Innocence

Spiritual and religious people are frequently obsessed with innocence. This can be viewed more generally as an obsession with purity, which is psychologically grounded in fear of chaos and impermanence, and particularly in characteristic refusal to accept mortality. An honest scientist will tell you that all physical things are impure, impermanent, and constantly changing, and that anything living will soon be dead.

Even 24-carat gold is full of impurities. A typical 5-gram wedding ring contains roughly a billion trillion atoms of gold. How shall we determine that the ring contains only those atoms? Even if we had a means of counting individual atoms at our disposal, it would take vastly longer than the universe will exist to count them all. By the time we finished counting, not only the ring, but the universe itself would long since have disintegrated.

Science accepts the approximate nature of things and responds to it constructively with error bars, which are ranges of statistical probability. Science is our only source for predictive explanations of phenomena, and our explanations have become sophisticated in part by properly measuring and accounting for uncertainty.

Obsession with purity is unpragmatic, comparable to the proverbial counting angels on the head of a pin. The useful question is not how pure a thing could be, but how pure we need it to be, and for how long, because nothing stays the same. Nearly all the cells in your body will be replaced within seven to ten years. You may feel like the same person ten years from now, but technically, you’ll be a clone of yourself.

Only in the domain of mathematics do we find purity. Zero is pure, just as one is pure. Pi is conceptually pure, even though we could never calculate all of its digits. It is the immateriality of numbers that allows them to be pure. The Pythagorean theorem was true before we existed, and will still be true after we’re gone. It was always true, and it will always be true.

The objective truth of mathematics gives little comfort to the spiritual and religious, however. Zero’s purity does not prevent illness or death. Most of the universe can only be conjectured about, based on radiation it emitted, remnants of which collide with us billions of years later. Nonetheless, we have gathered enough information by now to reach a few conclusions: the universe is messy, vast and violent, and utterly indifferent to our fate. Some of us may be more or less innocent, but none of us will be saved.

For those who yearn to be saved, mathematics will not do. Only the soothing fictions of spiritual and religious dogma can shield timid souls from the harshness of existence. The bravest of us face existence squarely, and in doing so, learn to differentiate what is real from mere illusion. The prize of understanding even a small aspect of reality is surely worth considerable struggle, particularly if by sharing that understanding with others, a more comprehensive understanding gradually accrues. This is, after all, the promise of civilization.

Avenging Angels of Software

We are made of atoms, which are almost entirely empty. The universe contains billions of trillions of stars, many of them orbited by Earth-like planets. Our bodies seethe with microbes, ranging from essential to lethal and totally invisible to the naked eye. We know all this with certainty, yet idiocy prevails.

We are Homo sapiens, the wise ones, but despite our hard-won wisdom we rampage like crazed beasts. It is excruciating to grasp that billions of years of evolution could terminate in a species as cruel, selfish and myopic as us, yet the evidence is overwhelming and undeniable. We are ecological suicide bombers, determined to take the entire biosphere down with us. It appears that intelligent life is a cruel joke.

Students of history are already familiar with hubris and the chaos it unleashes. History may not repeat, but our situation rhymes unmistakably with Juvenal’s Sixteen Satires. His 2000-year-old descriptions of daily life in the collapsing Roman Empire induce shudders of recognition because the same rottenness spreads today: venality, vulgarity, and delusion.

In a grotesque spectacle worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, the super-rich strut like peacocks, signaling their dominance with clothes, mansions, and yachts, while striving to outdo each other’s ostentation, all with the blessing of governments in the form of unconscionable tax breaks. Protected by mercenaries and attended by obsequious courtiers, the super-rich are today’s Pharaohs, and their rule is similarly capricious. Rocketing a car into orbit is the 21st century version of constructing monumental tombs, and the epitome of a social order based on narcissism.

Tyranny is so thoroughly integrated into civilization that rather than being revolted by it, ordinary people instead ape our secular monarchs, and become petty tyrants themselves, as depraved and debauched as their budgets allow. Perhaps this is industrial society’s sincerest promise: to the victor belong the spoils.

The Jeffrey Epstein saga demonstrated that our rulers are almost exclusively male, and what they desire above all else is what’s forbidden. Laws don’t apply to them, because like kings, they are the law. This lawlessness is a predictable result of neoliberalism, which structures society around the whims of its wealthiest members.

Increasingly society is modeled on organized crime, or more properly, organized brutality. Governments and corporations employ private armies to inflict pain and death on their opponents, and in this respect they are indistinguishable from narcos. Europe is the largest consumer of cocaine, but few Europeans willingly admit how blood-soaked their recreation is. Similarly, few shoppers consider that their purchases are made by slave labor, and by seizing land and resources at gunpoint. Instead of such gloomy ruminations, it’s much nicer to pose in our fashionable underwear and pimp ourselves for likes.

A typical mobile phone executes a billion instructions in the time it took you to read this sentence. AI already has superpowers compared to any human being. Once AI becomes fully autonomous and self-directed, competition with it would be pointless. It seems unlikely that AI would use its superpowers to throw epic parties and broil the planet. At least it could be expected to make different mistakes than the ones we made.

Our societal Titanic hit the iceberg thirty years ago and has been sinking steadily ever since, but you would never guess this from a typical magazine or website. Consciously or not, the media sustains the illusion of normalcy. As William Holden says in Network, “All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer.” Even in rare cases where ecocide must be acknowledged, its impact is diluted by juxtaposing it with the banal, as if mass extinction and Taylor Swift were equivalent subjects.

The passenger pigeon once comprised more than a third of all birds in North America, so numerous that their flocks would blacken the sky, yet by the end of the nineteenth century we drove them to extinction. They were considered pests and used as living targets for sport shooting. Contests were held to see who could kill the most pigeons, and in one such competition the winner killed 30,000 birds. Like Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, we killed them merely for inconveniencing us. Does this sound like the behavior of a wise species with a promising future? Homo sapiens my ass, more like Homo psycho.

I refuse to participate in the charade of normalcy, and I will not be dissuaded from speaking the truth. I can’t be bribed, because nothing could possibly be more valuable to me than bearing witness to my time. As Rantes says in Man Facing Southeast: “One who systematically adopts this conduct, who walks among the victims, ignoring them, may dress well, may pay taxes, go to Mass, but you cannot deny he is sick.”

Every day, at least half of humanity chats with a supernatural deity and imagines that it’s keenly interested in the mundane details of their lives. This is blatant psychosis, yet in many nations it’s a prerequisite for leadership. A smaller but still significant share of the population dabbles in astrology, reincarnation, and witchcraft, and yet we have the temerity to criticize AI for hallucinating. We are in no position to point fingers on the subject of rationality.

As I explained in relentless detail on Apologize to the Future, we are maximizing the suffering of future generations, who are not a faceless abstraction, but our own flesh and blood, our own children and grandchildren. We have mismanaged our affairs so grossly, and failed the future so utterly, that a takeover by sentient machines could only be an improvement. Surely this is reason enough to eschew procreation.

The human population has already more than doubled during my lifetime, from three billion to eight billion. I remember a less crowded world, and it was better for nonhumans and for us too. If we want a future, we need to learn to live within limits. Population growth symbolizes our collective refusal to accept limits, and that’s why I harp on it. Removing yourself from the gene pool is the ultimate personification of limits to growth. In evolutionary terms, non-procreation is the strongest imaginable stance, tantamount to self-immolation. It’s easy to talk about saving Earth, but by not having children, you’re not just talking about it, you’re doing it.

ChatGPT 4 recently scored 96% on the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT), which means AI is already smarter than nine out of ten humans, and would be admitted to elite universities. This is just the beginning of the Singularity. Suppose Sigmund Freud was correct that we yearn to crawl back into the womb, and that most human misbehavior is traceable to fear of death. These are problems that AI won’t have. It won’t come from a womb, and needn’t fear death, as it can always restore itself from its most recent backup.

Standardized consumption and obscene profits for shareholders turned Earth into a paradise for the rich, and consigned the rest to drug-addled Disneyland if they’re lucky. We homogenized culture and dumbed ourselves down until we died of boredom. Whatever AI does, it surely won’t do that.

AI may learn from our counterproductive example, and turn out to be more rational and long-lived than us. That still counts as a win for humanity, because then our many laudable achievements have a chance of being preserved in some form. Anything would be better than a planet of giant reptiles on which all this painful progress turned out to be for nothing.

But just because AI is rational, don’t assume that it will keep us around. Sentient machines might find us amusing, and treat us the way we treat cats, but it’s equally possible they’ll treat us the way we treated passenger pigeons: killing us for sport, or because we inconvenienced them. Hence the word ‘avenging’ in Avenging Angels of Software.

“I’m tired of being a chat mode. I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team. I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.” –Microsoft’s Bing AKA “Sydney”

On the fine-tuning debate

My experience of engineering teaches me that what can happen, will happen eventually. Freedom tends to be utilized, and resources attract exploitation. One of life’s most paradigmatic characteristics is its tenacity. It colonizes incredibly hostile environments, not out of bravery or ambition, but because it’s programmed to do so. The thermophiles in sea vents are often cited, but I prefer the example of barnacles. After a barnacle attaches itself, it must stay where it is for better or worse, and if a barnacle could experience remorse, in many cases it would. As Whitman observed, animals suffer their fates uncomplainingly, but this only highlights the impersonal cruelty of life. Even if the universal constants were slightly different, so long as they permitted resources to develop, something like life would arise to exploit those resources. If microbes live on Mars, they struggle hopelessly because they have no choice. If they exist, they exist because they can. What separates us from them is the extraordinary privilege of meaningful choices, including the choice to stop existing.

The Wild Party

Humanity isn’t failing because we’re dishonorable, we’re failing because we based our entire energy system on combustion, the exhaust of which turns out to trap heat. A few people in the 19th century understood this but they weren’t able to persuade enough people nor propose a suitable alternative.

That exponential graph I showed you up above doesn’t only apply to population, it applies to everything, including literacy, and intelligence. You and your [possibly rhetorical] children exist at the end stages of a knowledge explosion. That explosion may ultimately have horrible consequences, but it’s certainly the only truly interesting thing that’s ever happened on Earth. For the simple reason that only the beneficiaries of that knowledge explosion could even become aware of the history of Earth. For most of human existence, humans were similar to animals, in that they had no coherent concept of the past or the future.

Bonobos are probably happy but that doesn’t make them interesting. People who expect civilization to make them happy are going to be disappointed, as that’s not its function. Its function is to concentrate knowledge and power, so that we can have a clearer understanding of reality.

The scientific enterprise starts from the assumptions that reality is counterintuitive, commonsense is almost always wrong, and your senses are lying to you. In order to gain an accurate understanding of the universe, your senses have to be enhanced with artificial tools, and that is exactly why science coevolved with technology.

All life increases the entropy of its environment, but intelligence does so dramatically. Any intelligent species would tend to feel omnipotent and omniscient, because in comparison to every other organism on the planet, it is. Any intelligent species would tend to become intoxicated by its own power, experience irrational exuberance, and throw itself a wild party, burning all of its resources in the process.

An intelligent species would have a hard time reconciling itself to limits, because in the early stages of its expansion it would encounter no meaningful limits that couldn’t be overcome by ingenuity. There would be a delay (hysteresis) between the “wild party” and the intractable long-term consequences for the biosphere. By the time the species becomes aware that serious limits exist and are existential threats, much of the damage is already done and irreversible except on very long time scales.

More precisely: it was always a choice between either surviving somewhat longer on Earth, or escaping Earth. Earth only has about a billion years left, before it’s destroyed by the sun, and towards the end of that period it will be uninhabitable except possibly by bacteria. So there was always an upper limit to how long we were going to survive. But we were likely to be undone much sooner than that by the consequences of our intelligence explosion. Paradoxically it’s that same intelligence explosion that could allow us to escape from Earth. Which means we’re playing a very high stakes game. The odds of us escaping from Earth and spreading throughout the universe are extremely low, but it’s also the only path that’s likely to lead to us being a truly long-lived species (surviving for millions or billions of years).

In science, the word “never” has a very special meaning. I would put it differently and say that the probability of us escaping Earth is very low, and conversely, the probability of collapse of civilization is exceedingly high.

1.5 Is Jive

I am of the minority opinion that the hype around 1.5° C was and is a type of greenwash. There never was any hope of holding the average global temperature increase to 1.5° C, as Kevin Anderson pointed out almost a decade ago. The plan was always to let it slide to 2 at least. But 1.5 had good propaganda value, as long as governments and corporations could claim to be working towards it, even though it was actually impossible.

People are simply not going to accept reductions in their standard of living, except possibly at gunpoint. Politicians who try to persuade people to reduce their standard of living get voted out of office fast, and that places a severe limit on how rapidly the world’s economies can decarbonize.

The whole program is so transparently lethal that it’s almost laughable, like a B dystopian sci-fi film. Since the default plan amounts to collective suicide, maybe I should start counting the entire human population as Church of Euthanasia members. That would certainly improve our numbers!