If you have concerns about the instabilities abroad and at home in America, I am here to be of service. Being a Cassandra is a curse but when the moment arrives you are at least well prepared.
I’ve been discussing my concerns in prestige glossies and serious news media for years. I see venture friends throwing apocalypse themed parties and I can’t help but feel like the hour is late.
I call this kind of mass awakening to reality the Thursday Styles Problem. By the time something is cool it’s already past time for you the regular person to benefit much from the knowledge of what’s coming.
I am a bit tired so this could all be jet lag speaking but I’m feeling slightly disappointed. While I’ve found great inspiration in the work of my peers, I see the failures and venality too.
I am at Consensus and I’m unsure if I feel like we’ve got enough people building the future I want to see. I fear for the unraveling of the old powers and what the transition looks like. It seems like a lot of people will be voting for a convicted felon for commander in chief.
And yet there is hope. The conference coincides with the annual Coincenter dinner which is an industry wide non profit effort to work towards policy goals for decentralized computing like Bitcoin & Ethereum and the wider cryptocurrency.
Our mission is to defend the rights of individuals to build and use free and open cryptocurrency networks: the right to write and publish code – to read and to run it. The right to assemble into peer-to-peer networks. And the right to do all this privately.
Erik Vorhees delivered an incredible moving keynote address and I found myself with tears in my eyes as I considered the long history of fighting to become your own master. We separated church and state. We are fighting to separate money and state. I feel these philosophical lineages across my entire life.
And so I am slightly disappointed at this point. But I’ll try to sleep and it will pass.
As we rapidly accelerate the power of our computing tools, machine learning has blossomed into the most heated topic in government policy, business strategy, and popular culture, as artificial intelligence begins to affect everyday life.
The focus on harms, and in particular singularity doomerism, has (ironically) pulled focus from the implications of the seminal “attention is all you need” paper.
Policymakers and Silicon Valley executives are both calling for regulation of artificial intelligence as fears grow over its potential harms. But others warn of entrenching a dominant, opaque, centralized Big Tech model and instead advocate for open-source code, decentralized computation and distributed data sourcing. Whom should policymakers listen to? What, if anything, can governments do to help this vital technology evolve in a pro-human way?
Thankfully, we aren’t starting from scratch in building a regulatory framework for artificial intelligence. Code has been treated as speech in Bernstein v. United States Department of State. It would seem like a reasonable precedent to consider algorithms speech as well.
And let us be clear, math and computing power are as essential as speech. In today’s world, they ARE speech. Humans may speak in natural language, but the way we extend ourselves, build things, and grow as a species is through our tools. Computation is a tool. To presume that these tools do harm is to make us bad workmen.
Now of course incumbent powers may try to keep the disruptive and democratizing power of these tools out of the hands of the populace “for their own safety”, but imagine if the first amendment had been frozen in time at the printing press and didn’t protect the internet? We cannot accept permanently lowered standards of fundamental rights.
The 90s era fight for strong encryption enabled a flourishing of digital businesses from finance to e-commerce. We must insist that the freedom to innovate remains the default for U.S. digital policy.
America does not have a Federal Computer Commission for computing or the internet but instead relies on the wide variety of laws, regulations, and agencies that existed long before digital technologies came along.
If we are to regulate sensibly, let us treat artificial intelligence as we would any other tool and let us do so within the existing framework of our constitutional rights and their interpretations within past precedents.
I love cotton. In my Waldorf third grade, our year long class project was to plant, grow, harvest, gin, card, spin & dye cotton. Along with a similar wool project, this childhood experience instilled a love of fibers, fabrics & textiles in me.
The Agriculture Marketing Service of the USDA oversees efforts to improve the position of various commodities produced in America. Other campaigns include Got Milk, Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner, and Pork: The Other White Meat
We work to make cotton the best it can be through research, textile innovations (like water- and wind-resistant cotton apparel and moisture-wicking, wrinkle- and stain-resistant cotton), and sustainable advancements like finding new uses for cotton and cotton byproducts, reducing land and water usage, and modernizing agricultural processes.
We make sure you know about all of cotton’s amazing benefits through advertising, retail and influencer collaborations.
You might be annoyed to find that American cotton growers are obligated to pay into a government marketing program which underwrites social media influencers.
Cotton is the most popular natural fiber in the world with 25 million tons a year produced so it’s perhaps not unexpected American has an incentive to promote it as one of our commodities.
Cotton is crucial natural fiber which means it has its share of a controversies as commodity for things like its water & pesticide use and genetic engineering to withstand the herbicide glyphosate.
In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel synthesizes groundbreaking research from archaeology, economics, and science to reveal a surprising history. The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code.
This thesis suggests to me that fashion bitches are one of the original tribes of technology brothers. To care this much about the feature sets of a base layer clearly marks us as nerds. So I’ll finish this up with a personal anecdote.
I am furious at a brand of upper market cotton basics called Splendid. I’ve been buying the same long sleeve classic tee-shirt from them for at least a decade. It claims to be a 50% blend of Pima cotton and Modal. Both are considered premium fabrics with long fibers. Modal is a semi-synthetic developed in Japan made from beech trees. There are many grades of both fibers Splendid could source and in the past I’ve found the tee to wear extremely well. I’ve got a half dozen that never pilled, held its color & shape, and gave me years of wear.
Last month I bought three new Splendid tees as I becoming fearful of the downward trend in quality of manufactured goods. I’ve been trying to stock up on basics I’ve relied on in the past. Alas it would seem my most reliable shirt in my favorite fabrics has come to an ignoble end.
Splendid no longer manufactures with premium extra long cotton fibers as a new shirt pilled & caught onto other fibers in my tee shirt drawer.
There is a lot of noise at the moment. But occasionally a single event is so loud you can’t help but overhear it. America’s President Joe Biden caught my attention with this rather singular statement.
“There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos”
I am not well informed on this current situation as the last week or so I’ve been outside of the American news media bubble. I am not so sure I wanted to become well informed given that is what has reached me.
Chaos is more appealing in the abstract than the particulars. I say this as someone who views the word with more positive valence than is probably accurate to its general meaning and certainly than current public perception.
I believe chaos is increasing and rather than accept its effects as inevitable we must actively investment in our capacity to adapt to it. Building resilience has proven to be a very good investment thesis.
I don’t endorse causing chaos deliberately. Friction its place in the world. So does disruption. I’ll even advocate for creative destruction. But being destructive deliberately has been rightfully called an agitator.
Do we much we need additional agitation in a world already filled with chaos? I don’t get to make that decision on my own but I personally think it’s better to build fixes to the chaos we’ve already got. I don’t need to give entropy any help.
I can’t predict your choice, but I’ll admit my “rational” conscience mind desperately wants me to pick numbers.
Alas my emotional subconscious intelligence quickly goes intuitive, lurching my feelingsto a grabby place with “words.” That the right answer. I’d be hard pressed to correct my gut.
Humans love a good story. Even a single word can contain centuries of meaning. Just ask someone to define “woman” if you don’t believe me.
In the battle between numeracyand literacy, the bell has long ago been rung on the fight. Cave paintings transitioned to runes. Runes became alphabets. Literacy won before numbers got beyond accounting for the treasures of a king.
Priesthoods may have hated man understanding “the Word” but human minds were already on board with incantations of auspicious words before we got formal symbolic systems.
Probably understandably attempts to introduce topics like algebra were was a bit of stretch. Even simple arithmetic proved to be a contentious abstraction for many humans.
Ideas like property are a not a long haul from understanding “mine” and “yours” but it’s quite a leap to understand “how much” and “in what ways across different time and organizational schemas” which gets humans upset over specific collection of things.
Look at your hands and you understand that base ten allows you to calculate simple transactions for resources within your life.
Beyond that good luck. Got an abacus? Understanding that zero and one can communicate a universe’s worth of information is an even further leap. Attention wanders quickly without a computer.
And yet, as I enjoy the aesthetics of my own numeric symmetry in my 1212 days of consecutive writing, I know it’s my private counting mechanism.
“The need for numeracy today is enormous. Business requires people who have grasped the principles of reducing chaos of information to some kind of order.”
The Economist 1966
The narrative overlay of what numbers mean matters more than the numbers. So I’ll ask again. Which would you pick? Words or numbers?
Whenever I travel I am reminded of just how good a life I have be virtue of being born American.
I’m kept alive, fed, clothed and connected by a vast web of abstractions undergirding modern civilization thanks to the value of my passport and the exorbitant privilege of the dollar.
Constructs like private property have given rise to elaborate norms of obligation, honors, debts and expectations that enable coordination mechanisms like markets. This seems like a good thing from
All of this feels so astonishingly fragile. We listen when our bankers fret about “rules based western civilization” being under siege because we know those rules are what enables the niceties of our lives.
All it takes are a few assholes breaking the rules and the fabric frays a little more. Blessedly capitalism has its own immune system that is happy to attack all types of hostility.
If you are not integrated into the body politic of the dominant civilization you generally know it. I’ve found those outside of it generally wish they could be assimilated from simple envy. If you want these benefits be prepared to be assimilated to the rules and values of civilization.
Your alternative is struggle to hold yourself apart by your own rules and cultural values and insist others abide by them. This has generally required coercion, violence or shame in the past.
You can say “no” to civilizational benefits simply by opting out. To be left alone is to accept your status and stay outside of the great game of civilization. But to accept the benefits is to in some sense accept to accept that there are rules. You can’t break rules if you don’t know their importance. If you know the rules and break them however you can’t be surprised when it’s viewed as a thread.
“Since you’ve chosen death I must choose another path” It was a shitpost. I posted an acceleration meme. I happily endorse the bumpy progress of material change and the myriad human lives that choose to grow. The responses to my shitpost show that it’s no longer a joke.
Accelerate or die in style of the American Revolution “unite or die” snake representing the thirteen colonies but in the form of a network diagram.
I live in very clear reveled preferences on this front. My husband and I are accelerating the real world in our home in Montana. In two years we’ve planted a fruit orchard, installed solar grid, use the power from that grid to grow hydroponics and mine Bitcoin, we got chickens and advocate for local growth initiatives that allow people in Montana to live and grow together in mutual freedom.
I also believe those rights in the real world rest on a bedrock of natural rights enumerated in the American constitution.
And then suggest you want to engage in earnest debate. I find it hard to believe a good faith reader doesn’t immediately see the cognitive dissonance.
I do have the right to do as I choose as I am an American. We have first amendment rights.
Until you can measurably demonstrate proof that access to compute (which is just mathematics) has specific measurable harms you cannot invoke force on your fellow citizen for your personal paranoias.
The encryption wars had the same logic. So I ask people who worry about the consequences of compute power and artificial intelligence to give us what we’ve asked for in the form of measurably demonstrated specific types of harms where access to compute is a threat.
No “what if” hysterics, show me specifics and we can address those in policy. Armageddon in your head isn’t adequate. Being afraid isn’t enough.
If you can show measurable harms do so. We must hew to empiricism any time we seek to align others to our cause. Show me specific harms & we work to redress those harms. Actual crimes that exist already should be prosecuted as such. Seeking to newly criminalize a basic right because of unprecedented circumstances should be subject to the highest of scrutiny.
However if you show me you want the power for yourself to make these decisions I say no. We all keep our own conscience. We have existing rights.
I have shown through my revealed preferences I also believe this transition to more artificial will be chaotic. An age of higher variance is upon us and this can be a good thing with enough energy and intelligence. And we are about to get more intelligence thanks to the tools we have built.
I hope we can mitigate its harms. I believe we can apply ourselves in individual ways coordinated by the best efforts of those who build new tools. And that because we cannot predict with certainty we must hold firm to our principles doubly so then. We must be brave in approaching these problems as the principles matter.
Marxist Leninist thought has proven resilient
I am not advocating for revolution. I am advocating for keeping our heads and our hearts in times of change and protecting all of our freedoms.
We have historically shown the value of this position and the folly of violent control “for your own good.” Consider those classic socialist musicians the Beatles. Even they understood that revolutionary force was bad.
You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world You tell me that it’s evolution Well, you know We all wanna change the world
But when you talk about destruction Don’t you know that you can count me out, in
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
You say you got a real solution Well, you know We’d all love to see the plan You ask me for a contribution Well, you know We all doing what we can
But if you want money for people with minds that hate All I can tell is, brother, you have to wait
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
You say you’ll change the constitution Well, you know We’d all love to change your head (ah, shu-bi-do, ah) You tell me it’s the institution Well, you know You better free your mind instead (ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
If you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow
Revolution 1 – The Beatles
If you want to go around quoting Chairman Mao you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow. How prescient those British Boy Band Boomers were. If you are so certain a revolution is necessary but you will take my compute from me then it’s you who wishes to be the Vanguard not me.
These calls for safety and caution, lest an apocalypse scenario ensue, appeal emotions to seek a tyranny of the majority for a fantasy of control over something that “may” be dangerous but not in any empirical ways we can address together and in specific ways. They don’t want to be accountable. Accountability is a democracy not this pantomime of concern seeking control.
Appealing to fears is control. All of the issues which have been brought up in artificial intelligence and access to computer models have past analogs and parallels in our existing policy tool set and within the enumerated rights.
Feel free to specify those issues into specifics and not act like this is Patriot Act 2^nth Terminator 2 Boogaloo. We have no need to indulge in Tom Clancy level panic about sum of all fears.
To lighten the mood this is an aligned AI for you.
Embrace the freedoms of affirming your right to choose your own human life. These new tools can we’ve built from mathematics and computation can enrich all our lives.
Lest you not think I take the consequences of this massive change and its potential for dislocation seriously, I live off grid with redundant power and water in Montana. I invest exclusively in solutions to the real problems we face in uncertain times including energy, open source, decentralization & trustless intermediaries. I walk this walk. The choice to make the future is up to all of us. And we should walk it in the most life affirming way we can for each of us.
I went on a “long” drive today. It took three hours go about 160 kilometers, which is for Americans about 35 miles per hour. The speed limit was technically 60 mph (or 90km an hour) but traffic was everywhere and open road a mere dream.
Americans are so spoiled for our interstate system. I’d encourage anyone who can to rent a car and drive the roads of greater Europe and remind yourself how good we have it with Eisenhower’s legacy. Highways are not always open roads.
The various forms of traffic ranged from other vehicles to actual sheep. Spring is around the corner in the Mediterranean and little lambs tend to wander. Police, and pedestrians wandered even far from the city and nowhere was there more than a few kilometers to open the throttle. The black Mercedes I rode in roared through needless roundabouts.
I wasn’t exactly in civilization during most of the drive. I was going from a fairly major city to a beach town. In between was not so picturesque villages and ample signs of degrowth.
If Americans are saddened by rest stop towns and hollowed out empty America, do not make the mistake that it’s unique to us. Inflation, corruption, poverty and overbearing government are everywhere that we tolerate it. If we must have an expensive bureaucracy the least they can give us is the open road.
I’m in the Balkans for a few weeks doing some scouting and visiting with friends and colleagues. The western Balkans including Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro are known for their occasionallycolorful participation in cryptocurrencies.
These negative experience with currency instability, government corruption and sociopolitical unrest has led to a desire to experiment with transparency and decentralization amongst the region’s youth.
In an editorial in Bitcoin Magazine the founder of the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub summed up the “why”
As a result of years of unfulfilled promises from regional politicians, people of the Balkans are hard to convince about the long-term benefits that can be realized by adopting Bitcoin in one’s life. A low time preference way of life to most people in this region is associated with disappointment and the lowered standards of living that have happened many times before.
