My techno-optimism
vitalik.eth.limo
vitalik.eth.limo
I can't help but feel like I'm being marketed to. I've grown to completely distrust anything in this vein, since the reality of the system I see before me is so drastically inferior to how people appear to be reasoning about it. It's not like how a Model-T car differs from a modern one in safety, power steering, and so on -- it feels like an error of categories.
Honestly it's a complete skill issue if you can't get it to "basic tasks". People are out there literally spinning up entire websites and apps in minutes using GPT. There is also no indication at all that we're "hitting a wall". I suppose next you're going to say its glorified auto-complete or a "stochastic parrot"?
Like is this guy completely blind to progress? GPT4 is no better than GPT2? That GPT5 or 6 will have even better capabilities??
The 21st century may well be the pivotal century for humanity...
Every generation probably thinks this. And honestly, if I had to pick a major inflection point in recent history, it would be World War 2. The current world would be a lot different had the Germans or Japanese won. It seems to me that the current trajectory of world history is still just one extending from the 1950s.
The motifs that he evokes in this essay are far too complex for me to digest in confidence from a "Techno-optimist" "tech leader" who is still so relatively young. I'd be more interested in reading this perspective (and its counterperspectives) from someone else.
I’m sure these copies will happen in the future, but I don’t think this concept of identity will withstand real scrutiny. What’s more likely in my opinion is a reapplied focus on the body / extended cognition and a discarding of the mind-body dualism model that enables thought experiments like mind uploading to be conceivable. Or, as Vitalik mentioned, more of an enhanced human model that builds upon the body instead of discarding it.
it doesn't matter if the upload is a copy, if the "original" is constantly being shredded and re-printed every moment anyway
Again I’m not denying that elaborate imitations of the human brain won’t be possible. But that these won’t be copies, they’ll be a new thing. Hence “uploading” is an incorrect model.
There doesn't seem to be a strong reason to presume this. What is your basis for stating this?
> But that these won’t be copies, they’ll be a new thing. Hence “uploading” is an incorrect model.
Sure, that's a relevant, but pedantic point. Does it matter? Presume star-trek transporters were real, effectively they could be said to be duplicating and murdering every-time someone is beamed up. But the subjective experience is still one of continuity. It seams likely that would be the case for an "uploaded duplicate" they would "feel" like the original, in mind (barring sensory differences). Whether the "upload" process itself is destructive is another matter.
As time goes on these kind of things will get better and maybe you can have a copy version of you to chat to people you don't really want to talk to or do chores or the like.
As you get older and maybe go gaga the AI version of you may be closer to the old you than your physical self, and that could live on if you pass away.
Not sure if they'd do things while no one talked to them or just respond like GPT or have some physical presence or in VR or if you could leave money and power to the virtual you or not. Guess we'll have to see how that plays out.
Getting data from scanning a brain is probably a long way off but could be added in in a few decades if they get there. Sadly real world teleporters probably aren't happening. Though maybe in VR.
There's actually a YC startup for brain scanning but I still think that'll be a while https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/13/144721/a-startup...
It was a continuous process that lasted centuries, at different times in different parts of the world.
I mean, have you ever tried to have a conversation with one of your cells? Maybe they talk back and we've just been listening wrong.
Once you learned that they do talk back, would you try to rid yourself of them? I wouldn't.
And for some folks, there are pseudo-religious elements. There's been a long line of thought (search Extropians) obsessed with a sort of godhead-merger, or becoming godlike, and related immortality dreams. And just from a symbology perspective, there are a lot of religious overtones. The similarities between Vinge's singularity and biblical rapture are hard to miss, for instance. And just listen to some of the "AI" cheerleaders right now...
We are cheap, disposable tools for machines.
If machines figure out how to farm humans, they're set...it's way more practical than mining resources, refining them, producing materials and using the materials to build a mechanism to travel around in.
It's from the original script at least, not the batteries explanation in the final product.
Or is it that your emotions and thoughts are where all the value is, and a machine executing its function is no different to a hammer?
My two cents on the post: First of all, in my mind, the Andreessen "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" is such self-serving half-baked neoreactionary junk, that the only appropriate response is just to ignore it altogether. It seems not even worth commenting on. Or at least, if you're going to comment on it, you should just summarily dismiss it, like "yeah, of course VCs are excited about accelerating techno-capitalism because it serves their material interests, and let's not take their philosophical self-justification seriously."
Regarding the substance of the post:
> If we want a future that is both superintelligent and "human", one where human beings are not just pets, but actually retain meaningful agency over the world, then it feels like something like this is the most natural option.
This is on the one hand, totally common sense, and on the other hand, something that (I'd argue) is directly in conflict with the material interests of companies that create and use generative AI. They absolutely want you to outsource your thinking to the machines, to give up your agency. What will the organized forces of resistance to this look like?
[1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/vitalik-buterin/
I see only a difference in degree. It starts with trusting AI to write your emails, then organizing your calendar, then organizing your finances, then establishing financial goals, then making important life decisions. And then you're a pet.
There will be companies actively trying to build this kind of trust. And they will succeed -- at least, they'll be able to deliver this kind of advice for almost no cost, and much of the advice will be considered helpful, much of the time.
But who's going to be on the other side, arguing that listening to the AI advice is a net bad?
>But who's going to be on the other side, arguing that listening to the AI advice is a net bad?
If an AI reached the point where it is objectively better than the human, across all intellectual metrics, to which it is giving advice would it be a net bad?
Between topsoil depletion, fresh water scarcity, usable sand and precious metal scarcity, and ocean acidification leading to an eventual possible extinction of all edible seafood, it's looking like we aren't going to be able to just keep building new tech to keep supporting our current population, especially at the rampant level of consumption companies have been training them on (nevermind a perpetually increasing population).
And likely we're going to start running out of these things (and others) in certain locations, and eventually everywhere, if we don't find the will to completely reverse course (and it's clear there's been no real will to do so by those in charge). Conversion to electric cars and solar panels just improves the CO2 problem, it doesn't address the rest.
I like Vitalik and own Ethereum and I love technology, but I still don't see anything that's likely to resolve the fundamental problem that we're just using resources way, way faster than they can be replaced on this finite planet, and eventually it's going to catch up to us, short of some form of major human cataclysm (like a super pandemic or something) that happens before resources start running out.
I can't help but think the actual motivation behind your attitude is not environmentalism but a pessimism about technology that amounts to an extreme form of conservatism. At worst it's a kind of misanthropy.
Technology isn't always good but we should keep building it. I'm not sure how much pressure we should be applying to the brake. Definitely some, but not as much as you're advocating.
I would love if there was a technological solution to these things, and the human will to do so. I don't even want people to stop searching for technological solutions, it just doesn't seem like it will ever be enough considering human nature.
I also suspect that throwing more technology at the problem might just add more problems, like taking a shot to lose weight that ends up giving you pancreatic cancer a few years later (based on an actual warning label on an Ozempic-like sample my doctor gave me once).
Edit: Part of the reason I have so many laptops is my job requires it, and one of those extra laptops is 8 years old and I haven't recycled it yet. Whenever I change jobs I'll have to return 2 of those laptops.
There's every reason to believe that this pattern will continue. As the world gets richer, we'll continue to develop the will to deal with various environmental problems. In the meantime, a certain amount of damage will be done, but it won't be irrecoverable.
Why is there every reason to believe that we can do those things without environmental destruction? Seems like wishful thinking. If people in rich countries actually cared, they would demand things were made in their country with environmental regulations, not imported from somewhere that doesn't care.
It is wrong. Technology fundamentally requires the destruction of the environment, to make a spear you must nap flint and harvest a hard, straight stick. That’s resource destruction on a very small scale.
We have scaled up to Billions of people and near ubiquitous hi-tech. So the scale is what’s eating us, the earth is big, but 8 Billion people is a heck of a lot when every one of them requires highly refined goods.
People in rich society could certainly improve their quality of life quite considerably by cutting back on certain consumption, such as building more walkable and sustainable environment.
We probably still have to make certain sacrifice, such as eating less meat.
I don't think that 8 billion people is too many. As we adopt more environmentally friendly technology, I think we'll realize that the earth can easily sustain 8 billion.
The environment changes naturally anyway, technology or not.
Why our bubble in time is specifically owed resources to make barely updated iPhones each year?
Why these crappy synthetic gadgets? Why not compute in chemistry or biology? Business machines of the 1900s are not the only viable substrate for computing.
I don't know if it's our society that cares little about future generations or simply human nature, but we're almost certain to keep living unsustainably until a major disaster happens.
Your critique trades on intuitions about the moral conservativism that frustrates political debate, but is actually pointing to an existential conservativism that looks back at a successful half-million year effort at human continuity and wonders what all the rush is about.
Care to elaborate on this speculation? Sounds more like a harbinger of collectivist austerity to me.
There is no absolute resource scarcity on any meaningful timescale, there is only a related question about the size of the resources which will become economically recoverable over succeeding centuries. Resource-to-production ratios are often used to suggest that certain resources will run out within a number of decades, but that is just a form of corporate book-keeping - new exploration, technologies, and rising prices, can and do push the search for new reserves. The R-P ratios at the heart of the Limits to Growth argument have actually improved since the 1970s despite rising consumption, for exactly that reason.
You are right, however, that there are clear tensions between compound growth and planetary boundaries like ocean acidification and topsoil depletion. That is really the crux of the issue - how many times can we multiply the size of the economy without, through sheer weight of exploitation of natural resource sources and sinks, and of material power and artifice, destroying the planet.
I'm not really arguing exactly whatever is in the Limits to Growth book (I've heard of it but haven't read it), but I do think we are overutilizing resources faster than they can recover, and we can't just create a "make some new fossil fuels" or "make the sand that we need" tech at the scale that we would need to replace them.
Like fossil fuels for example, take millions of years for the planet to produce naturally, but we've burned through a good chunk of what is cheap to extract and process in about a hundred years.
I might be including two things that are a bit different from each other, but they all contribute to our ability to thrive as a species, especially at our (average) level of comfort and consumption currently.
I might be including two things that are a bit different from each other, but they all contribute to our ability to thrive as a species, especially at our (average) level of comfort and consumption currently.
It's possible that certain overuse of certain technology is actually causing us discomfort.
Cars are energy intensive mode of transportation and manufacture. We could all walk more and be subjected to less pollution and experience a greater quality of life.
Yeah I agree. I already try to use my car (a hybrid, tried to get electric but there were none in the area at the time) as little as I can.
Working from home the past six years has cut down how much I drive to like 20% of what I used to. Unfortunately I do live in a suburb in the US, so I don't have much choice but to drive to places unless I just want to be stuck in my house forever. Only place I could probably feasibly walk to near me is a 7-11 or a Papa Johns, and that would still take 25 minutes each way.
If someone took the technology of the early 1900s and looked forward at the population growth, the conclusion would have been as bleak as yours, if not worse.
Topsoil depletion isn’t a problem for people that know how to farm. Market forces will quickly incentivize people who don’t understand it when there is starvation at stake. Right now we have such an over abundance of affordable food that it’s just not a global threat.
Freshwater access is likewise a complete non-issue at a global scale. The absolute worst case is people pay for it like in Israel with desalination, but there even in the US in the driest parts, we’re still arguing about letting farmers grow the dumbest crops possible for free.
"Water scarcity affects roughly 40% of the world's population and, according to predictions by the United Nations and the World Bank, drought could put up to 700 million people at risk of displacement by 2030. People like van der Heijden are concerned about what that could lead to.
"If there is no water, politicians are going to try and get their hands on it and they might start to fight over it," she says."[1]
But no, a complete non-issue. Just build desalination plants, poor countries!
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210816-how-water-shorta...
Secondly, the resources we use per dollar of GDP is going down rapidly. Not as fast as GDP is growing, but it is going down. Given that a good portion of our growing GDP is due to growing population, once the "growing population" part of it goes away, it's not unreasonable to expect that resources/$GDP will shrink at the same rate that $GDP grows.
It's not unreasonable -- if we have access to lots of clean energy and we recycle efficiently our footprint will go down substantially. For example, the iPhone 25 will be better than the iPhone 24 yet likely use less resources. And the upgrade cycle for iPhone's is slowing down -- an iPhone 18 will still likely be "good enough".
The biggie is food. Food uses a lot of resources. If we stabilize the population that'll take a lot of strain off, but I believe that we can significantly reduce our resource requirements for food. Right now we grow our food the way we do not because it requires so many resources, but because that's the cheapest way to do so. For example, if we used a lot more greenhouses we'd use a lot less land for the same amount of food, but we don't because greenhouses are more expensive than just using a lot of land. Also, I'm very optimistic about "precision fermentation".
Invisible resource consumption pipelines offset resource savings elsewhere. Drink carts on airplanes have their own resource supply chain while most just think of the fuel costs.
Reducing life for the masses to “make money” has infantilized people. Not so sure why we’re afraid of pushing back against a generation that can barely hold its head up and the tacit ageism they put upon us to prop them up at our expense.
* reduce ocean acidification by reducing CO2 — which is the primary cause of ocean acidification — emitted per unit of energy generated. For instance, solar panels are becoming more effective and affordable, and this progress is happening at a rapid rate. Wind turbines are advancing nearly as fast. There's also progress in carbon capture and storage technology, which can directly reduce the amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere. Nuclear energy also has enormous potential.
* create new topsoil and increase the amount of food produced per unit of topsoil. For example, the use of GPS and IoT devices in agriculture allows farms to optimize planting and harvesting, toincrease output while reducing topsoil degradation. The same applies to the rapidly progressing fields of hydroponics and vertical farming
* recycle more precious metals, and access more precious metals in the Earth's crust, and outside of the Earth. This also applies to material classes other than precious metals, including critical minerals like lithium, where companies are developing methods to more efficiently recycle lithium from batteries. The steady improvement of compost system manufacturing and distribution meanwhile makes topsoil generation more accessible and affordable.
* generate more fresh water, through technologies like desalination and more efficient water filtration systems, which makes previously unusable water drinkable.
Many of these are energy intensive, and the potential to expand clean energy output is absolutely enormous, from sources including solar, nuclear fission reactors and nuclear fusion reactors.
First, this concern is as old as the world[1] - and I experienced a version of this in the mid-90s when people were freaking out about peak oil[2] using much the same language/tone/concepts as you're voicing in your message. My point isn't that past performance guarantees future returns, but that there's something about this type of idea/anxiety that is inherently "sticky" in people's minds, separately from how it has actually panned out.
Second, I think you're missing a logical step between "we aren't going to be able to just keep building new tech" and "rampant level of consumption companies have been training them on." Companies have been able to "train" consumers to the current level of consumption precisely because resource availability has made it possible. If a resource became scarce, the price of goods based on that item would go up and thus consumption would go down. For example, see the graph of oil consumption in the US that naturally dropped by quite a bit around the supply shock of the Iranian revolution. [3]
The fact is obvious that humans can shift our consumption patterns, either by consuming less of something or shifting our consumption to a different type of thing. We naturally do this all the time as resource availability (and thus price) determine what is and isn't economical to be consuming.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil [3] https://www.ourworldofenergy.com/vignettes.php?type=introduc...
Earth's inner core is literally a molten ball of iron and nickel. Earth crust contained plenty of minerals, including elements like silicon and oxygen.
Now, we could go full hog on population growth, assuming no ecological issues. What we might run into is the problem of heat dissipation. Humans are basically 100 watts space heaters. Never mind all the infrastructure needed to support a human population. How much can we produce before there's too much heat? Producing steel is a heat intensive process.
But yeah, there just doesn’t seem to be enough incentive yet unfortunately. But if, say, there were mass protests world-wide there could be action from governments and companies. The problem is people just don’t care that much, but when millions are dead we might start caring.
They were totally wrong on every point. All of their predictions failed. It's because technology constantly adapts. If some resource is low, alternatives are found. Productivity increases. Price signals tell entrepreneurs what to work on and produce more of. We will never run out of anything.
Regarding CO2, it pains me greatly that people actually think a few degrees change in temperature will destroy the earth. The earth has been much warmer and much colder. Mesopotamia used to be paradise, now it's a desert. Regions change. Humans adapt. This is no reason to do something extreme, or live with existential grief.
For people that live in constant anxiety about all the things politicians and the news tell you about, I recommend this book, what can it hurt giving it a read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vision_of_the_Anointed
Also even if we do that, there's only a tiny fraction of the people on Earth that will be able to go on that journey. Most of the people born here are definitely stuck here.
There are predictions that some of these things could start happening as early as 2050 (specifically the extinction of edible seafood one), and most of what I mentioned maybe happening by 2100. Is the majority of people here still alive at that time going to be off this planet then?
The Universe is really, really, really, really, really, really, and even more really than you can probably count big!
I guess this is what the bible meant when it said:
"the meek will inherit the earth"
The greatest immediate risk is concentration/centralization of power (in human hands).
I'm not advocating for luddites, and we should continue to learn about consciousness and the brain, but be open to the possibilities that there are forces at work that we do not currently perceive or understand.
AI should replace human governance, but the biggest danger with this transition is that those in power today have a wildly different vision for how the future should look. Their vision is clearly techno-communism and digital serfdom. I'm not sure how we steer around this.
Yes, our scientific models of intelligence and information processing are severely limited.
What? WASM came out in 2017. The shift is definitely from faster client machines and more browser APIs (that often test the sandboxing assumptions he's talking about)
Browser VMs are v8 and the dart one flutter uses in the web browser implementation. And I almost forgot React native has their own VM too,
Well that's my point.
> The GDP gap between Europe and the United States is now 80%
Lots to worry about in Europe.
Since dang is rate limiting me, I'm going to add my response to this comment:
Cutting edge treatments for cancer usually arrive in the US first. Also, I believe the US had access to mRNA vaccines for Covid before Europe.
Also, the US has more access to mental health treatments. Is ketamine for TRD available anywhere in the EU? If so, it’s a minority.
A lot of drugs used in the US for ADHD and depression aren’t available in Europe.
If it’s the former, then I guess. If it’s the latter, in the past 10 years, it’s hard for me to imagine what tech made improvements to people’s lives in NA, meanwhile Europe and Asia has been chugging along. From simpler things like never needing cash when you’re in the country (I know, HN hates it), to building massive infrastructure in the cities which requires new tech.
Disclosure: I live in Canada, so can be completely wrong. I have family both in US and Europe, so I visit both very often. You can see gradual change in both, but it’s different.
To paraphrase Ursula Franklin: technology is systems, not just the artifacts that we typically consider "technology". As an example, consider "the car". There is the artifact of an automobile, for sure, but when we say "the technology of cars" we are referring to something which is a superset of the collection of physical automobiles: we are also tacitly including all of the human protocols which have been put in place to enable the automobile artifacts to "function properly" (move a human body from place A to place B safely and quickly). Road design and maintenance, drivers ed, traffic engineering, urban planning etc. are all components in the larger technological system that defines the capabilities of "the car". I'm not saying that it's wrong to refer to subsystems of this technology as "technologies" of their own, just that it's a more difficult taxonomical problem than many are willing to acknowledge. There are no artifacts functioning in a vacuum; all of our tools are embedded in and partially defined by the human systems around them.
I say this because I think it changes what it means to be a "techno-optimist". To be optimistic about the capabilities of technology to produce beneficial outcomes is more than just being optimistic about the capabilities of the artifacts ("we will develop more effective vaccines and more efficient batteries"), but also being optimistic about human systems. I do think that Vitalik has this somewhat in mind in this post; his discussion of differential development, as well as the role of governance systems gets towards this. However I wish he was more explicit about it because "technological progress" takes on a radically different flavor from this perspective. To some extent it becomes tautological: progress in human techno-systems is progress in human society more generally. However it also lays out additional axes to consider development along. For example: moving towards his solarpunk utopia north star could conceivably occur with no or little change in the current capabilities of our tooling, and instead result from a radical reorganization of human society. Extrapolating further you might conclude that a true d/acc techno-optimist should spend less time developing cryptographic consensus mechanisms, and more time radicalizing the folks at your community garden to become self-sustaining and mutually supportive. This is extreme, and probably the best way forward is "both/and", but I think that it gets underplayed in any of these discussions about "technology", resulting in a somewhat limited scope of action items.
When it comes to AGI I think this perspective is even more salient, because it unbundles the single "AGI" entity into a collection of subsystems and allows us to more effectively game out what the probable AGI futures are. Indeed, my own somewhat contrarian take is that AGIs already exist in the form of the human organizations (states, corporations, etc). These are decision-making entities composed of humans, but I think it's not unfair to consider them as a type of hive-mind entity which deserves status as "intelligent agent". The popular AGI anxiety, that we will create a novel type of agent which will "function" free of human systems entirely, seems unlikely to me: given how little we know about what a "mind" is, it seems like a stretch to assert that one could be engineered in silicon so easily. Rather I think the more probable outcome is Vitalik's AI-supercharged totalitarian state: instead of carving itself free of our systems I think it's likely that an old version of an AGI (the state or corporate apparatus) upgrades itself using the new computing paradigms available to it. This has happened many times before: the invention of statistics and the big data revolution(s) show us what happens when computing and decision making infrastructure embeds itself in the governing technology. Looking back to these previous "AGI apocalypses" we can more effectively extrapolate and plan for the future. Rather than being an entirely new problem space (Vitalik compares it to the origin of life; to me this is an enormous stretch), it becomes one with which we are exceedingly familiar.
If your species outnumber what your species consider a plague, there is a high chance that your species it's the bigger plague.
Nobody cares about the absolute number of rats. We care about the inconveniences they cause us.
Mmmmmmh...
I don't think that overpopulation is a problem today. Population collapse due to concentration of capital and power is.
Our carbon footprint would be an eight fraction of what it is if there was only 1 billion people in the world, current state of climate change would still be decades away giving us a bit more time to gradually change course, and consentration of wealth and power would be less dramatic as the workforce will be more limited (supply and demand for money itself).
Another perspective is whether not doing anything (and by "doing" I mean simple public health measures like free condom distribution and family planning, education about the impact of human population, or, more succinctly, "no Hitler-y stuff") would ultimately yield more harm to minorities as they'd be the first to feel the impacts of population stress.