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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • I admit I’m on the verge of losing sight of the overall point of this thread. But thinking about it more, I will add that looking at the actual tech curve itself may not be that important, depending on where you draw the line between technology and capability. For example, it may not matter that increase in transistor density is slowing down when global total compute keeps increasing exponentially. Further, how would quantum computing factor into this (the movement in the cryptography space suggests that a post-quantum world is imminent). On the topic of LLMs, would it matter if those stagnate while the ability of companies and states to manipulate us and drown us in misinformation keeps growing exponentially? And how would the advent of AGI factor into this - in some ways that would be the last invention we have to make ourselves. I guess the point is that some advancements, even ones that are just incremental, seem to have an outsized effect on our ability to impact the world around us.

    Anyway, I read the article you linked and enjoyed it. It reminded me a bit of Meditations On Moloch, also a good read if you haven’t seen it yet, attempting to explain the behaviors of civilizations.


  • Fair enough all good points, but the reason we’re all here beyond the natural carrying capacity and eating the planet is because of the exponential tech curve (Haber-Bosch and others) that we’ve been in since discovering fossil fuels. If the energy is there, we will use it to grow at the detriment to everything else, it’s in our nature. If we somehow manage to complete the green energy transition that’s probably even worse for our long term survival, because instead of running out of accessible fossil fuels and being forced to degrow, we’ll keep the growth machine running and accelerate this mass extinction and knock down the rest of the planetary boundaries. All new technologies will allow us to increase the scale of our impacts to the planet.

    Thanks for the link, I haven’t read it yet but it looks interesting.




  • I find ‘metacrisis’ more descriptive and satisfying for the reasons Daniel talked about in the video - that it’s not just the many crises we face, but the underlying systems that are creating the crises (ie, Moloch). Also, it doesn’t matter if AI is not effective at staving off disaster, as long as it creates value for the market it will be deployed with mind-boggling scale and resource use even as the world burns.




  • In my experience it’s okay, but not amazing and slowly getting worse year after year for various reasons. Generally speaking if you have a life-threatening issue (heart failure, cancer, etc), you are taken care of as well as anyone could reasonably expect. But for anything else it can take forever to see a specialist and it’s easy to get lost in the system that always seems to be running in capacity crisis mode. There are other countries that do a better job with the single-payer model, mostly those without provincial fiefdoms that insist on doing everything themselves and reinventing all the wheels for political reasons.