[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking off tape and you brought up longtermism. I am familiar with similar concepts but not to the extent that you’re talking about which I would see more as deep longtermism. What do you mean by long-term-ism? What problems do you see with it?
Rick Rosner: So I started reading about it, I was prompted to read about it because there’s this journalist named Dave Troy that I follow on Twitter, who wrote a long series of tweets about how Putin believes in the noosphere, the worldwide thought sphere replacing the biosphere which is very bad. Now you and I talking have discussed how eventually there will be the worldwide thought blob or thought cloud or whatever you want to call it with everybody linked up. People and other kinds of thinking beings all kind of linked via using technology. And things will be very weird. Apparently according to this Dave Troy guy, Putin believes in some kind of phase change where the earth itself Gaia plus the thinking beings on earth combine to wake up and form this worldwide consciousness which is not the same thing. Everybody in the world plus every thinking thing in the world being linked via technology plus all the weird new stuff in the world that thinks, maybe even animals if they get juiced up to think, or just a bunch of think-y stuff linked. This is Gaia, the earth itself waking up to consciousness.
There’s more hocus-pocus in the in the Gaia vision though if you squeezed all the bullshit out, you might have something that’s reasonably close to something that can be reasonably predicted to happen. But according to this Dave Troy guy, looking at the people around Putin, he thinks the earth is going to wake up and become super conscious in conjunction with the super conscious beings on earth at the time and though those that dominate at the time that earth wakes up get to rule. And this leads to a bunch of scary kind of brinksmanship behavior where it’s possible that one aspect of Putin’s war of aggression on Ukraine and possibly his willingness to use nukes is part of his idea of how we get to awaken up earth.
So this is scary and weird but it also pointed me into the direction of other people who are thinking about like the worldwide waking up which includes a bunch of tech people. I guess a bunch of tech people believe in this thing called longtermism which is that you shouldn’t just look at making the world nice now, you should look at making sure that humanity plus technology survive for the far far future of tens of millions of years and billions even of years what would optimize humanity’s chances of surviving and flourishing or whatever humanity turns into in a far far down the line in geologic time basically.
The deal with longtermism or one of the objections to it is that people who believe in it might be willing to let a lot of stuff get fucked up now and a lot of people get fucked over now indifference to the many many people of the future. If you let two billion people die from global warming, now that’s not terrible because in the future you might have 10 quintillion people a million years from now. You’re sacrificing the present and the near future for the far future. So one objection is you’re sacrificing people and the planet of the present and the near future for what might be horseshit or even if it isn’t horseshit you’re still saying fuck you to the present.
My problem with it is a lack of imagination. Now I haven’t read any long things about it. I just read an essay about it that was probably about 10,000 words or less. So maybe if I read a book or two about it, they would discuss the failure of imagination that postulates a quintillion people a billion years from now because they’re just fucking people even if they’re souped up super smart super linked up people. I guess if I had to believe in anything along these lines it would be short to medium-termism. Beyond the medium term 200 or 300 years from now, you don’t really know what the fuck shit’s going to look like. So doing anything now or being dicks now in the service of what you imagine shit to be like more than 300 years from now seems just goofy. I don’t know, any thoughts here?
Jacobsen: In some ways I can see the point. In other ways Putin may have a point in the same way Teilhard de Chardin did have a point.
Rosner: The Putin thing somehow jumps off from de Chardin’s noosphere stuff but in creepy directions.
Jacobsen: The idea of Teilhard de Chardin was theistically oriented as he was a Jesuit priest. A main thing there though is a sort of magical thinking of not only the earth as a sphere, a geosphere, a noosphere building into a consciousness expanding out everywhere into the entire universe and sort of uniting with God and Christ in some manner. That’s a form of magical thinking but the premise of matter if translated into organic matter producing consciousness or rich information processing through an evolutionary process, that does have a premise because we do see over millions of years an increase in the level of what we would term conscious information processing and a sense of self behind that for conscious information processors. So the noosphere has a premise yet a lot of magical thinking and superstition to get shoved in rather than jettisoned to muck up the waters. However, the general idea of increased thought complexity, information process and complexity seems like a reality on the surface of the earth with evidence of millions of years.
Rosner: It’s a reality that as everything shifts you want to be at the forefront of it because the rate of technological acceleration with AI plus everything may mean that like some chunks of the world gain some huge advantage just due to the speed with which everything happens.
Jacobsen: Even without animals with such forethought, objectively you would not want to be a rodent now. You would want to be on the smarter edge of human now in a similar manner you want to be on the smarter edge of merge humans or official beings that have conscious senses of self.
Rosner: There’s a lot of talk about the wealth gap in America where the rich have never been richer relative to everybody else but there’s also the intelligence gap which is probably pretty significant now and could get a lot bigger.
Jacobsen: If I can interrupt. Consider a kid in a poverty-stricken country or a kid in a wealthy country who happens to have no technological access in contrast to a kid to 10 years old with some technological know-how who has an iPhone. Ray Kurzweil makes this a valid point; they have access to all of human knowledge, not only that, they have access to applications capable of giving output that would typically require a very high level of expertise in terms of mathematical operations or Google in terms of just finding general information.
Rosner: Yeah, and we know that our tech has over fairly recent history kind of evened out people’s access to information from the Flynn effect where the people’s cultural literacy as reflected by IQ around the world went up in the 50 years after World War II. So that’s a thing that you can reasonably argue happened. Then there’s the contravening thing which is that as we lean more on tech, a lot of people get stupider.
Jacobsen: The Flynn effect has stagnated or reversed now.
Rosner: Yeah. So, it could go both ways.
Jacobsen: Well, it can go both ways but the argument both points are affirmed in a sense that 50 years after IQs went up globally in the 90s to now, their stagnation or decline which also hypothetically could support the point of people being less internally culturally literate because they depend on applications, phones, etc. to do that for them. So when they come up to an IQ test they can’t answer it immediately but if they had a resource maybe they could.
Rosner: Anyway, the idea that we should be kind of callous about very chill-y things like climate change, that we should just kind of, if we have to like cut big chunks of humanity loose, if somehow that lines up with this over the long-term survival of humanity, though I’m not sure not having read that much about longtermism, what situations would do that. It seems like the things you do to save the planet now for the most part line up with increasing the chances of having our descendants survive. Anyway, that’s longtermism; it seems like a particular flavor of semi bullshit.
One more thing before I conclude. I had dinner with a guy who I don’t know exactly what he does but I wasn’t even supposed to ask because it may be something secret-ish and we were talking about the Turing test and he said that’s a bad test and I’m like “Well it was a good test for its time” I talked about how we both knew about the guy at Google who got fired for saying that Google translate or some other Google app is conscious. We agreed that he’s a lunatic but then I said something in a very limited sense Google translate knows how the word love works within language and that provides a road map to approach consciousness if you’ve add it in more modules of knowing the visual module, I didn’t have a chance to get much of this out, and he kind of shot it down. The conversation pretty much ended there but it left me thinking that I’m guilty of magical thinking, I felt like he thought I was engaging in not understanding consciousness and doing magical thinking. I don’t know the guy very well so I couldn’t read him and we couldn’t talk about it more. Anyway I felt like kind of a dick but there you go, sometimes you feel like a dick.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 