đ The AI singularity ⊠then what?
Techno-prophets assume paradise would be a bore, at least for the beings running our simulation. Everything known about people suggests otherwise
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
What a piece of worke is a man! how Noble in
Reason? how infinite in faculty, in forme, and moving
how expresse and admirable in Action, how like an Angel
in apprehension, how like a God?
Everyone has a favorite clip on social media thatâs from a film theyâve never quite gotten around to watching. One such snippet that sticks with me comes from the 2002 film Adaptation, in which struggling writer Charlie Kaufman, played by Nicolas Cage, is hired to turn a nonfiction book into a screenplay.
At one point, Kaufman attends a seminar led by the famed screenwriting guru Robert McKee, played by Brian Cox, and while sitting in the audience, poses what Iâll call the Seinfeld Question: Might a film be structured around a story âwhere nothing much happensâwhere people donât change, they donât have any epiphanies? They struggle, theyâre frustrated, and nothing is resolved. Something more like a reflection of the real worldâ?
To which an absolutely volcanic McKee responds:
The real world? The real f***ing world? First of all, if you write a screenplay without conflict or crisis, youâll bore your audience to tears. Secondly: Nothing happens in the real world? Are you out of your f***ing mind? People are murdered every day! Thereâs genocide and war and corruption! Every f***ing day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else! Every f***ing day, someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love! People lose it, for C****tâs sake! A child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry! Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman! If you canât find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, donât know much about life! And why the f*** are you taking up my precious two hours with your movie? I donât have any use for it! I donât have any bloody use for it!
Keep McKeeâs entertaining eruption in mind when reading the latest round of forecasts about advanced AI, which often treat the technology as the final chapter of the human story.
