The Future of Work with AGI
…Working even a good job cramps your sense of possibility, imposes narrow objectives, and eats away at the little things that could grow into big things if they weren’t so oppressed by the rigors of existing structure…
This is part of why we need an active leisure class in society. Productive exploration requires the application of skilled personal judgment to chasing hunches and interesting problems without narrow material and objective constraints. It is generally unfair and wasteful for this to be anything but voluntarily self-funded…thus, speculative exploration is a special duty of those with means. Relatedly, it’s unfair and wasteful for the people who could be out there exploring and building the future on their own dime to be either working normal jobs or simply managing their money for profit. This is a key part of what it means to be a responsible elite. You use your privilege and your personal judgment to explore and solve problems that no one else can.
If you have the resources to spend some time exploring, if you are on to interesting threads of novelty that few other people have, and if you have the spirit to tighten your belt, throw out your map, and explore off-road, then your real job is to do so. It is a grave sin to neglect that kind of cosmic duty. But many more people have the means and privilege to quit their tracked careers than ever realize it and act on it. You need far less than you think to live in monk mode and pursue this kind of exploration. What this means in practice is that at some point far before you are or feel ready, you need to quit your job.
Even if you are rich and have no nominal boss, statistically speaking you are still effectively a wage slave. If all you end up doing is nursing the money, without ever exercising the authority to decide on which future it shall be spent, it might as well be someone else’s… You don’t actually need the money; in reality, the money needs you to give it a worthy purpose…
This is related to why man became stunted with the dawn of agriculture. We traded a life limited by the occasional violent struggle over bountiful surplus for a more predictable life limited by grinding labor after barely sufficient nutrition. Scale won out, but not health. Quitting your job, in the full sense I have described here, is a bit like quitting that agricultural life to return to a life of adventure on the wild frontier. It is a much less certain existence and a more violent one. But the combination of leisurely surplus, mortal intensity, and demand for novel virtue is where you will find life at its healthiest and highest. It is where we will find the most important destinies.
Live like an aristocrat:
…In the early modern era, landed gentry and similar were essentially unemployed. Perhaps they did some minor administration of their tenants, some dabbled in politics or were dragged into military projects, but compared to most formal workers they seem to have worked relatively few hours. They filled the remainder of their time with intricate social rituals like balls and parties, hobbies like hunting, studying literature, and philosophy, producing and consuming art, writing letters, and spending time with friends and family…I sometimes wonder if there is some implicit classism in people’s worries about unemployment: the rich will know how to use their time well, but the poor will need to be kept busy.
…the urge not to feel useless….
At Our Wits End
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…IQ test results correlate positively with something objective—that is, with differences in reaction times.[24] It is widely accepted among leading psychometricians such as Arthur Jensen,[25] Hans Eysenck,[26] and Ian Deary[27] that IQ tests correlate with this objective neurological measure…
According to research from Iceland, the ‘sweet spot’ in terms of fertility, or producing the highest numbers of children, is your third cousin!(Helgason, A., Palsson, S., Gudbjartsson, D., et al. (2008) An association between the kinship and fertility of human couples, Science, 319, pp. 813–816.)
…In the early 19th century, in London, it was not uncommon to see dead babies in the streets or in rubbish dumps. By the 18th century, the number of abandoned babies was so great in many European cities that orphanages were established to house them. In 1741, the Thomas Coram hospital for foundlings was opened in London. However, due to the lack of wet nurses, 71% of these foundlings were dead by the age of 15, whereas it was roughly 40% in the general population. Due to insufficient wet nurses, foundlings were malnourished and acutely vulnerable to infectious disease…
Nice summaries of civilizational cycling (rise and fall) hypotheses/myths throughout history:
Polybius (200–118 BC)
Societies rise when they are religious, have a deep reverence for the past and for older generations, are prepared to engage in noble acts of self-sacrifice, and follow clear moral rules. These qualities ensure that they have a sense of superiority, a sense of their own destiny, that they are a cohesive community, and that they can be motivated to defend their society, even unto death. When they lose these qualities—which they inevitably do—then they fall. People become too rich and when this happens they lose their ‘fear of the gods’ and with it their selflessness and community spirit, their sense of eternal destiny, their reverence for older generations, and the strict moral rules which bind them together.
Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406)
Ibn Khaldun argued that central to civilisation was the concept of ‘Asabiyyah’, which translates as something like social cohesion or social solidarity. Asabiyyah will increase and reach a peak as civilisation advances but, ultimately, it will go into decline and, with it, the civilisation will go into decline and be displaced by another one in which Asabiyyah is stronger…For Ibn Khaldun, conditions of something like group selection were strong among people who lived in the deserts. This meant they could only survive if they were high in Asabiyyah and manifestations of it such as religiousness and martial values. This high Asabiyyah allowed them to flourish and create cities. However, here the selection for Asabiyyah was lower because conditions were more luxurious. As such, after a number of generations Asabiyyah declined to an extent that they would be invaded by desert tribes that were higher in Asabiyyah and the cycle would begin all over again.
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744)
Vico argued that states pass through three stages: the Age of Gods, the Age of Heroes, and the Age of Men. After the Age of Men, society collapses back into the Age of Gods and the cycle occurs all over again…They began as simple, savage societies whose anxieties were allayed by the gods, whom they also feared. A simple aristocracy ruled over these societies and controlled them through religion or, as Vico terms it, ‘poetic wisdom’. However, this aristocracy was not highly distinct from those whom it ruled. From this, they developed into more complex societies where there was a much clearer divide between the ‘nobility’ (the heroes) and the ‘plebeians’, who fought to gain some of the privileges held by the nobility but were ruled by them. So, society has become less united. In the Age of Heroes, there is a conspicuous and highly distinct ruling class whose members battle with each other for control and to show their strength. In the Age of Men, the heroes cede some of their power to the plebeians. In the previous ages, humanity was ruled by religion and ritual and this upheld the power of the nobility. The plebeians advance their own interests, and undermine the power of the nobility, by advocating a rational way of thinking. This empowers the plebeians but also undermines religion and, in so doing, shatters cultural unity. Religiousness inspires people to work for the common good but now they focus only on the individual. Society splinters into ‘the barbarism of reflection’ in which civil wars are fought solely for personal gain. It duly collapses back to the Age of Gods.
Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)
Spengler argued that all societies that have ever existed—though they may differ markedly in specifics—go through the same fairly clear stages that organisms do: birth, youth, maturity, decline, and death. In its spring, the society is characterised by a ‘culture’ which is based around a strong sense of religiousness. This bears fruit in its summer, in which we then see the height of its creative achievements: its epics, its poems, its plays; all of them religiously inspired to some extent. The culture is vital, optimistic, and does not question its own destiny. However, as it matures into the autumn of its years, it becomes urbanised and wealthy. There appears a Socrates or a Rousseau who questions everything and we enter an age of rationalism in which technological progress goes hand-in-hand with scepticism about religion, aristocratic rule, tradition, and everything that has held society together. At first this generates optimism about a better future, in which standards of living are much improved. Indeed, the society is so certain of the utility of its rational way of thinking that it motivates empire-building and the spread of its way of thinking, often via a political figure: Caesar, Napoleon, or Cecil Rhodes. But, on the other hand, there is a decline in religious certainty, with everything focused around material wealth.This process of rationalisation continues, and every idea is questioned, then everything is rationalised down to money (even having children), all of the old ways are despised, and there is no longer any optimism or soul holding society together. Society is strongly individualist and we enter the winter of civilisation. The constant critique, and artificial attempt to create meaning, leads to a nihilistic, pessimistic world and a gulf between the money-focused elite and the masses, because there is no longer any religious belief that the position of the elite is somehow deserved. Society becomes fragmented, democracy and order break down and demagogues take over, leading an increasingly alienated mass. This is the Age of Emperors. These Emperors are given extraordinary powers to sort out the mess of conflict that society has degenerated into, including problems of external invaders. The despair which people feel is lifted by vague religious yearnings. They engage in religious practices of various kinds but don’t really believe them. But as society becomes yet more chaotic we see the development of a ‘Second Religiousness’, which is an anti-intellectual and rehashed version of the religion on which the society was founded… Spengler insists that, when he was writing, the West’s Second Religiousness remained a number of generations into the future. During this period, society becomes so badly weakened that it is often taken over by societies which are more youthful, and descends back into a Dark Age, to be reborn anew.
…religiousness is associated with stress…religiousness is a significant predictor of fertility: the more religious you are, the bigger your family is likely to be. This may be because many religions teach that children are a blessing from God and you should have as many as possible. But, as the elite become more intelligent, less stressed, and less religious, their fertility is likely to be impacted for this reason. There’s no God who demands they ‘go forth and multiply’, so why bother? Why not just ‘drink, eat and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die’? By having a small number of—or even no—children, such people help to preserve a relatively high standard of living, but it is at the expense of their genetic interests. This compounds the g decline and also leads to a society—and particularly its elite—that is low in ethnocentrism and is nihilistic.
… the basic cause of the collapse of Rome, it is that its level of g rose too high and this set off a process of g decline, because those with the highest levels were both able and willing to limit their fertility. This is the fate of all advanced civilisations. If they become too comfortable, which they do if their g reaches a certain level, they lose their religion, they lack a sense of the eternal, they run out of steam, and they start to decline.
Herder’s Romantic nationalism begins with the dogma that the most natural state is for peoples to live in separate nations internally bonded by shared blood, soil, language, and history. The peasant is the purest and least polluted manifestation of this ‘folk culture’ and, so, to rebuild it we must imitate the peasant, who is seen as diligent, honest, and the best manifestation of Man.
…The fall of religion and the nobility opens up the idea that all men are equal…
…with the development of contraception, people begin to limit their fertility and in some European countries the population growth slows down; only increasing due to non-European immigration and high immigrant birth-rate. The emphasis on equality and the questioning of all traditional ideas continues and we see the rise of feminism, relativism, and the pervading view that life has no meaning…
Winter is civilisation’s old age and, if Spengler is correct, we are already there. He predicts that we develop into a highly globalised world, which is ruled by a kind of international financial elite who are very distant from ordinary people.
..declining voter turnout in Western countries. People despair and feel that their voice can no longer influence events and so they lose faith in democracy and democracy declines. Technology flourishes, fuelled by micro-innovation…. macro-innovation rates are declining also, there is widespread economic stagnation. Feeling completely helpless and no longer trusting party politics, people simply start to elect charismatic individuals who they feel will sort the crisis out and listen to their woes…And they are prepared to give them huge powers in order to do this.
…Growing areas of the nation are no longer populated by the descendants of those who established the civilisation in question…
We can perhaps see parallels between cultural Marxism and the place of secular philosophy in the Fall of Rome. The result of this is a constant state of ethnic strife in increasingly diverse Western nations and massive immigration into them, which the financial elite perceive as a good thing because it keeps labour costs down and renders the populace divided, allowing the elite to retain power.
An elite that is anti-group selected (i.e. purely self-interested) is likely to enhance in their offspring those traits that were most important to its success—traits such as psychopathy.[8] Thus such a ‘liberalised’ eugenics is more likely than not to make things worse for civilisation in its winter years.
On providing for geniuses: There should be no pressure to publish, or deal with bureaucracy, or attend conferences. They must simply be permitted to get on with it, as Newton was.
Autism and the Internet
https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/autism-and-the-internet-will-defeat
…Tyler Cowen framed these qualitative observations in economic terms: he argues autistics should be expected to have lower price elasticities and to specialise in production to a greater degree. That is, what they enjoy they enjoy much more than the average person and what they dislike they also dislike more, which makes them less likely to respond to differences in pay when choosing a job and place more value on their enjoyment of it — sometimes to the point that enjoyment is the only thing that matters. This explains why, unpaid and unrecognised, anonymous writers on forums like LessWrong have written thousands of words of often highly technical posts…
…Most workplaces are structured by and for non-autistic individuals, often making it challenging for those on the autism spectrum to leverage their unique abilities in professional environments. While autistic individuals may excel in academic settings or in entry-level positions that prioritize analytical skills, their career advancement frequently stalls. This stagnation largely results from the increasing emphasis on conventional social skills necessary for climbing the professional ladder, particularly in roles that focus on client relations at higher levels. In many professional settings, autistics very often face a real “Glass Ceiling.” It is this relative lack of success and inadequacy that drives many to the Internet…
The Coming Insurection
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…The horror of work is less in the work itself than in the methodical ravaging, for centuries, of all that isn’t work: the familiarities of one’s neighborhood and trade, of one’s village, of struggle, of kinship, our attachment to places, to beings, to the seasons, to ways of doing and speaking…work has totally triumphed over all other ways of existing, at the very moment when workers have become superfluous…We are living the paradox of a society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed to distract us.
In corporations, work is divided in an increasingly visible way into highly skilled positions of research, conception, control, coordination and communication which deploy all the knowledge necessary for the new, cybernetic production process, and unskilled positions for the maintenance and surveillance of this process. The first are few in number, very well paid and thus so coveted that the minority who occupy these positions will do anything to avoid losing them. They and their work are effectively bound in one anguished embrace. Managers, scientists, lobbyists, researchers, programmers, developers, consultants and engineers, literally never stop working.
The series of tasks that can’t be delegated to automation form a nebulous cluster of jobs that, because they cannot be occupied by machines, are occupied by any old human—warehousemen, stock people, assembly line workers, seasonal workers, etc. This flexible, undifferentiated workforce that moves from one task to the next and never stays long in a business can no longer even consolidate itself as a force, being outside the center of the production process and employed to plug the holes of what has not yet been mechanized, as if pulverized in a multitude of interstices. The temp is the figure of the worker who is no longer a worker, who no longer has a trade—but only abilities that he sells where he can—and whose very availability is also a kind of work.
On the margins of this workforce that is effective and necessary for the functioning of the machine, is a growing majority that has become superfluous, that is certainly useful to the flow of production but not much else, which introduces the risk that, in its idleness, it will set about sabotaging the machine….This floating population must somehow be kept occupied. But to this day they have not found a better disciplinary method than wages. It’s therefore necessary to pursue the dismantling of “social gains” so that the most restless ones, those who will only surrender when faced with the alternative between dying of hunger or stagnating in jail, are lured back to the bosom of wage-labor.
The order of work was the order of a world. The evidence of its ruin is paralyzing to those who dread what will come after. Today work is tied less to the economic necessity of producing goods than to the political necessity of producing producers and consumers, and of preserving by any means necessary the order of work.
If the unemployed person removes his piercings, goes to the barber and keeps himself busy with “projects,” if he really works on his “employability,” as they say, it’s because this is how he demonstrates his mobility. Mobility is this slight detachment from the self, this minimal disconnection from what constitutes us, this condition of strangeness whereby the self can now be taken up as an object of work, and it now becomes possible to sell oneself rather than one’s labor power, to be remunerated not for what one does but for what one is, for our exquisite mastery of social codes, for our relational talents, for our smile and our way of presenting ourselves.
Gasoline SuperUsers
https://coltura.org/gasoline-superusers/
KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF GASOLINE SUPERUSERS:
- Use more than 1,000 gallons of gasoline a year
- Drive three times more miles than the average driver
- Are more likely to drive pickups and SUVs
- Are more likely to live in rural areas
- Have similar income and educational levels as the general population
- Have lower average income levels than current EV drivers
- Spend on average 8% of their income on gasoline — more than twice that of average drivers.
- Cut gasoline use faster, more efficiently, and at a lower cost.
- Require fewer EVs to achieve the same level of carbon reduction as existing policies.
- Improve equity.
Area 51
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…In Central Intelligence Agency parlance, there are two kinds of strategic deception: cover and disinformation. Cover induces the belief that something true is something false; disinformation aims to produce the belief that something false is in fact true. In other words, cover conceals the truth while disinformation conveys false information. When the CIA disseminates false information, it is always intended to mislead. When the press disseminates false information that helps keep classified information a secret, the CIA sits back and smiles.
…Spying on Russia and defying Soviet airspace was one thing; lying about it after being caught red-handed made the president look like a liar in the eyes of the world. In 1960, American presidents were expected to be truth tellers; there was no public precedent for lying. [editor’s note: amazing how times have changed. Maybe we are just more aware of how corrupt our politicians are.]
Roswell Incident notes:
Post WWII German engineers who migrated to the US worked on the atomic and H bombs. Those who migrated to, or were captured by Russia worked on wingless flight - what we would refer to as “flying saucers”.
Stalin was observant of the chaos induced by the radio theatre War of the Worlds. He noticed how easily duped Americans were and planned to sew chaos amongst American with flying saucers transporting “aliens”.
Josef Mengele was promised refuge in Russia if he engineered humans, either genetically or surgically, to appear as aliens. The passengers on the wingless aircraft the crashed at Roswell were teenagers with macroencephaly - large heads, bulging eyes - which gave them the appearance of what one might expect an alien to look like as presented by Hollywood.
The crash was an accident. The remote controlled aircraft was supposed to land, the “aliens” walk out and the press and public go hysterical.
The interior controls of the craft are labeled in Russian.
Much concern at the time that Russia had wingless technology, a novel propulsion mechanism, as well as radar evading capability.
Conjecture:
Bob Lazar only mentioned briefly. He was a dupe introduced to Area 51 and selectively shown information in the hope he would “reveal” just enough to keep the the alien stories alive.
The US has most likely reverse engineered the propulsion system of the Roswell saucer and many of the UFO sightings today are spy planes/saucers of either Russian or American origin.
Details remain classified so as not to release the capabilities of current aircraft, as well as to hide human experiments carried out by the CIA/Atomic Energy Comission that occurred at Area 51.
Alien hysteria serves the purpose of obscuring information the government wants the citizenry to ignore e.g. recent alien info releases coincided with both John Durham reports, relegating that information to below the fold.
Note that releases of new alien information are always termed “newly released” i.e. old information that is being released again - nothing “new”.
Canada weaponizes anti-money laundering laws
“The Canadian model”: Any country can weaponize money laundering laws to wage war on dissent; forcing banks, crypto firms to freeze accounts to combat citizens’ thought crime
Canada uses existing money laundering laws to target citizens’ thought-crime, maybe-crime, pre-crime, and petty-crime. Fear not, likeminded leaders; you too have these laws. The FATF AML model is a turnkey, one-size-fits-all version, easily deployed against any country’s citizens.