🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review+ #14
AI economic shocks, Up Wing politics, socialist solarpunk, a look at the 'Lost in Space' reboot, and 5 Quick Questions for AI expert Niko Grupen and science policy analyst Tony Mills
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So much thought-provoking Substack content this week (IMHO), as you will see below. I covered a wide range of subjects in the essays, Q&As, and micro reads on Monday and Friday, as well as the paywall-free issue on Wednesday. Enjoy the Saturday summaries, recaps, as well as a bit of new content (usually)!
Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Mini-Essay (new): The techno-solutionism of the Lost in Space reboot
Essay Highlights:
— What the economist who identified the 'China Trade Shock' says about a possible AI Shock | (May 30, 2022)
— Imagine a US political party built around faster economic growth and technological progress (June 1, 2022)
— Why socialist 'solarpunk' provides a poor vision of the future (June 3, 2022)
Best of 5 Quick Questions:
— Computer scientist Niko Grupen on the future of machine learning
— Science policy analyst Tony Mills on funding the future
Mini-Essay
🌌 The techno-solutionism of the Lost in Space reboot
Finding optimistic, yet compelling, science fiction may seem like a near impossibility these days. Most modern sci-fi is drenched in catastrophism. The main villain is typically the modern world itself, our civilization of Late Capitalism ™ and technological hubris. Problems are endured rather than solved. Life may go on, but humanity’s best days are surely far behind it.
Star Trek, even the 21st century incarnations, might be the exception that proves the rule. It’s been by far the most common pick when I’ve asked my 5QQ interviewees about a television show, film, or book with techo-optimistic, Up Wing themes. Maybe The Martian, both the book and film, is a close second.
But I’ve found another one. I recently finished the first season of Lost in Space, the 2018 reboot of the cheesy 1960 television series. The Robinson Family — parents John and Maureen, kids Judy, Penny and Will — is back, as is the villainous Doctor Smith and always helpful Robot. And they’re still lost in space.
Some key differences, though. The brilliant Penny is a step-daughter, Doctor Smith has been gender swapped, and Robot has been manufactured by aliens. In the first season, the family is more stranded than lost, stuck on a distant planet. They’re also not stuck there alone. The Robinsons are part of a group of families on a mission to colonize the Alpha Centauri planetary system in the year 2046. When disaster strikes the mother ship en route, the families escape to a local Earth-like planet in their Jupiter flying saucers.
I love that Up Wing thinking is built into the very premise. The colonization mission is prompted not by anthropogenic climate change ravaging the Earth, but by a climate-ruining asteroid strike. So a lack of technological expertise, not too much technology, is to blame here. More to the point, most of the drama during the first season comes from tough circumstances, not bad buys. Like The Martian, the Robinson Family has to solve technical problem after problem to survive. Their travails constantly reminded of this Martian quote.
At some point, everything's gonna go south on you... everything's going to go south and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem... and you solve the next one... and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.
Or in this case, you get to go to Alpha Centauri. There's a "maker” ethos embedded in the show’s DNA. I mean, of course the Robinson’s handy 3D printer plays a key role throughout. And since the show is set only a quarter century from now, problems are solved through understandable ingenuity and (mostly) realistic tech, not superscience. I look forward to binging seasons two and three, ASAP.
Essay Highlights
😲 What the economist who identified the 'China Trade Shock' says about a possible AI Shock | MIT economist David Autor is one of the economists behind research finding that China trade competition knocked down some US regions and they never got back up. In a new paper, “The Labor Market Impacts of Technological Change: From Unbridled Enthusiasm to Qualified Optimism to Vast Uncertainty,” Autor looks at possible disruption from artificial intelligence, but mostly offers possible scenarios and uncertainty rather than hard conclusions. “The uncertainty is that we have less clarity about our technological future than we did two decades ago. AI has extended the frontier of technological possibility towards boundaries that are barely visible at present, he writes. Still, Autor is pretty sure about a few things: For example; “I feel confident that the most skilled workers will likely continue to be complemented by advances in computing and AI—such as workers who invent, design, research, lead, entertain, and educate.” He also doesn’t see Autor also doesn’t see AI or robots deeply affecting low-paid service occupations.
⤴ Imagine a US political party built around faster economic growth and technological progress | Neither major party in 2022 satisfactorily promotes and reflects “Up Wing” policies and values. Up Wingers are all about economic and technological acceleration for solving big problems, effectively tackling new ones, and creating maximum opportunity for all. Which brings us to the Golden State. I’ll be paying close attention to California’s primary scramble for governor next week to see how political independent and policy analyst Michael Shellenberger performs. He’s running on a pretty Up Wing agenda: more nuclear power, more density, more technological solutionism. And even if Shellenberger finishes far back, there are other reasons for optimism about Up Wing thinking — new interest in nuclear energy around the world, advances in nuclear fusion and advanced geothermal, the big decline in space launch costs, and a pandemic that has shown the value of cutting-edge science and harm of government bureaucracy. For now, strengthening and expanding the Up Wing parts of the two existing major parties seems like it would be a more fruitful path than attempting to create an Up Wing alternative.
☀ Why socialist 'solarpunk' provides a poor vision of the future | Solarpunk is a science fiction genre that, as the excellent TVTropes site puts it, “focuses on craftsmanship, community, and technology powered by renewable energy, wrapped up in a coating of Art Nouveau blended with African and Asian aesthetics.” It’s what emerges when an eco-pessimist gets tired of being pessimistic but still hates capitalism and needs to tweet about it on the lastest model of a fully charged iPhone. So a different kind of Up Wing optimism, I guess. A couple of visual examples:
But what is the political economy of a world where a solarpunk future emerges? Well, I think I figured it out, thanks to the new Noema magazine essay “Planning An Eco-Socialist Utopia” by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese, also the authors of the recent book, Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics, from which their essay is adapted.
Pendergrass and Vettese present a thought experiment where a global socialist government re-wilds half the planet, implements veganism, and bans cars. (Also golf.) But don’t worry, they guarantee that all the democratic niceties are met. I believe Friedrich Hayek would have much to say about this. But at least the pictures sure are neat. That said, give me techno-democratic capitalism built on market and prices — human action — over the benevolent bureaucrats of a Soviet-style central planning board (“Gosplant” rather than Gosplan, seriously) minutely planning the global economy with fancy computer models.
Best of 5QQ
Niko Grupen is a Ph.D. student at Cornell, where he thinks about how the ingredients of human intelligence can make AI more capable. Prior to Cornell, Grupen was a machine learning engineer at Apple. Back in March, he wrote a fascinating piece, “AlphaFold, GPT-3 and How to Augment Intelligence with AI,” for the Future newsletter by venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Your a16z pieces highlight AI tools like protein structure prediction, AI-assisted coding, and AI-generated images, among others. Which do you think is most likely to prove to be AI's "killer app" and why?
There has been a lot of ink spilt on the notion that AI will permeate everything — including in my answer to the previous question. … So my take on this is: if we can use these AI tools to build anything, what’s the most positively impactful thing we can build? Right now I think that would be for the environment and for healthcare. Protein structure prediction will be massively impactful here — proteins might play a role in decarbonizing the atmosphere, breaking down plastics/pollutants, developing cancer treatments, and preventing future pandemics — but I think we’ll see some of the other AI models we’ve discussed impact these areas as well.
Tony Mills is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies the federal government’s role in scientific research and innovation (R&D funding and policy) as well as how to integrate scientific expertise into our governing institutions.
Did the pandemic change or reinforce any of your science policy views?
When COVID started, I was a little bit more optimistic that our executive institutions (so I'm thinking about CDC, FDA) would be effective at responding to the crisis. I spent a lot of my own time thinking about Congress' role in science and technology and arguing that we need a stronger role for Congress. When COVID happened, sort of reflexively, I, like a lot of people, I think just assumed, "Well, this system is going to work in the crisis because we have these agencies that are designed to respond to this kind of thing." Boy, that was not the right expectation.
I think one of the things that COVID has sort of confirmed for me, although in kind of the moment it disconfirmed, is that our science, technology, medical research establishment is strong and effective because of its pluralism. Testing capacity is a really good example during COVID. We were able to develop diagnostic testing, not because of the FDA—in fact, the FDA made it very difficult to do that—not because the CDC—CDC’s testing kits were bad—we were able to do it, initially, because we have this vast and pluralistic decentralized system of research and development that includes non-governmental laboratories, universities, private companies, startups, corporations, governmental labs.
Thanks for reading this far! Just a quick note for first-time visitors and free subscribers. In my twice-weekly issues for paid subscribers, I typically also include a short, sharp Q&A with an interesting thinker, in addition to a long-read essay. Here are some recent examples of those interviewees:
Economist Tyler Cowen on innovation, China, talent, and Elon Musk
Existential risk expert Toby Ord on humanity’s precarious future
Silicon Valley historian Margaret O’Mara on the rise of Silicon Valley
Innovation expert Matt Ridley on rational optimism and how innovation works
More From Less author Andrew McAfee on economic growth and the environment
A Culture of Growth author and economic historian Joel Mokyr on the origins of economic growth
Physicist and The Star Builders author Arthur Turrell on the state of nuclear fusion
Economist Stan Veuger on the social and political impact of the China trade shock
AI expert Avi Goldfarb on machine learning as a general purpose technology
Researcher Alec Stapp on accelerating progress through public policy