π Faster, Please! Week in Review #63
Please check out some great highlights from my essays and interviews!
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Melior Mundus
Some shameless self promotion: I have a book coming out on October 3. The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is currently available for pre-order pretty much everywhere. Iβm very excited about it! Letβs gooooo! πβ‴π
In This Issue
Essay Highlights
β Could AI really generate explosive economic growth?
β The most important pro-progress event of the year (so far) was a tech failure. But that's OK.
Best of 5QQ
β 5 Quick Questions for β¦ policy analyst Alex Trembath on the notion of 'Earth overshoot'
Best of the Pod
Essay Highlights
‴ Could AI really generate explosive economic growth?
A new analysis examines the case for artificial general intelligence, or AGI, enabling explosive economic growth this century. Good news: Growth could accelerate sharply if AI makes human labor accumulable and scalable like capital. Even basic simulations show massive expansion potential if AI systems are inexpensive. Even one-time productivity surges seem plausible from partial automation. However, potential barriers include regulations, physical bottlenecks, gradual adoption, misalignment risks, innovation challenges, and measurement issues. While each concern has some validity, individually most seem surmountable. After weighing each counterargument's limitations, as well as AI's unprecedented automation potential, explosive growth appears a substantial possibility, not a remote one. Yeah!
β Β The most important pro-progress event of the year (so far) was a tech failure. But that's OK.
Though LK-99's promise quickly vanished, its brief emergence sparked some welcome techno-optimism. The speculative superconductor fueled plenty of pro-progress creativity, with enthusiasts envisioning some revolutionary applications. Despite fading like a desert mirage, the (almost) innovation highlighted society's deep desire for big breakthroughs and sparked a renewed optimism about improving life through technology. The visions were thought-provoking, reminding us to maintain hope in human ingenuity despite a long record of stagnation. The excitement generated important conversations about progress, even without a true breakthrough. Not bad at all for a failure.
π Do you want to build a factory?
Politicoβs E&E News: βAt the Port of Albany, little work has been done on a factory where 550 workers are supposed to roll thick plates of steel into massive turbine towers β the backbones of new offshore wind projects planned for the East Coast. Trees have been cleared for the facility, but almost three years after the factory was announced, construction on its five buildings has yet to begin. And the cost of the project has more than doubled from $350 million to $700 million.β To be fair, the problem at the Port of Albany seems to be multicausal, but NEPA, the βMagna Cartaβ of environmental regulation, is a major cause. NEPA litigation is a significant factor affecting infrastructure project development in the US, especially for energy projects. Those who would both argue for the status quo and also think we need to transition the US economy away from fossil fuels and toward solar and wind might want to think about how NEPA is dragging down that transition.
Best of 5QQ
π‘ 5 Quick Questions for β¦ policy analyst Alex Trembath on the notion of 'Earth overshoot'
Alex Trembath is Deputy Director at the Breakthrough Institute. He recently wrote, βCorrection, Coercion, or Collapse.β
Can you briefly explain the notion of the ecological footprint and what that has to do with this anti-holiday, Earth Overshoot Day?
Anti-holiday is the best word for it. The ecological footprint is the sort of methodological framework behind this thing that you might've heard, which is that humans use about 1.7 Earth's worth of resources every year. It used to be 1.6, now it's about 1.7 according to them. And that means that by a certain day every year that the Global Footprint Network calculates, we are in βovershoot,β we have already used a year's worth of resources. This year, that was August 2nd, and for the rest of the year we're in deficit, we're in overshoot. That's based off this calculation called the ecological footprint that was created in the β90s by these two ecologists, William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel, who tried to create a unitary measure of humanity's footprint on Earth.
What do you make of this methodology? Is it sound?
It is not sound. Bottomless nonsense is, I think, the most generous way to put it. What the ecological footprint does is it takes a number of measures of human impact on the Earth β fossil fuel consumption, farming, grazing, lumber and forestry, our impact on the seas and oceans β and tries to synthesize those into one measure: your ecological footprint. It does that by measuring the surplus or deficit on all of those metrics. But on almost all of those metrics, we are actually in balance because of the reductive nature of the metric itself. For crop land, for instance, we consume roughly β including the waste β as many crops as we produce. So we're in balance. I'm not really sure what that's supposed to tell us about our ecological sustainability. We could literally cover the Earth's land area in farmland and wipe out all of what's left of wild nature and be in balance according to this metric. The only reason that we're in deficit according to the ecological footprint is because of our fossil fuel consumption, which even there, the measurement isn't tons of carbon emissions in the atmosphere or tenths of a degrees centigrade warming or the typical metrics of our climate footprint. It is how many trees you would have to plant to offset the emissions of anthropogenic fossil fuel consumption. And again, there are a whole bunch of assumptions that go into that that don't make a lot of sense either. So we both have this metric that doesn't really tell you anything about the sustainability of human activity, of human consumption, of human society, and in fact does a worst job at measuring our very real ecological impact on the climate, on landscapes, on ecosystems, on biodiversity. Then just typical bread and butter garden variety metrics would like how many acres of forest are we cutting down every year? How many tons of CO2 are we pumping into the atmosphere? These are actual problems. They're actually measurable. And the ecological footprint is actually a way of oddly sort of undervaluing or under telling the story through its attempt to synthesize all of these measures into one.
Best of the Pod
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His books include The End of History and the Last Man, Our Posthuman Future, and 2022's Liberalism and Its Discontents, among many others. Other writings can be found at American Purpose.
In Our Posthuman Future more than 20 years ago, you wrote, βThe aim of this book is to argue that [Aldous] Huxley was right [in Brave New World], that the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a βposthumanβ stage of history. This is important, I will argue, because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species.β But then you added, βIt may be that, as in the case of 1984β β and, I think, parenthetically, information technology β βwe will eventually find biotechnologyβs consequences are completely and surprisingly benign.β After 20 years, and the advent of social media, and now it seems like possibly a great leap forward in AI, would you still characterize the IT revolution as βbenignβ?
That's obviously something that's changed considerably since I wrote that book because the downside of IT has been clear to everybody. When the internet was first privatized in the 1990s, most people, myself included, thought it would be good for democracy because information was power, and if you made information more widely available, that would distribute power more democratically. And it has done that, in fact. A lot of people have access to information that they can use to improve their lives, to mobilize, to agitate, to push for the protection of their rights. But I think it's also been weaponized in ways that we perhaps didn't anticipate back then.
And then, there was this more insidious phenomenon where it turns out that the elimination of hierarchies that controlled information, that we celebrated back then, actually turned out to be pretty important. If you had a kind of legacy media that cared about journalistic standards, you could trust the information that was published. But the internet really undermined those legacy sources and replaced it with a world in which anyone can say anything. And they do. Therefore, we have this cognitive chaos right now where conspiracy theories of all sorts get a lot of credibility because people don't trust these hierarchies that used to be the channels for information. Clearly, weβve got a big problem on our hands. That doesn't mean that the biotech is not still going to be a big problem; it's just that I think the IT part has moved ahead very rapidly. But I think the biotech will get there in time.