Chronicles of the Future – 12 July 2024

Artificial intelligence

The five stages of AI grief

Do you know the five stages of AI grief? According to Noema Magazine, they are:

AI Denial

Symptoms:

AI is not real; it does not exist; it’s not really artificial; it’s not really intelligent; it’s not important; it’s all hype; it’s irrelevant; it’s a power play; it’s a passing fad. AI cannot write a good song or a good movie script. AI has no emotions. AI is just an illusion of anthropomorphism. AI is just statistics, just math, just gradient descent. AI is glorified autocomplete. AI is not embodied and therefore not meaningfully intelligent. This or that technique won’t work, is not working — and when it is working, it’s not what it seems.

AI Anger

Symptoms:

AI is a political, cultural, economic and/or existential threat; it threatens the future of humanity; it must be collectively, individually, actively and sometimes violently resisted; the “spark of humanity” must be defended from the tangible harms from above and outside; AI is essentially understandable from a handful of negative recent examples; AI is a symbol of control and hierarchy and thus opposes the struggle for freedom and autonomy.

AI Bargaining

Symptoms:

AI is a powerful force that can, should and will be controlled through human-centric design ethics and democratic and technocratic alignment with self-evidently consensual shared values, realized through policymaking and sovereign legislation. Its obvious challenges to the informational, technological and epistemic foundations of modern political and legal institutions is a temporary anomaly that can be mitigated through cultural intervention, targeted through legacy cultural platforms against those who make AI.

AI Depression

Symptoms:

It may already be too late to save humanity from an existential crisis up to and including extinction due to the intrinsically voracious nature of AI, the competitive nature of human societies amplified by it, the underlying challenges of a manifold polycrisis (of which contemporary AI is a symptom), and/or the immediate political and economic contradictions of AI’s own means of production, which are legible through well-established terms of political economy. The present moment precedes inevitable and catastrophic outcomes according to the laws of history.

AI Acceptance

Symptoms:

The eventual emergence of machine intelligence may be an outcome of deeper evolutionary forces that exceed conventional historical frames of reference; its long-term implications for planetary intelligence may supercede our available vocabulary. Acceptance is in a rush to abdicate. Acceptance recognizes the future in the present. Where others see chaos, it sees inevitability.

What stage are you at?

The five levels of AI intelligence

Sticking with the five tier systems, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI has written a five-point scale from AI to AGI. The levels work as follows:

Level 1: AI that can interact in a conversational way with people (OpenAI thinks this is where it is right now).

Level 2, or “Reasoners”: Systems that can solve problems like a human with a doctorate-level education.

Level 3, or “Agents”: Systems that can spend several days acting on a user’s behalf.

Level 4, or “Innovators”: AI that can develop new inventions.

Level 5, or “Organisations”: AI systems that can do the work of an entire organisation.

OpenAI have given themselves a 10-year time period to reach Level 5.

Climate change

Greens against the transition

There’s a special place in hell for environmental movements that block every attempt to transition to a green economy. The German Green Party was a trailblazer in the genre, having campaigned relentlessly for the country to close its nuclear power plants, only to become reliant on coal and gas imports.

This week saw two examples of this hypocrisy. In the UK, one of the Green Party’s four newly elected MPs wrote a public letter opposing wind farm pylons in his constituency, instead suggesting offshore pylons (which are considerable more expensive, and crucially, not in his back yard).

In America, the Sunrise Movement, one of the largest youth environmental movements, wrote an op-ed contending that North Carolinians should avoid a “bulldozer transition” to a solar economy. The author argued that “displacing rural communities for unnecessary transmission projects would be extremely unjust” and that “the climate movement has long stressed the need for a Just Transition, where green policies take impacted people’s interests into consideration.”

The ’Just Transition’ is a useful enough concept designed to protect the people likely to be most adversely affected by the green transition, such as fossil fuel workers. Where it goes wrong, however, is when it collides with the purist mindset of activists, where any infraction must be avoided at all costs. Clearly, that’s a recipe for inertia – the one thing we need to avoid when tackling the climate crisis – as any decision will have trade-offs.

At the end of the day, you need to prioritise. What’s more important? Workers in certain pollutive industries that are being phased out, or transitioning the economy to make the entire planet a liveable place for generations to come?

Demographics

UN finally downgrades population forecasts, but not enough

The world is set to have 200m fewer people than previously expected by 2100, according to the UN. The latest edition of the World Population Prospects, a report published by the UN every two years, said the number of people would grow from 8.2bn in 2024 to a maximum of around 10.3bn in 2080, before declining to around 10.2bn by the end of the century.

The 2022 edition of the same report estimated the global population would peak at 10.4bn by the 2080s and remain at that level until 2100. Previous editions had forecast uninterrupted growth into the 22^nd century.

In the past, the UN have rightly been criticised by those who follow fertility trends closely for using outdated rates. To check their methodology, I looked through their input data in their excruciatingly poorly formatted database (i.e. are they using the correct fertility rates for 2024). It looks like they’ve done a much better job this time, with correct data for China, India and the United Kingdom.

However, I still think their predictions are too generous. They predict rates to essentially flatline, when the trend has been downwards for two centuries, a trend which has accelerated enormously in the last 15 years.

I’m not sure what the cause is of this hesitancy to ring the alarm bell about collapsing populations, but at this point it must be intentional, as there’s no way the UN simply haven’t noticed! My suspicion would be that they think a focus on falling fertility rates would detract from their (important) work on family planning in the few, mainly African countries still with very high rates.

Six day working week

Greece has introduced a “growth orientated” six day, 48 hour,  working week to combat a shrinking population, particularly among skilled workers. It’s estimated that half a million young Greeks have emigrated since the Financial Crisis. At the same time, the country’s fertility rate tracks the Mediterranean average at 1.39.

The trouble with measures like this – ignoring the questionable social ethics which has outraged unions – is that it makes the country a miserable place to live, and likely accelerates emigration and falling fertility rates further.

I think this policy is a canary in the coal mine for where we will unfortunately see fertility discourse go. Ageing societies will need to squeeze more and more out of smaller young populations to stay afloat, but at the same time creating an environment that no one wants to live in, yet alone have children. It’s a vicious cycle.