was sound?
Just as deontologists trying to answer the question of identity are pushed to adopt utilitarian ideas, so utilitarians stymied by the lack of a suffering calculus often end up adopting a deontologist position. They uphold general rules like “Avoiding wars of aggression” or “Protect human rights,” even though they cannot show that following these rules always reduces the sum total of suffering in the world. History provides them only with a vague impression that following these rules tends to reduce suffering. And when some of these general rules clash — for example, when contemplating launching a war of aggression in order to protect human rights — utilitarianism doesn’t offer much practical help. Not even the most powerful computer network can perform the necessary calculations.
How then did bureaucratic systems throughout history set their ultimate goals? They relied on mythology to do it for them. Practical people, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any religious influence, are usually the slaves of some mythmaker.
The alignment problem turns out to be, at heart, a problem of mythology.
One of the most important things to realize about computers is that when a lot of computers communicate with one another, they can create inter-computer realities, analogous to the intersubjective realities produced by networks of humans.
The Google algorithm determines the website’s Google rank by assigning points to various parameters, such as how many people visit the website and how many other websites link to it. The rank itself is an inter-computer reality, existing in a network connecting billions of computers — the internet. Like Pokemon, this inter-computer reality spills over into the physical world. For a restaurant, it matters a great deal whether its website appears at the top of the first Google page.
Jews and Muslims, acting on religious beliefs and backed up by nuclear capabilities, are poised to engage in history’s worst-ever massacre of human beings, over a rock.
These financial devices were invented by a handful of mathematicians and investment whiz kids and were almost unintelligible for most humans, including regulators. Computers may well create financial devices that will be orders of magnitude more complex than CDOs and that will be intelligible only to other computers.
The problem we face is not how to deprive computers of all creative agency, but rather how to steer their creativity in the right direction. It is the same problem we have always had with human creativity.
By the 19th century, racism pretended to be an exact science: it claimed to differentiate between people on the basis of objective biological facts, and to rely on scientific methods such as measuring skulls and recording crime statistics. But the cloud of numbers and categories was just a smoke screen for absurd intersubjective myths.
Religions have always imagined that somewhere above the clouds there is an all-seeing eye that gives or deduct points for everything we do and that our eternal fate depends on the score we accumulate.
AI is not a dumb automaton that repeats the same movements again and again irrespective of the results. Rather, it is equipped with strong self-correcting mechanisms, which allow it to learn from its own mistakes.
The database on which an AI is trained is a bit like a human’s childhood.
Some humans may consequently conclude that the quest for an infallible technology has finally succeeded and that we should treat computers as a holy book that can talk to us and interpret itself, without any need of an intervening human institution.
Large-scale societies cannot exist without some mythology, but that doesn’t mean all mythologies are equal. To guard against errors and excesses, some mythologies have acknowledged their own fallible origin and included a self-correcting mechanism allowing humans to question and challenge the mythology. That’s the model of the US Constitution. But how can humans probe and correct a computer mythology we don’t understand?
The Industrial Revolution also undermined the global ecological balance, causing a wave of extinctions. In the early 21st century up to 58K species are believed to go extinct every year, and total vertebrate populations declined by 60% between 1970-2014.
Much the same is true of the information that our lawyer, our accountant, or our therapist accumulates. Having access to our personal life comes with a fiduciary duty to act in our best interests.
It is harder to automate the job of nurses than the job of at least those doctors who mostly gather medical data, provide a diagnosis, and recommend treatment.
Another common but mistaken assumption is that creativity is unique to human so it would be difficult to automate any job that requires creativity. In chess, however, computers are already far more creative than humans. Creativity is often defined as the ability to recognize patterns and then break them.
We regard entities as conscious not because we have proof of it but because we develop intimate relationships with them and become attached to them.
Progressives tend to downplay the importance of traditions and existing institutions and to believe that they know how to engineer better social structures from scratch. Conservatives tend to be more cautious. Their key insight is that social reality is much more complicated than the champions of progress grasp and that people aren’t very good at understanding the world and predicting the future. That’s why it’s best to keep things as they are — even if they seem unfair — and if some change is inescapable, it should be limited and gradual. Society functions through an intricate web of rules, institutions, and customs that accumulated through trial and error over a long time. Nobody comprehends how they are all connected. An ancient tradition may seem ridiculous and irrelevant, but abolishing it could cause unanticipated problems. In contrast, a revolution may seem overdue and just, but it can lead to far greater crimes than anything committed by the old regime.
To be a conservative has been more about pace than policy. Conservatives aren’t committed to any specific religion or ideology; they are committed to conserving whatever is already here and has worked more or less reasonably.
Yet during all those millennia, human minds have explored only certain areas in the landscape of go. Other areas were left untouched, because human minds just didn’t think to venture there.
The problem with many human prejudices is that they focus on just 1 or 2 data points — like someone’s skin color, disability, or gender — while ignoring other information. Banks and other institutions are increasingly relying on algorithms to make decisions, precisely because algorithms can take many more data points into account than humans can.
While human decisions may seem to rely on just those few data points we are conscious of, in fact our decisions are subconsciously influenced by thousands of additional data points. Being unaware of these subconscious processes, when we deliberate on our decisions or explain them, we often engage in post-hoc single-point rationalizations for what really happens as billions of neurons interact inside our brain.
Whereas previously humans were sometimes engaged in status competition, but often had welcome breaks from this highly stressful situation, the omnipresent social credit algorithm eliminates the breaks.
To function, a democracy needs to meet 2 conditions: it needs to enable a free public conversation on key issues, and it needs to maintain a minimum of social order and institutional trust. Free conversation must not slip into anarchy. Especially when dealing with urgent and important problems, the public debate should be conducted according to accepted rules, and there should be a legitimate mechanism to reach some kind of final decision, even if not everybody likes it.
As of 2024, more than half of “us” already live under authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, many of which were established long before the rise of the computer network.
The fate of Tiberius indicates the delicate balance that all dictators must strike. They try to concentrate all information in one place, but they must be careful that the different channels of information are allowed to merge only in their own person. If the information channels merge somewhere else, that then becomes the true nexus of power.
Macro orchestrated a coup against Sejanus, and as a reward Tiberus made Macro the new commander of the Praetorian Guard. A few years later, Macro had Tiberius killed.
In the 19th century, China was late to appreciate the potential of the IR and was slow to adopt inventions like railroads and steamships. It consequently suffered what the Chinese call “the century of humiliations.” The Chinese vowed never again to miss the train.
China has banned FB, Youtube, and many other western social media apps and websites. Russia has banned almost all western social media apps as well as some Chinese ones. In 2020, India banned TikTok, WeChat, and numerous other Chinese apps on the grounds that they were “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India, security of state and public order.”
In a new imperial information economy, raw data will be harvested throughout the world and will flow to the imperial hub. There the cutting-edge technology will be developed, producing unbeatable algorithms.
How many Romans or Jews in the day of Tiberius could have anticipated that a splinter Jewish sect would eventually take over the Roman Empire and that the emperors would abandon Rome’s old gods to worship an executed Jewish rabbi?
Cyber weapons are much more versatile than nuclear bombs. Cyber weapons can bring down a country’s electric grid, but they can also be used to destroy a secret research facility, jam an enemy sensor, inflame a political scandal, manipulate elections, or hack a single smartphone. And they can do all that stealthily. At times it is hard to know if an attack even occurred or who launched it.
Even worse, if one side thinks it has such an opportunity, the temptation to launch a first strike could become irresistible, because one never knows how long the window of opportunity will remain open. Game theory posits that the most dangerous situation in an arms race is when one side feels it has an advantage but that this advantage is slipping away.
All national teams agree not to use performance-enhancing drugs, because if they go down that path, the WC would eventually devolve into a competition between biochemists.
It is easier to hide an illicit AI lab than an illicit nuclear reactor. Second, AIs have a lot more dual civilian-military usages than nuclear bombs.
It argues that at heart humans are Stone Age hunters who cannot but see the world as a jungle where the strong prey upon the weak and where might makes right. For millennia, the theory goes, humans have tried to camouflage this unchanging reality under a thin and mutable veneer of myths and rituals, but we have never really broken free from the law of the jungle. Indeed, our myths and rituals are themselves a weapon used by the jungle’s top dogs to deceive and trap their inferiors. Those who don’t realize this are dangerously naive and will fall prey to some ruthless predator.
There are reasons to think that “realists” have a selective view of historical reality and that the law of the jungle is itself a myth. Real jungles are full of cooperation, symbiosis, and altruism. If organisms abandoned cooperation in favor of an all-out competition for hegemony, the rain forests and all their inhabitants would quickly die.
“If we split all the property under Heaven into 6 shares, 5 shares are spent on the military, and 1 shares is spent on temple offerings and state expenses. How can the country not be poor and the people not in difficulty?”
The Roman Empire spent 50-75% of its budget on the military. The Ottoman Empire 60%. The British Empire 75%.
In the early 21st century, the worldwide average government expenditure on the military has been only around 7%, and even the dominant superpower of the US spent only around 13% of its annual budget to maintain its military hegemony.
Every old thing was once new. The only constant of history is change.
Politics is largely a matter of priorities. Should we cut the healthcare budget and spend more on defense? Is our more pressing security threat terrorism or climate change?
While “realists” dismiss historical narratives as propaganda ploys deployed to advance state interests, in fact it is these narratives that define state interests in the first place.
Than Shwe struck first and held forth for nearly an hour on the history of Myanmar, hardly giving the UN secretary-general any chance to speak. In 2011, Netanyahu did something similar in the WH, when he metObama.
When church fathers decided to include 1 Timothy in the biblical dataset while excluding the Acts of Paul and Thecla, they shaped the world for millennia.
The present-day equivalents of Bishop Athanasius are the engineers who write the initial code for AI, and who choose the dataset on which the baby AI is trained.
If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive? Why do we go ahead producing these things even though we’re not sure we can control them and failing to do so could destroy us. Does something in our nature compel us to go down the path of self-destruction?
Just as the law of the jungle is a myth, so also the idea that the act of history bends toward injustice. History is a radically open arc, one that can bend in many directions and reach very different destinations.