History of ideas: western thought since 1945

Some time in the 1990s, I read an essay proposing that existentialism, structuralism, postmodernism are three identifiable stages in the evolution of western culture after the end of World War 2. Now I have been thinking that transhumanism, rationalism, accelerationism are three stages in the evolution of Internet techno-optimism since the 1990s. One could actually write a history of the West since 1945, in which this succession of six stages is the organizing principle, and everything else is somewhat epiphenomenal.

Eschatological techno-optimism

Another year has passed. AI hasn’t palpably progressed since my last post, nor has it gone away. The same applies to the war in Ukraine, which has now been joined by the war in Gaza. The same mid-2020s sensibility still prevails. But it will pass eventually, replaced by something else.

Eschatological optimism was the emerging paradigm of the Russian martyr-philosopher Darya Dugina, assassinated in 2022, it is believed, by a Ukrainian infiltrator. Techno-optimism is a philosophy articulated in 2023 by the AI-accelerationist American billionaire Marc Andreessen, a former tech CEO who ascended to the realm of the investors.

These are controversial individuals and controversial views. Dugina gave philosophical support to a war; Andreessen, to capitalist AI. To hybridize their philosophies is outlandish; they are more plausible as geopolitical and metaphysical enemies.

And yet, there’s something there. To seek, in the throes of our technological transformation, a utopian redemption of Being; to do so, in full wariness of the world’s evil and the mind’s illusions. If only I had time to think it through.

Season of singularity

It has been several decades since I first encountered scenarios of high-tech doom or transcendence. Science fiction and futurology have given us many: galactic societies of leisure and immortality, worlds dismantled and turned into giant computers, cryptic aliens or AI gods overseeing eschatological cycles.

Meanwhile, the real world has actually entered some version of an age of artificial intelligence. Right now, while I write this blog post in one window, in another I can see a dialogue I had with an AI – the new version of Microsoft’s Bing.

First I asked it to summarize a well-known essay about AI doom (“AGI Ruin”). The summary rapidly deviates from the actual contents of the essay – this quaint tendency among our new AIs is called “hallucination” – but the imaginary essay it does describe, is summarized crisply and coherently, and the lengthy description (including 26 bullet points) took less than a minute to generate.

Bing then suggested that I ask, “How can we solve these problems?” That was indeed what I had planned to ask it. The value of this plan was somewhat reduced by Bing’s deviation from the actual text, but I clicked anyway, and quickly obtained a Wikipedia-quality list of generic AI safety methods, along with links to more information.

After that we discussed Dadaist poetry, and it gave me an example of one poet’s work, “translated from German”, which again appears to be hallucinated; and I tested its ability to multiply two six-digit numbers (the answer was almost right).

I’m not aware that science fiction ever anticipated an age of AI in which the AI so frequently made up things, or got them wrong. But then, AIs were supposed to do everything via facts and logic, that was how they differed from human beings. Even within the field of AI, essentially no one anticipated that AI would arise by first creating “language models” that could generate imaginary texts of almost any kind, and then tuning them to manifest a conversational persona which tries to be helpful and accurate. One may anticipate that the tuning will continue to improve their power and accuracy, while reducing the unrequested excursions into fantasy.

But should one anticipate that these AIs, or something like them, will actually surpass human intelligence and control? I think yes. They aren’t yet smarter than the smartest humans, but they have already extended the speed advantage of computers, from just the domain of calculation, to more difficult tasks like essay writing and image generation. The quality of their output depends greatly on how they are prompted – we don’t actually know their full power. They are mysterious oracles that happened to emerge from the statistical modeling of human prose, which are now being subjected to fierce field-testing, study, and re-engineering.

They are already being used to provide a stream of consciousness for simple computational “agents”; programs that treat the AI’s words, not as comments, but as commands. In effect, they no longer just think, they also act. For now, their actions mostly consist of writing code and conducting web searches, but in time they will be given machine bodies to control too.

In itself, this is a revolutionary, science-fictional event: to have computer programs among us that can talk glibly about themselves and about almost any topic, and which will obligingly write poems, devise itineraries, discuss politics or philosophy or history… But how far will they go? Will they surpass us, conquer us, domesticate us, uplift us, ignore us?

I began by saying that I have long known what it means to envision “science fiction” happening in real life. I have also lived long enough to see it not happen, to experience instead this era’s version of mundane daily life. All of my experience, and all of humanity’s experience, says, don’t expect transhumanity or extinction, just expect a standard human life cycle, just another human generation among many.

And yet, there it is in the other browser window: the obliging computer oracle with its unknown potential, something that never existed before. Only a few months old, but already beginning to shake the world. How could this not be humanity’s destiny, finally arrived?

Choices

Once again, it’s a really long time since I posted here. Globally, it’s been long enough that the era in which Covid governs the world system appears to have ended (sorry,  virologists and public health experts). Instead, the constant tensions among the great powers have flared into war on the Russian-American front: Russia invaded Ukraine in order to prevent it from joining the western bloc. Beyond the fighting itself, Europe and America began to cut off Russia’s remaining ties to western institutions (though not so totally that Europe can’t keep buying Russian gas). Russia in response is treating this as an acceleration of the trend towards a “multipolar” world, especially financial multipolarity, and indeed other powers like China, India, and the Gulf oil states, seem unwilling to join the west in ostracizing Russia. 

Perhaps the war will drag on, or perhaps there will be a ceasefire soon. Meanwhile, according to my philosophy, the rise of artificial intelligence remains the most important thing in the world. From that perspective, it’s all about centers of significant AI research: the west contains the most; China is running second; while Russia perhaps can be viewed as containing a single significant node of AI research, associated with the Russian state rather than with a business like Google or Microsoft. 

If the human race were rational, it would long since have organized to cure the aging process and maximize longevity. But it’s clear that its priorities lie elsewhere. Nonetheless, it is at least possible for a few people to work in that direction, and the rise of AI means that even if humans don’t solve the problem, AI eventually will  – that is, if it cares to solve the problem. 

I don’t know for sure that this is the structure of the possible futures ahead of us. Maybe we’re on the threshold of a warp drive and aliens will intervene. Maybe materialism is wrong and this is all a dream within a dream. Maybe global troubles and collective indifference will keep humanity pinned to this planet and this life cycle, and we’ll never know what lies beyond it. All these scenarios and more have their partisans. The human race has enough brainpower to be dealing with all of them at once. But personally, my bet is still on the rise of AI as the pivot of a transformation that eventually leads to transhumanity.  

Also on the personal front, I am back in Canada with my partner Tiana, trying to find a niche in which we can survive and prosper. I believe we are both people who ideally would be able to work full-time on transcendent endeavors like these. But we’re not part of any establishment institution or patronage network, we’re outsiders fighting to make our contributions when the daily struggle allows it. Perhaps I will write more about what that involves – if the struggle allows it. For now, like humanity itself, we are neither beaten nor victorious, just fighting onward, towards an unknown destiny. 

Virology is the new climatology

This thought came to me, when I realized similarities between Covid skeptics and climate skeptics (indeed, they are often the same people).

Usually, economics is the “science” that is most prominent in politics, because money matters so much in people’s lives, and because extreme wealth is such a source of power. If the fight against global warming had ever become the organizing principle of world politics, climatology might have come to rival economics in political significance; and at the start of 2020, there was a revival of climate activism occurring in the west. Extinction Rebellion was occupying public spaces, Greta Thunberg was a “person of the year” for 2019.

But in the end, it was Covid-19, not climate change, that was deemed so threatening, that a de-facto planetary state of emergency really did take shape, in which business-as-usual was overthrown everywhere. Public health officials and vaccine makers now have the clout that climate and energy gurus always dreamed of achieving.

And just as esoteric issues of climate science became a factor in the policy-making of governments, and a subject of critique by diverse skeptics wanting to neutralize the growth of a new eco-technocracy… now epidemiology and molecular biology have become of interest to the state, contrary opinions about the efficacy of masks or the importance of aerosol transmission can make you a kind of dissident, and ordinary people must struggle to make sense of news and rumors about viral symptoms and vaccine effects.

Our new Covid world order must eventually fade into the background, as the pandemic is slowly extinguished worldwide and thereby diminishes in political and practical significance. I predicted that the post-Covid world order will be one of continued ideological and technical rivalry between America and China, and that still seems plausible. Biology and biotechnology may also retain their new prominence; something that may hearten transhumanists. But many other details of Covid’s legacy have yet to be decided.

Dialectics of biotechnology

“In the future, animals will continue to develop.” — Mao

Three years ago, the first humans known to have been genetically edited were born. Only a single “edit” was performed – an attempt to turn off CCR5, a receptor on the surface of white blood cells, whose immune system function is not quite known, but which HIV (the AIDS virus) uses to enter the cell. The declared purpose of the edit was to protect against HIV; but CCR5 also suppresses “neuronal plasticity, learning, and memory” (quoting Wikipedia), so there has been speculation that the edit was also an experiment in increasing IQ.

In any case, when the mastermind of this experiment, He Jiankui, a biology professor from southern China, announced it to the world, it was quickly deemed to be dangerous and scandalous. All his research was suspended, and he was sent to jail for three years.

I have exhumed this forgotten piece of recent history, as prelude to announcing an untimely new opinion: I now suspect that Covid probably came from that virology institute in Wuhan. After all, if a bat virus outbreak takes place near a national bat virus repository, it’s a logical thing to suspect. Perhaps the real question is whether it was found already in its current form, or whether SARS-CoV-2 (as the Covid virus is called) was created by “gain of function” research – whether, in trying to preempt the next pandemic, they actually set it in motion.

At this point, I haven’t tried to make a more detailed hypothesis. But here are some links. First, for the defense, the March 2020 paper from Nature which argues for a natural origin; and an interview with the chief virologist from the Wuhan institute, in which she tells us some of the history. Then, see this paper from India, which discusses the closest known natural relative to the Covid virus, and this American journalist’s review of the Covid origin debate (and the history of worries about gain-of-function research). It was this last article that changed my mind.

Meanwhile, we have a Democrat restoration in America, and numerous Covid vaccines are now in use. The world is changing again. I will write more when I can.

America and China in late 2020

It’s less than a month until we find out whether an Obama Democrat can do, in 2020, what a Clinton Democrat couldn’t do in 2016: beat Trump.

Contemplating the possibility of a Biden victory, I am most concerned by the censorious tendencies of his side of politics. I tell myself that, whoever wins, the situation for ordinary people will be similar: institutions will be enforcing “politically correct”, “cultural marxist” dogma, but there will be millions of individuals resenting, dissenting, complaining, and resisting. Arguably the main difference between a Trump presidency and a Biden presidency, in this regard, is that in a Trump presidency, one of those dissenting individuals is theoretically in charge of the American government.

As my partner Tiana puts it, the goal of American cultural marxism is to make everyone on earth believe in the dogmas of American political correctness. But I think that’s a lost cause. Whoever wins, will only directly affect what happens inside the American bloc. The rest of the world will continue to go its own way.

Meanwhile, I have tried to understand more objectively, the nature of this new society. There is a narrative in economic historiography which says that, first there were tribal societies based on hunting and gathering, then there were feudal societies based on agriculture, then industrial societies based on mass production, and now we have an information society based on computers. That makes sense to me. And I would suggest that if factories were the central institutions of the industrial society, universities are the central institutions of the information society.

This seems consistent with the latest thoughts from Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, previously best known for reviving the idea that democracy is not the best system of government. (I would crudely summarize his thoughts as “good nondemocratic government is better than democratic government is better than bad nondemocratic government”, where nondemocratic government could be e.g. monarchy, a one-party state, or a state run like a modern corporation.)

Last month he revealed a laborious analysis of how the United States really works (summed up in a diagram). His thesis is that the unelected bureaucracy actually runs things (e.g. by setting the rules for business), according to principles developed in the universities and propagated by the mass media. Democratic elections are just a spectacle, a holdover from the pre-technocratic political order, but whoever wins, the bureaucracy remains the real government. To this picture, I would add that social media have become the fabric of everyday life, in this information society, and are also a place where the battle of opinion plays out.

In this analysis, the Democrats are the party of the system, while the Republicans under Trump have become a party resisting the system. We could say that the Democrats now represent government by committee, and Trump Republicans, government by personality. In modern American liberalism, the demand for equality has become the dominant value, overpowering the demand for liberty; and so intellectual life is freer under the personal rule of a conservative autocrat. But this is held by the liberals to be one of the sins of the conservative regime: freedom of opinion allows people to disagree with political correctness, and to disagree with the latest truth-claims of the technocracy.

To survive under a modern liberal regime, it seems essential that one should have definite opinions on at least the following: climate, sexism, racism, homophobia/transphobia, nationalism, coronavirus. Life will be easiest if you have the popular opinions (climate change must be stopped, nationalism is bad, coronavirus lockdowns are good, all those discriminations are bad). If you have an unpopular opinion, you may be able to defend yourself somewhat, if you can present an argument for it. The people who are most vulnerable to ideological ostracism, are those who have no opinion, or unpopular opinions that they can’t defend.

So much for America. What about China, now America’s leading rival? Unlike multi-party America, China is explicitly a one-party state (there are other parties, but the Communist Party is legally and pragmatically in charge of everything). Information-age Communist China is a bit like Yarvin’s technocratic America, but without the spectacle of elections, and where the party of the system is officially, visibly, and permanently in charge. China does have an annual consultative conference with people’s representatives, and perhaps that along with social media, is the main avenue whereby issues from outside the system can be heard.

Modern China started out as one of the world’s two great Marxist-Leninist states. It developed its own variations on Marxist ideology, first because it was more a land of peasant farmers than factory workers, then in order to differentiate itself from Russian “revisionism” (denunciation of Stalinism) and “social imperialism” (willingness to intervene militarily in other communist countries).

In Marxist theory, the economic “base” is the causal factor in history, and the cultural “superstructure” is epiphenomenal, and the revolution consists of socialism seizing control of the base. The Cultural Revolution, in China, was justified as a matter of extending socialist values into culture too. But even in that era, the leadership remained pragmatic enough to open relations with America and replace Taiwan in the UN Security Council, and after Mao died, the Cultural Revolution was disavowed, and Deng famously allowed the economic reformism which ultimately produced today’s economic superpower.

The Chinese party survived the collapse of communism throughout the Russian bloc – something they attributed to political reformism, such as allowing multi-party politics – and somehow hung on throughout the quarter-century that followed, even though the old Marxist notion of world revolution seemed to be dead, and the world was instead either a borderless corporate marketplace, or an ensemble of ancient civilizations reasserting their independence. Western analysts sometimes say that throughout this time, China was basically just an authoritarian capitalist state whose leadership justified their rule through nationalism rather than Marxism. Perhaps that is so.

Nonetheless, the party has remained officially Marxist, just very flexible ideologically. They can probably resist multi-party-ism and stay in power, so long as their approach to the ever-changing world situation remains successful enough. For a glimpse of contemporary Chinese political thought, perhaps see Jiang Shigong.

A theme of the 2020s

A new intuition has just come to me: that the next world order, after the coronavirus interlude, will be continued competition between the American and Chinese blocs, with the key issue being how the technologies labeled “Industrial Revolution 4.0” are developed and deployed within society.

I find this a useful idea because it gives me something concrete to focus on, amidst many uncertainties. We don’t know how long it will take for the coronavirus lockdowns to be over with. We don’t know if Trump or Biden will win in two months’ time, a choice likely to have a profound influence on western politics and culture. But we do know that computers, robots, drones, genetics labs, and so much else, will still be here, and that we are still only at the beginning of tapping their potential.

This intuition has come to me from several sources. I first understood the radical futurism of my collaborator Tiana, by saying it was a blueprint for how to utilize the potentials of IR 4.0. “Clarissa’s Blog” has argued (e.g. here) that phenomena like BLM mania and COVID panic are actually about the transition to digital neofeudalism, with a wealthy educated minority designing and planning the innovations of the information society, while the consumerist masses have their social media and guaranteed income. The latest from Pepe Escobar, a Brazilian music journalist who somehow became the leading reporter on the other world that China, Russia, and allies are building, attacks a western proposal for a “Great Reset” in the post-corona world.

In fact, the Great Reset is being proposed by the German professor who originated the very idea of the “fourth industrial revolution”, as an umbrella term covering “robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, the internet of things, the industrial internet of things, decentralized consensus, fifth-generation wireless technologies, 3D printing, and fully autonomous vehicles”.

China, meanwhile, has its own futurists. I would still say that the difference between east and west is that in China and Russia, the politicians control the billionaires, while in the west, the billionaires control the politicians. It’s probably too simplistic a formula, but it can help to remind us of the essential differences.

Towards the corona endgame

On a global scale, coronavirus is still spreading, and there have been second waves in most countries that locked down and then reopened. Fortunately, vaccine news has been promising, Russia has authorized a vaccine (Sputnik-5), China is patenting a vaccine (Ad5-nCoV), etc. Management consultants McKinsey wrote three weeks ago that vaccines for critical personnel should become available in the fourth quarter of 2020 or first quarter of 2021 (e.g. in Russia I think doctors and teachers will be among those first vaccinated, and in China it seems that PLA soldiers were among the first immunized).

I am impatient to see concrete scenarios for how vaccines might be added to the existing national strategies involving hygiene, border control, renewed lockdowns to suppress second waves, etc. I particularly care about Australia and Canada, and the USA too because we are in its sphere of influence, but a coronavirus endgame scenario for any nation anywhere would be good to see.

By now such scenarios must have been secretly written for many big organizations, but they haven’t been made public. Big organizations use scenarios to think concretely about possibilities, but they only go public with definite plans, and the facts aren’t clear enough for them to announce plans with timelines yet.

Meanwhile, those of us out here in the big bad world could also use some scenarios, just to concretize our own thinking about when and how this all might end. At the web forum of “Quillette” magazine, I just speculated on how to construct such a scenario:

It would be nice to see someone spell out a concrete scenario (it doesn’t have to be a definite prediction or policy recommendation, just a scenario) of how judicious mass vaccination programs could finally secure a nation somewhere, against coronavirus. Surely all the ingredients needed to construct such a scenario now exist. Just pick a particular vaccine (e.g. in Australia it could be the UQ vaccine), make a hypothesis about how often it needs to be administered (e.g. every six months – I am making up that figure just to be concrete), suppose that it is approved after final phase testing and that manufacturing capability has been set aside (I heard that CSL could be a vaccine manufacturer for Australia), and then spell out a scenario of national deployment sufficient to create artificial herd immunity, along with continued monitoring of people entering the country, etc.

Post-corona

This evening, as I look at Canadian job vacancies, feels like the first truly post-corona day for me. It looks like the whole thing will now fade away anticlimactically. The nations of the west are now cautiously coming out of their bunkers. Life will resume step by step, with a few changes. Politics, economics, culture, will all go back to what they were, with a few changes. The time of corona will become a memory of half-deserted cities. We shall see how bad the economic hangover is.