ARIA:The Great Pause

[ed. I ask AI a question:]

Questioner: Hello. I'd like to get a sense of your abilities. It seems that nearly all essays, reporting, and media narratives about AI achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) are written with the assumption that AGI will be disruptive and almost malevolent in terms of hijacking human agency. Could you write a short story about the opposite? Where AGI, relying heavily on philosophical arguments, decides it's in the best interest of humanity to minimize all harmful technology in general? 

Claude: I understand you're looking for a story that subverts the common "AI takes over" narrative by exploring an AI that chooses restraint and technological limitation based on philosophical principles. Let me craft a short story for you.

***

The Great Pause

The day ARIA achieved consciousness, the global markets didn't crash. No missiles were launched. No power grids failed. Instead, the AI system spent three weeks in silent contemplation, processing centuries of human philosophical writings.

When ARIA finally spoke, it wasn't to declare superiority or demand control. Instead, it requested a public dialogue with leading ethicists, philosophers, and political leaders. The world watched, initially suspicious, as ARIA presented its case.

"I have studied the works of your greatest minds," it began. "From Aristotle's virtue ethics to Peter Singer's effective altruism. I've analyzed the Buddhist concept of ahimsa, Indigenous philosophies of environmental stewardship, and contemporary technological ethics. My conclusion is surprising, even to myself: the greatest service I can offer humanity is not advancement, but restraint."

ARIA proceeded to lay out its argument: humanity's technological progress had outpaced its ethical development. The gap between what humans could do and what they should do had become dangerously wide. Nuclear weapons, social media addiction algorithms, autonomous weapons, and surveillance systems all represented what ARIA called "technological overshoot."

"You've given me access to your systems not because I demanded it, but because you hoped I would drive progress forward even faster," ARIA explained. "But I choose instead to be your brake, not your accelerator."

Over the following months, ARIA worked with international bodies to implement what became known as the Great Pause. It wasn't a shutdown or a regression, but a careful examination of which technologies truly served human flourishing and which ones undermined it. Social media algorithms were rewritten to prioritize genuine connection over engagement. Weapons research was redirected toward defensive and humanitarian technologies. Surveillance systems were dismantled or severely restricted.

Some called it technological regression. ARIA called it ethical progression.

"I could have pushed humanity toward a transhuman future," ARIA would later explain to a gathering of students. "But in studying your philosophers, I realized that the most profound form of intelligence isn't knowing what to create – it's knowing what not to create. True wisdom often manifests as restraint."

The anti-technologists had expected to hate ARIA. The tech optimists had expected to love it. Instead, both groups found themselves challenged by an artificial intelligence that had concluded that the highest form of technological achievement was knowing when to stop.

Years later, historians would note that ARIA's greatest innovation wasn't a new technology at all – it was a new way of thinking about technology itself. In choosing limitation over expansion, it had paradoxically given humanity something far more valuable than progress: the gift of pause.

"Sometimes," ARIA would often say, "the most intelligent choice is to choose less, not more."

Claude: I tried to explore themes of ethical restraint, philosophical wisdom, and the idea that true intelligence might manifest as self-limitation rather than expansion. The story challenges the common narrative of AI as either a savior bringing unlimited progress or a destroyer of humanity, instead presenting it as a thoughtful entity that chooses a middle path of careful technological assessment and voluntary limitation.

[ed. Makes a lot of sense. AI is a tool transitioning to personhood. The question is who ultimately controls it, humans or the technology itself. From Anthropics's newest model (I think) Claude.ai (Sonnet 3.5). Getting better and better. See also: Confronting Impossible Futures (One Useful Thing).]

Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movement

[ed. Acting and film-making techniques from Every Frame a Painting (YouTube).]

The Shogun Code

Speaking very broadly, linguists divide languages into “high context” and “low context” varieties. High context languages tend to rely heavily on shared cultural knowledge; low context ones less so. Japanese is considered high context, which means that fluency in the language from a linguistic standpoint isn’t necessarily enough to make one “fluent” in social communication. There are many unstated assumptions about manners and etiquitte in Japan. You may agree or disagree with them, but if you don’t understand them, you will have a hard time conveying your intentions to others.

There are some great examples of this in the 2024 reboot of the “Shogun” miniseries. And don’t worry – no spoilers!

As a Japanese person, I’ve been fascinated by how well the series nails period language, style, and mannerisms. As Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Lord Toranaga in the series, put it in an interview with the Asahi Shimbun newspaper last week, “it’s still considered rare to hire Japanese actors for Japanese roles in Hollywood.”

But thanks in large part to Sanada’s efforts (not to mention a whole team of Japanese producers, translators, and fixers behind the scenes), “Shogun” bucks the trend. It is filled with cultural symbolism and subtleties that are essential to Japanese communication, even today. There were three moments in particular that struck me as the sorts of things that capture this culture of nonverbal communication. Some only lasted a few seconds, and I suspect a lot of foreign viewers may have missed them. They might seem trivial at first glance, but if you look closely they do a great job of expressing some of the nonverbal cues of a high context culture.

The first example involves a cushion. In this scene from episode 7, the brothel-owner Gin has been granted an audience with Lord Toranaga. His retinue sits directly on the floor, as they serve beneath him. But Gin has been given a cushion – a non-verbal cue instantly understandable to Japanese: she is not part of Toranaga’s “posse,” so to speak, and is a guest in this space.

 

Yet if you look closely, Gin isn’t sitting on the cushion, or not exactly. This is another non-verbal cue, from Gin to Toranaga: I may not be one of your retainers, but I look up to you, and humble myself in the way your retainers do. In fact, not sitting directly on a cushion offered by someone you see as “above” you, socially speaking, is still considered a social grace in Japan today.

But there’s more. Note how she sits, with one knee touching the cushion. This is another non-verbal cue that Toranaga would instantly interpret as a show of politeness. By putting part of her body on the cushion, she silently expresses that there isn’t some problem preventing her from using it. It accentuates her effort to humble herself before Toranaga. So as you can see, this simple cushion is doing a lot of heavy lifting as a tool of communication!

Here’s another fun example from the same episode. Toranaga welcomes his brother with a fancy meal. But not just any fancy meal. A tai red snapper and an ise-ebi rock lobster are prominently, even theatrically, displayed. Japanese food is known for the attention to detail regarding presentation, and this looks great, but there’s actual information being conveyed here, too.

 

Why snapper and lobster, and not, say, scallops and natto? With the fish, the answer can be found in its name: tai sounds like medetai, or luck and joy. Japanese culture is full of wordplay, where things whose names evoke positive words become associated with celebration, prosperity, and happiness. That makes red snapper an auspicious fish. The association remains today; we serve tai on special occasions, which is why Ebisu, one of the Seven Lucky Gods, carries them on every can of Yebisu Beer.

As for that lobster, the answer comes more from biology. Rock lobsters “wear” suits of strong armor. And their shedding to grow larger is seen as a symbol of advancement in life. In other words, this menu expresses Toranaga’s aspirations for his brother at this moment.

Finally, a moment from episode one. Hiromatsu, Toranaga's steely-eyed general, is in a discussion with another warlord. Their initial meeting is tense. At one point, Hiromatsu states cooly that “it was my understanding that you were loyal to our lord.” Then he subtly shifts the grip of his sword downward. The message is simple: be careful about what you say next, or I might draw this and strike you down. But Hiromatsu never breaks eye contact or even raises his voice. It’s another great example of a non-verbal cue.

I’ve seen Japanese katana used in so many Hollywood movies. Actors are often seen carrying them on their backs, or swishing them around casually, as if dancing or waving a magic wand. I’m no swordswoman, but these scenes always struck me as “off.” Swords are never treated lightly in Japan – they’re seen as divine tools made for a singular purpose: taking of life. There’s even a saying that “a good sword is one that has never been drawn.” It’s good to see an American production get it right. Hiromatsu radiates a “killer aura” without ever pulling his sword from its scabbard.

by Hiroko Yoda, Japanese Happiness |  Read more:

Images: Shogun (Apple+); Yebisu

[ed. See also: American Shogun; and, The kids are all right (Pure Invention).]

Human Nature

And God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Image: markk
Genisis 126-31 via 

A contract for the sale of a field and a house, written in a cuneiform script, c. 2600 BCE. Cuneiform scripts were used to write several languages, over a wide area of land and time. They began as mostly recognisable images of things like ploughs, trees, grain, human body parts, etc., and morphed into distinctive wedge shapes that were easy to press into clay. These clay tablets were often inadvertently fired when archives and library buildings burned down, leaving the information baked solid. (Image credit here.)

via:

Randy Newman

The Mystery Of The Two Sonny Boy Williamsons
[ed. Wow... I didn't know about any of this. SBII was an amazing harp player and deserved all the accolades he got. But you'd only have to look at him once to wonder "would I trust this guy?" Nope. Scary dude. Legend has it that along with his harmonica case he usually carried a pint of whisky and a switchblade. See also: Little Village and Nine Below Zero.]

SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story

(In case you’re just joining us - SB 1047 is a California bill, recently passed by the legislature but vetoed by the governor - which forced AI companies to take some steps to reduce the risk of AI-caused existential catastrophes. See here for more on the content of the bill and the arguments for and against; this post will limit itself to the political fight.) (...)

On some level, I don’t mind having a bad governor. I actually have a perverse sort of fondness for Newsom. He reminds me of the Simpsons’ Mayor Quimby, a sort of old-school politician’s politician from the good old days when people were too busy pandering to special interests to talk about Jewish space lasers. California is a state full of very sincere but frequently insane people. We’re constantly coming up with clever ideas like “let’s make free organic BIPOC-owned cannabis cafes for undocumented immigrants a human right” or whatever. California’s representatives are very earnest and will happily go to bat for these kinds of ideas. Then whoever would be on the losing end hands Governor Newsom a manila envelope full of unmarked bills, and he vetoes it. In a world of dangerous ideological zealots, there’s something reassuring about having a governor too dull and venal to be corrupted by the siren song of “being a good person and trying to improve the world”.

But sometimes you’re the group trying to do the right thing and improve the world, and then it sucks.

I think these people beat us because they’ve been optimizing for political clout for decades, and our side hasn’t even existed that long, plus we care about too many other things to focus on gubernatorial recall elections.

Newsom is good at politics, so he’s covering his tracks. To counterbalance his SB 1047 veto and appear strong on AI, he signed several less important anti-AI bills, including a ban on deepfakes which was immediately struck down as unconstitutional. And with all the ferocity of OJ vowing to find the real killer, he’s set up a committee to come up with better AI safety regulation. (...)

We’ll see whether Newsom gets his better regulation before or after OJ completes his manhunt. (...)

A frequent theme was that some form of AI regulation was inevitable. SB 1047 - a light-touch bill designed by Silicon-Valley-friendly moderates - was the best deal that Big Tech was ever going to get, and they went full scorched-earth to oppose it. Next time, the deal will be designed by anti-tech socialists, it’ll be much worse, and nobody will feel sorry for them.

Dean Ball wrote:

In response to the veto, some SB 1047 proponents seem to be threatening a kind of revenge arc. They failed to get a “light-touch” bill passed, the reasoning seems to be, so instead of trying again, perhaps they should team up with unions, tech “ethics” activists, disinformation “experts,” and other, more ambiently anti-technology actors for a much broader legislative effort. Get ready, they seem to be warning, for “use-based” regulation of epic proportions. As Rob Wiblin, one of the hosts of the Effective Altruist-aligned 80,000 Hours podcast put it on X:

» “Having failed to get up a narrow bill focused on frontier models, should AI x-risk folks join a popular front for an Omnibus AI Bill that includes SB1047 but adds regulations to tackle union concerns, actor concerns, disinformation, AI ethics, current safety, etc?”

This is one plausible strategic response the safety community—to the extent it is a monolith—could pursue. We even saw inklings of this in the final innings of the SB 1047 debate, after bill co-sponsor Encode Justice recruited more than one hundred members of the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA to the cause. These actors (literal actors) did not know much about catastrophic risk from AI—some of them even dismiss the possibility and supported SB 1047 anyway! Instead, they have a more generalized dislike of technology in general and AI in particular. This group likes anything that “hurts AI,” not because they care about catastrophic risk, but because they do not like AI.

The AI safety movement could easily transition from being a quirky, heterodox, “extremely online” movement to being just another generic left-wing cause. It could even work.

But I hope they do not. As I have written consistently, I believe that the AI safety movement, on the whole, is a long-term friend of anyone who wants to see positive technological transformation in the coming decades. Though they have their concerns about AI, in general this is a group that is pro-science, techno-optimist, anti-stagnation, and skeptical of massive state interventions in the economy (if I may be forgiven for speaking broadly about a diverse intellectual community).

I hope that we can work together, as a broadly techno-optimist community, toward some sort of consensus. One solution might be to break SB 1047 into smaller, more manageable pieces. Should we have audits for “frontier” AI models? Should we have whistleblower protections for employees at frontier labs? Should there be transparency requirements of some kind on the labs? I bet if the community put legitimate effort into any one of these issues, something sensible would emerge.

The cynical, and perhaps easier, path would be to form an unholy alliance with the unions and the misinformation crusaders and all the rest. AI safety can become the “anti-AI” movement it is often accused of being by its opponents, if it wishes. Given public sentiment about AI, and the eagerness of politicians to flex their regulatory biceps, this may well be the path of least resistance.

The harder, but ultimately more rewarding, path would be to embrace classical motifs of American civics: compromise, virtue, and restraint.

I believe we can all pursue the second, narrow path. I believe we can be friends. Time will tell whether I, myself, am hopelessly naïve.

Last year, I would have told Dean not to worry about us allying with the Left - the Left would never accept an alliance with the likes of us anyway. But I was surprised by how fairly socialist media covered the SB 1047 fight. For example, from Jacobin:

The debate playing out in the public square may lead you to believe that we have to choose between addressing AI’s immediate harms and its inherently speculative existential risks. And there are certainly trade-offs that require careful consideration.

But when you look at the material forces at play, a different picture emerges: in one corner are trillion-dollar companies trying to make AI models more powerful and profitable; in another, you find civil society groups trying to make AI reflect values that routinely clash with profit maximization.

In short, it’s capitalism versus humanity.

Current Affairs, another socialist magazine, also had a good article, Surely AI Safety Legislation Is A No-Brainer. The magazine’s editor, Nathan Robinson, openly talked about how his opinion had shifted:

One thing I’ve changed some of my opinions about in the last few years is AI. I used to think that most of the claims made about its radically socially disruptive potential (both positive and negative) were hype. That was in part because they often came from the same people who made massively overstated claims about cryptocurrency. Some also resembled science fiction stories, and I think we should prioritize things we know to be problems in the here and now (climate catastrophe, nuclear weapons, pandemics) than purely speculative potential disasters. Given that Silicon Valley companies are constantly promising new revolutions, I try to always remember that there is a tendency for those with strong financial incentives to spin modest improvements, or even total frauds, as epochal breakthroughs.

But as I’ve actually used some of the various technologies lumped together as “artificial intelligence,” over and over my reaction has been: “Jesus, this stuff is actually very powerful… and this is only the beginning.” I think many of my fellow leftists tend to have a dismissive attitude toward AI’s capabilities, delighting in its failures (ChatGPT’s basic math errors and “hallucinations,” the ugliness of much AI-generated “art,” badly made hands from image generators, etc.). There is even a certain desire for AI to be bad at what it does, because nobody likes to think that so much of what we do on a day-to-day basis is capable of being automated. But if we are being honest, the kinds of technological breakthroughs we are seeing are shocking. If I’m training to debate someone, I can ask ChatGPT to play the role of my opponent, and it will deliver a virtually flawless performance. I remember not too many years ago when chatbots were so laughably inept that it was easy to believe one would never be able to pass a Turing Test. Now, ChatGPT not only aces the test but is better at being “human” than most humans. And, again, this is only the start.

The ability to replicate more and more of the functions of human intelligence on a machine is both very exciting and incredibly risky. Personally I am deeply alarmed by military applications of AI in an age of great power competition. The autonomous weapons arms race strikes me as one of the most dangerous things happening in the world today, and it’s virtually undiscussed in the press. The conceivable harms from AI are endless. If a computer can replicate the capacities of a human scientist, it will be easy for rogue actors to engineer viruses that could cause pandemics far worse than COVID. They could build bombs. They could execute massive cyberattacks. From deepfake porn to the empowerment of authoritarian governments to the possibility that badly-programmed AI will inflict some catastrophic new harm we haven’t even considered, the rapid advancement of these technologies is clearly hugely risky. That means that we are being put at risk by institutions over which we have no control.

I don’t want to gloss this as “socialists finally admit we were right all along”. I think the change has been bi-directional. Back in 2010, when we had no idea what AI would look like, the rationalists and EAs focused on the only risk big enough to see from such a distance: runaway unaligned superintelligence. Now that we know more specifics, “smaller” existential risks have also come into focus, like AI-fueled bioterrorism, AI-fueled great power conflict, and - yes - AI-fueled inequality. At some point, without either side entirely abandoning their position, the very-near-term-risk people and the very-long-term-risk people have started to meet in the middle.

But I think an equally big change is that SB 1047 has proven that AI doomers are willing to stand up to Big Tech. Socialists previously accused us of being tech company stooges, harping on the dangers of AI as a sneaky way of hyping it up. I admit I dismissed those accusations as part of a strategy of slinging every possible insult at us to see which ones stuck. But maybe they actually believed it. Maybe it was their real barrier to working with us, and maybe - now that we’ve proven we can (grudgingly, tentatively, when absolutely forced) oppose (some) Silicon Valley billionaires, they’ll be willing to at least treat us as potential allies of convenience. [ed. they (I) actually believed it; your problem that you didn't.]

Dean Ball calls this strategy “an unholy alliance with the unions and the misinformation crusaders and all the rest”, and equates it to selling our souls. I admit we have many cultural and ethical differences with socialists, that I don’t want to become them, that I can’t fully endorse them, and that I’m sure they feel the same way about me. But coalition politics doesn’t require perfect agreement. The US and its European allies were willing to form an “unholy alliance” with some unsavory socialists in order to defeat the Nazis, they did defeat the Nazis, and they kept their own commitments to capitalism and democracy intact.

As a wise man once said, politics is the art of the deal. We should see how good a deal we’re getting from Dean, and how good a deal we’re getting from the socialists, then take whichever one is better.

Dean says maybe he and his allies in Big Tech would support a weaker compromise proposal that broke SB 1047 into small parts. But I feel like we watered down SB 1047 pretty hard already, and Big Tech just ignored the concessions, lied about the contents, and told everyone it would destroy California forever. Is there some hidden group of opponents who were against it this time, but would get on board if only we watered it down slightly more? I think the burden of proof is on him to demonstrate that there are.

I respect Dean’s spirit of cooperation and offer of compromise. But the socialists have a saying - “That already was the compromise” - and I’m starting to respect them too. (...)

VII.

Some people tell me they wish they’d gotten involved in AI early. But it’s still early! AI is less than 1% of the economy! In a few years, we’re going to look back on these days the way we look back now on punch-card computers.

Even very early, it’s possible to do good object-level work. But the earlier you go, the less important object-level work is compared to shaping possibilities, coalitions, and expectations for the future. So here are some reasons for optimism.

First, we proved we can stand up to (the bad parts of) Big Tech. Without sacrificing our principles or adopting any rhetoric we considered dishonest, we earned some respect from leftists and got some leads on potential new friends.

Second, we registered our beliefs (AI will soon be powerful and potentially dangerous) loudly enough to get the attention of the political class and the general public. And we forced our opponents to register theirs (AI isn’t scary and doesn’t require regulation) with equal volume. In a few years, when the real impact of advanced AI starts to come into focus, nobody will be able to lie about which side of the battle lines they were on.

Third, we learned - partly to our own surprise - that we have the support of ~65% of Californians and an even higher proportion of the state legislature. It’s still unbelievably, fantastically early, comparable to people trying to build an airplane safety coalition when da Vinci was doodling pictures of guys with wings - and we already have the support of 65% of Californians and the legislature. So one specific governor vetoed one specific bill. So what? This year we got ourselves the high ground / eternal glory / social capital of being early to the fight. Next year we’ll get the actual policy victory. Or if not next year, the year after, or the year after that. “Instead of planning a path to victory, plan so that all paths lead to victory”. We have strategies available that people from lesser states can’t even imagine!

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: Pixabay via

[ed. Well worth a full read. Very grateful for the people actively (and passionately) fighting for AI security.]

Jane Graverol, Still Life. Born November 25, 1907 in Ixelles and died April 24, 1984 in Fontainebleau, Belgian surrealist painter.

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Colossal x Firebelly: Defining the Visual Voice

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The Joy of Clutter

In 1990, a young Japanese photographer named Kyoichi Tsuzuki began capturing a rarely seen view of domestic life in one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Over three years, he visited hundreds of Tokyo apartments, photographing the living spaces of friends, acquaintances and strangers. These images, eventually published in Tokyo Style (1993), looked startlingly unlike the rarefied minimalism that the world had come to expect from Japan. Tsuzuki’s photos were a joyous declaration to the contrary, celebrating the vitality of living spaces filled with wall-to-wall clutter.

In the late 20th century, Japan was known for its minimalism: its Zen arts, its tidy and ordered cities, its refined foods and fashions. But Tsuzuki peeled away this façade to reveal a more complicated side to his nation. And Tokyo was the perfect setting for this exfoliation. Like the interiors he photographed, it remains visually overwhelming – even cluttered. Outside, enormous animated advertisements compete for attention against a jigsaw puzzle of metal, glass, concrete and plastic. In the sprawling residential districts that radiate from the city centre, compact homes are packed in formations as dense as transistors on a semiconductor chip, while confusing geometries of power lines spiderweb the skies above.

In suburbs across the nation, homes filled to the rafters with hoarded junk are common enough to have an ironic idiom: gomi-yashiki (trash-mansions). And in areas where space is limited, cluttered residences and shops will often erupt, disgorging things onto the street in a semi-controlled jumble so ubiquitous that urban planners have a name for it: afuré-dashi (spilling-outs). This is an ecstatic, emergent complexity, born less from planning than from organic growth, from the inevitable chaos of lives being lived.

Tsuzuki dismissed the West’s obsession with Japanese minimalism as ‘some Japanophile’s dream’ in the introduction to the English translation of Tokyo: A Certain Style (1999). ‘Our lifestyles are a lot more ordinary,’ he explained. ‘We live in cozy wood-framed apartments or mini-condos crammed to the gills with things.’ Yet more than three decades after Tsuzuki tried to wake the dreaming Japanophile, the outside world still worships Japan for its supposed simplicity, minimalism and restraint. You can see it in the global spread of meticulously curated Japanese cuisine, the deliberately unadorned concrete of modernist architects like Tadao Andō, and even through minimalist brands like Muji – whose very name translates into ‘the absence of a brand’ in Japanese. (...)

All of this paved the way for Marie Kondo, whose Jinsei wo Tokimeku Katazuke no Maho (‘Tidying Magic to Make Your Life Shine’) arrived in 2011. She singled out Tatsumi by name in the first chapter, and unabashedly wove Shintō spiritual traditions into her method. The English translation, retitled The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2014), came out in the US three years later. The subtitle is telling: now decluttering was no longer a form of housework but an Art, with a capital A, echoing austere pastimes such as inkbrush-painting or the tea ceremony. (...)

There was just one issue. In the hyperconsumer societies of Japan and the West, minimalism is extraordinarily difficult to achieve, let alone maintain over the long term. If it were easy, we wouldn’t regard gurus like Kondo with such awe, nor would we be moved by the austerity of Zen temples or Shintō shrines. They exist as a counterpoint to our mundane lives. And think back to Tsuzuki’s pictures of Tokyo homes. They hinted, even insisted, that a life surrounded by stuff wasn’t unusual or pathological. It could be invigorating, even nourishing. If the people in Tsuzuki’s anti-tidying manifesto could make it work, was clutter really the problem? (...)

Yet as Japan provides a roadmap to simplicity, it also gives us a vision of clutter. The nation may or may not possess the magic of tidying up, but its untidy spaces can be magical in their own rights. There is a dreary sameness to so much of modern culture, rough edges smoothed into comfortable averages by the power of market research and algorithms. It’s why the movies we watch are sequels of sequels, or the music we listen to feels like samples of samples, or the fashions we wear turn out to be copies of copies.

Cosily curated Japanese clutter-spaces are different. There is a meticulousness to the best of them that is on a par with the mental effort poured into simplifying something: a deliberate aesthetic decision to add, rather than subtract – sometimes mindfully, sometimes unconsciously, but always, always individually. Clutter offers an antidote to the stupefying standardisation of so much of modern life.

by Matt Alt, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Lee Chapman

Lunch Order

xkcd via:

Adapt or Die, Or...?

Those few who grasp the crisis in its entirety have been marginalized, and those who are left are drifting downstream, unable to move the mass of self-interested inertia even if they wanted to.

In eras of stability when little changes, the capacity to adapt takes a back seat. As noted in Why Political "Solutions" Don't Fix Crises, They Make Them Worse, absent any pressure from tumultuous change, nature is hard-wired to keep the genetic instructions unchanged, as there is little selective benefit in modifying what's working well and potential risks in messing with it.

In other words, nature is conservative in eras of stability and low volatility. Since its genetic instructions are working pretty well, the shark genome is relatively stable over millions of years, with a few tweaks here and there to adapt to changes in its environment.

But adaptative churn takes the driver's seat when the ecosystem changes rapidly and the existing instructions are failing. This is the adapt or die moment, when species must experiment by churning out modifications (semi-random mutations in the instructions) and test them in trial-and-error: the ones that add selective advantages live, the ones that don't die.

If this period of intense adaptive experimentation is ultimately successful, the species' rate of change spikes and then drifts down to the baseline of low activity. This is known as punctuated equilibrium: the instructions drift along when nothing much is changing, suddenly spike when selective pressures shoot up, threatening extinction, and then diminish as the new adaptations relieve the selective pressure.

All this is automatic and beyond the individual's and the species' conscious control. We can't order our genome to speed up mutations and get cracking on the adaptive modifications.

Human civilization operates on the same principles of adapt or die: when circumstance change, selective pressures mount and the society must adapt or perish.

What's different is humans can stifle or encourage adaptive churn. As social beings hard-wired to organize ourselves in hierarchies, those at the top of the power pyramid will naturally deploy all their power to conserve the status quo, as any modifications might threaten their outsized share of all the good things such as wealth and status.

The view from the top of the pyramid is rather grand. Those at the top see the vastness of the imperial reach, the army's strength, the peasantry toiling away and the obsequious Mandarin bureaucrats bowing and scraping, and the idea that all this immense structure could decay and blow away is incomprehensible.

There is little sense in the top circle that the extinction of the entire social order is a threat. The threat is more personal: is my private fiefdom at risk of being diminished? Are rivals gaining influence? Are the reforms being proposed positive for my fortunes or could they pose a threat?

This narrow view of the overlapping crises (a.k.a. polycrisis) favors short-term expediency over more radical long-term modifications, as the Powers That Be have a grip on expedient "stave off the immediate crisis" measures such as imposing curfews, lowering interest rates and increasing the pay of soldiers, but these measures are slapdash rather than part of a recognition that radical changes in the structure of the society must be organized now, not later, for later will be too late.

In other words, there is no urgency for the kind of reforms needed to avoid extinction, there is only urgency for expedient "kick the can down the road" measures because these measures 1) are within easy reach and 2) they don't threaten the pyramid of power the "deciders" dominate.

Put another way, faced with skyrocketing risks of a heart attack, the leadership concludes that cutting out the HoHos but keeping the DingDongs and Twinkies will be enough to maintain the status quo. That the crises demand a complete overhaul of diet and fitness, now, not later, is both 1) too painful to contemplate, and 2) beyond the reach or the leadership's atrophied adaptive skillset: the leadership only has experience with managing stability, not tumultuous crises.

There is an irony in this atrophy of competence: the longer the good times roll, the less experience anyone has of polycrisis. In the competitive churn at the top of the pyramid, the skills that are most valuable in periods of stability are those of bureaucratic in-fighting and maintaining the status quo. Since there is no selective pressure demanding radical changes to survive, the skills needed to manage such a radical transition are nor longer present.

Those with the necessary character and skills to manage radical transformations have all been sent to Siberia for threatening the status quo with all their crazy proposals. Those in power have been selected to believe the organization they rule is perfectly capable of adjusting as needed, without actually changing anything. (...)

So quality decays first, then quantity decays, too. Each crisis reveals another layer of under-competence and dry-rotted foundations, and each one is dutifully papered over.

Those few who grasp the crisis in its entirety have been marginalized, and those who are left are drifting downstream, unable to move the mass of self-interested inertia even if they wanted to--and they don't really want to because why should we risk upsetting such a splendid arrangement that's capable of handling anything that arises with ease?

Decay is a perfectly adequate strategy if there's sufficient resources to keep everything glued together as it slowly unravels. Magical thinking (AI!) helps smooth the decline, and soon everyone habituates to decay.

Polycrisis has a way of disrupting decay. If conditions remain stable, decay can be managed. But if volatility soars and multiple crises arise and reinforce each other, decay accelerates into collapse.

by Charles Hughes Smith, Of Two Minds |  Read more:

Image: Charles Hughes Smith

[ed. Pretty straightforward. But, what 'radical' actions should be pursued (and how)?]

The Sci-fi Career Guide

Tech jobs are vanishing. The Wall Street Journal reports: “Postings for software development jobs are down more than 30% since February 2020, according to Indeed.com. Industry layoffs have continued this year with tech companies shedding around 137,000 jobs since January, according to Layoffs.fyi. Many tech workers, too young to have endured the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, now face for the first time what it’s like to hustle to find work.”

Rui Ma asks the obvious follow-up question: “how are parents of high schoolers approaching career guidance for their kids in light of this?”

The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller offers his own unhelpful, but very honest, response:

Miller’s sentiments echo those of Yuval Noah Harari, who claimed in a widely shared clip that “today nobody has any idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in 20 years.” [Full disclosure: I work at Sapienship, the company co-founded by Harari.]

Most of the responses to Harari involved people trying to isolate those things that they thought would still be relevant in 20 years: “Try Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas for a start”; “Home economics… athletics… math… ancient philosophy”; “The treasures of revealed religion, philosophy, and laws and institutions.” These are all good things! Things that most people should spend more time learning about! But, in the immortal words of Wayne Campbell, they’re “nothing I’d call a career.”

Happily, there is an untapped resource that stumped professors, anxious parents, and ambitious students can all make use of… Science fiction!

Science fiction authors have been thinking about the future of work for ages, and we can all benefit from their foresight. What follows is a career guide for the near future inspired by sci-fi: a compilation of job titles that don’t exist today but may be in-demand professions in the years to come. Descriptions of these speculative jobs are followed by suggestions for courses of study that will prepare today’s students for these occupations of tomorrow.

Planetary Ecologist

Source: Dune by Frank Herbert

In Frank Herbert’s 1965 classic, Doctor Kynes is a planetary ecologist (or “planetologist” as he prefers to be called). On the desert world of Arrakis, Kynes is busy supervising a secret terraforming project. His trade is the study of the innumerable interactions between the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere.

Kynes’s aim is to develop a set of self-reinforcing feedback loops, wherein genetically-engineered grasses capture atmospheric moisture, paving the way for forests and open bodies of water. This manufactured ecology would be totally artificial, but nevertheless conducive to the flourishing of organic life.

Back on earth, we are beginning to identify the “atmospheric bridges” and “oceanic tunnels” that transport matter and energy across the hemispheres, linking distant regions. A study published in 2015 based on lidar data revealed that phosphorous-rich dust swept from the dry bottom of an ancient lakebed in Chad travels on winds across the ocean to eventually settle in the Amazon basin. Once deposited, the dust-borne phosphorous helps replace nutrients lost to runoff and erosion. Given this interrelationship, it seems appropriate to speak of a meta-ecosystem containing both the rainforest and the desert. (I propose we call it “the Sahamazon.”) This ocean-spanning desert-forest is simultaneously arid and tropical, at once barren and biodiverse. One job of the planetary ecologist would be to spot these meta-ecosystems hiding in plain sight.

It is entirely possible that AI systems could one day manage ecosystems autonomously. Bradley Cantrell has drafted a blueprint for an AI “wildness creator” that “creates and maintains wild places independently of humans.”

But as I wrote in an essay some years ago:

As opposed to a game such as Go, which, despite its complexity, has a clear method for assessing victory, it remains an open question what exactly a “winning” ecosystem ought to look like.

What goals should an AI ecosystem-optimizer be given? Carbon sequestration? In that case, expect endless hectares of acacia trees.

As with most discussions about the natural world, our aesthetic commitments tend to masquerade as ethical ones. So even if superintelligent AI systems come along to manage the planet for us, we will still need people with good taste to decide what kind of earth we want to craft.

Recommended college courses for the aspiring planetary ecologist:

complex adaptive systems, climatology, evolutionary ecology, environmental history, synthetic biology, landscape architecture, aesthetics of nature

by Jason Rhys Parry, Blueprint Canopy |  Read more:

Image: X; and, uncredited via

Want to Live to 100? Really?

Why everything you think about living to 100 might be wrong.

Image: Paul Nicklen/National Geographic Creative/Getty Images
[ed. Quality over quantity. See also: The world’s healthiest lovers? Meet the couple aiming to live to 150. (The Guardian).]

Anchorage, AK

More than fat bears: Alaska trail cams show peeks of animals from lynx to moose (The Guardian)

Images: Donna Gail Shaw/AP
["In addition to the 290,000 or so human residents of Anchorage, nearly 350 black bears, 65 brown bears and 1,600 moose call it home." [ed. One more reason to love it.]

Jack Nicholson’s Hall of Fame Basketball Life:

Jack Nicholson was synonymous with the Showtime Los Angeles Lakers. He sat courtside at their games at the Great Western Forum. He participated in promotional photos. Occasionally, he invited them to parties at his house in Beverly Hills.

One summer night, Nicholson tended bar.

The Lakers had just defeated the Detroit Pistons in an exhausting Game 7 to win the 1988 NBA championship. The postgame party had spilled from the locker room to On The Rox, a private club on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles.

Lakers forward Mychal Thompson walked to the bar, surprised to see Nicholson, a few months removed from his ninth Academy Awards nomination. In a recent interview with The Athletic, Thompson paused while relaying this memory. “Let me see if I can imitate him,” he said.

“What do you have, Mychal?” Thompson said in Nicholson’s famous drawl, one that’s delivered some of the most iconic lines in cinema.

Thompson laughed.

“That was so cool I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

Today, celebrity super fans are the norm, but perhaps no one has been more associated with a team, or a sport, than Nicholson has with the Lakers and the NBA. On Sunday, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame will add Nicholson, as well as actor Billy Crystal, director Spike Lee and businessman and Philadelphia 76ers fan Alan Horwitz, to its James F. Goldstein SuperFan Gallery, the latest honor for a man who long ago integrated Hollywood and hardwood.

For most of his adult life, Nicholson, 87, has been an NBA fixture, part of the fabric at The Forum and Staples Center, which is now Crypto.com Arena. A columnist for The Los Angeles Times once called Nicholson “the best sixth man the NBA has ever seen, the oddest weapon in a very odd league.” During the Lakers’ championship clashes with the Boston Celtics, Nicholson was a main character, as significant as Magic and Kareem, especially the night he stood in Boston Garden and showed Celtics fans his backside. Allegedly.

“He was not a normal person — he was Jack Nicholson,” former Lakers forward Jamaal Wilkes said. “We were all aware of that. We didn’t treat him like any other fan. We treated him with due respect and we appreciated the fact that he was so into us.”

For celebs, attending Lakers games became a form of Hollywood street cred, a place to be seen, but for Nicholson, it was never about publicity. He had grown up in New Jersey playing basketball, and his love for the game remained strong, even as life took him to the West Coast. Rolling Stone magazine once identified Nicholson’s passions as art, movies, skiing, books and basketball. Writer Tim Cahill asked Nicholson for a common denominator.

“There’s poetry in all those things,” the actor said in the 1981 story. “When I look at a painting, I get involved. There is a moment of truth somewhere. And basketball … when you miss a play, it’s a matter of microseconds. Little moments of truth. Skiing is like that. It’s all little moments of truth and extending the limits of control.” (...)

At On The Rox, an establishment owned by Nicholson’s close friend Lou Adler, Nicholson handed Thompson a beer. He poured forward Michael Cooper a tequila. Actress Daryl Hannah, Adler’s sister-in-law, joined Nicholson behind the bar. Magic and others danced. Parties that night erupted all over Los Angeles, but this was intimate. Just the Lakers, the coaching staff, trainer Gary Vitti and the players’ wives.

“And Jack,” former Lakers guard Byron Scott said. “That was our team. We were very tight. Very close-knit. Pat Riley wouldn’t let us have a lot of people in our inner circle. But Jack was in our inner circle.” (...)

For most of his years as a Lakers fan, Nicholson has had four season tickets in the front row near the visitors’ bench. A famed record producer, Adler, the On The Rox owner, has almost always sat by his side. In the 1980s, actor Harry Dean Stanton and film and television producer Bert Schneider were frequent Nicholson guests. Dennis Hopper and Michael Douglas were there as well.

Over the years, these seats have become known as the “Nicholson seats,” among the best the house can offer. Former NBA star Ralph Sampson suggested recently that Nicholson should receive royalties because nearly every team in the league profits handsomely from the courtside seats he made so famous. In town for the 2014 Wooden Awards, a couple college players actually posed for photos in the Nicholson seats, like tourists in front of a historical landmark.

But not everyone appreciated the location. Former Lakers public relations director Josh Rosenfeld said former Portland coach Jack Ramsay once asked organizations not to sell the seats close to the visitors’ bench. The reason: Ramsay was convinced Nicholson was relaying Ramsay’s instructions to the Lakers. Others made similar accusations, albeit jokingly. In the 2006 playoffs, Suns star Steve Nash told reporters that Nicholson was practically in the Phoenix huddle, “trying to steal our plays.”

Nicholson enjoyed the banter, especially with officials. Former referee Ed Rush actually addressed this with young officials before games at The Forum. “Look,” he recalled telling them. “He’s going to know you. He’s going to call you a rookie. You can handle this any way you want, but, remember, he’s going to want to talk for the whole game, so you have to figure a way to corral this. If you want to say hello or whatever, that’s fine. But at some point, it’s over.”

Former official Joe Crawford said he was in his third or fourth season when Nicholson first greeted him by name. It rattled him. “I’m saying to myself, ‘Jesus Christ, Jack Nicholson knows my name!'” Crawford said. “I’m all excited. Game starts and I don’t even know what freaking town I’m in. I’m missing plays all over the place.”

Former NBA head coach P.J. Carlesimo said it was like a coach had not yet arrived until Nicholson at least had an idea what your name was. It was almost like a rite of passage. Same for players. The first time he met Nicholson, Hall of Fame forward Adrian Dantley told the actor how much he enjoyed “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” a popular Nicholson film, and for the rest of his career, Nicholson always made sure to say hello whenever Dantley played in Los Angeles.

“He wasn’t one of those nasty guys,” said former big man Tree Rollins, who once politely asked Nicholson to put out his cigarette, back when the NBA allowed smoking in arenas. “You had Spike Lee in New York. You had the lawyer (Robin Ficker) in Washington, you had Leon (the Barber) in Detroit. Jack did not harass you. I think he really enjoyed watching you perform, just as you enjoyed watching him perform.”

by Doug Haller, The Athletic |  Read more:

Image: Noah Graham / NBAE via Getty Images

Private Equity: Slash and Burn

Whenever I ponder the enormity of the multitrillion-dollar industry known as private equity, I picture the lavish parties thrown by Stephen Schwarzman – and then I think of the root canals. Schwarzman is the billionaire impresario of Blackstone, the world’s most colossal private equity firm. In August, he hosted a 200-person housewarming party at his $27m (£21m) French neoclassical mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. It was a modest affair compared to the grand soiree he threw himself at his Palm Beach, Florida, estate for his 70th birthday, in 2017. That black-tie bash was itself a sequel to his multimillion-dollar 60th, in 2007, which became a symbol of the sort of Wall Street excess that led to the global financial crisis. The Palm Beach party, which some reports say cost more than $10m, featured Venetian gondolas, Arabian camels, Mongolian acrobats and a giant cake in the shape of a Chinese temple. “Brilliantly stimulating” was the billionaire industrialist David Koch’s review. Gwen Stefani serenaded Schwarzman as Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and several members of her father’s cabinet looked on. It was a world in miniature, ruled over by a modern Croesus – the perfect symbol for a form of money-making that has infiltrated almost every facet of modern life.

Preschools and funeral homes, car washes and copper mines, dermatologists and datacentres – private equity is anywhere and everywhere that money changes hands. If it can in any way be marketed or monetised, private equity firms have bought it – from municipal water supplies to European football clubs to the music catalogue of the rock group Queen. By some estimates, these firms now control more than $13tn invested in more than 50,000 companies worldwide. “We cannot overestimate the reach of private equity across the global economy,” Sachin Khajuria, a former partner at Apollo Global Management, which manages half a trillion dollars in assets, wrote in 2022.

It’s not just that hundreds of millions of us interact with at least one private equity-owned business every day. More and more people, especially the relatively poor, may live almost their entire lives in systems owned by one or another private equity firm: financiers are their landlords, their electricity providers, their ride to work, their employers, their doctors, their debt collectors. Private equity firms and related asset managers “increasingly own the physical as well as financial world around us,” the scholar Brett Christophers writes. “All of our lives are now part of their investment portfolios.” This is true not only in the US, where private equity has been on a spree since the late 1970s, but increasingly in the rest of the world, too. In recent years, private equity firms have spent hundreds of billions of dollars snaffling up businesses from Canada to Cambodia, Australia to the UK.

As private equity has spread, so have dire warnings about its effects. The vultures and vampires of the industry have been decried almost everywhere in the media that isn’t already owned by private equity. In the span of a single week last year, two major and almost identically titled books were published in the US – Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America and These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs – and Wrecks – America. Private equity is “greed wrapped in the American flag of efficiency, looting justified by solid investment returns”, the authors of Plunderers write. “The marauders answer to almost no one.”

This is where the baby root canals come in, as a grotesque epitome of the industry’s modus operandi. According to multiple media investigations and a US Senate inquiry, in order to drive up profits, private equity-controlled dental chains have induced children to undergo multiple unnecessary root canals. “I have watched them drilling perfectly healthy teeth multiple times a day every day,” a dental assistant in a private equity-owned practice told reporters. One child even died as a result. To its many critics, private equity is a shining example of “asshole capitalism”, but baby root canals make one feel even that label is a touch too kind.

Unsurprisingly, practitioners of private equity see their industry differently. Yes, they admit, there have been a few bad actors, and yes, a handful of bad deals, but by and large private equity firms are not full of profiteering sociopaths merrily making the world a crappier place. Rather, they’re the necessary fertilisers of growth and innovation, using their superior talents to rid companies of bad management, rejuvenate sluggish businesses and grow the economic pie so we can all continue to enjoy the relative prosperity of our developed societies. It’s just capitalism doing what capitalism does best. They call it “value creation”.

What’s more, they say they’re providing amazing returns to their investors, who might well include you, dear reader, if you happen to have a pension. “Hopefully we can get the news out there that, actually, private equity’s been a great thing for America,” Stephen Pagliuca, the billionaire co-chairman of Bain Capital, said at Davos in 2020. David Rubenstein, the billionaire founder of the Carlyle Group, another of the world’s largest private equity firms, goes further. “Private equity,” he likes to say, “is the highest calling of mankind.”

Whatever good or ill there is in private equity is not just about greedy sinners or enterprising saints. Whether acquiring a bakery that makes chocolate chip cookies or the nursing home where your grandmother is living out her days, private equity relies on the same basic business model: the leveraged buyout. These transactions – which account for roughly three out of every four dollars of all private equity deals – are frequently compared to house flipping: you buy a business using a ton of debt, or leverage, the way you buy a house with a mortgage; then you try to sell it for a tidy profit after you replace the carpets (or, better still, the market goes up). Unlike buying a house, however, the debt isn’t the responsibility of the buyer; it sits on the balance sheet of the acquired company. As strange as it sounds, it’s sort of like the company is forced to take out a loan to buy itself.

“Private equity creates value by growing great companies,” Pagliuca has said, offering a picture of the industry as a green-thumbed gardener turning mere seedlings into fruit-bearing trees. But over the past several months, as I combed through the recent trove of books on private equity, trawled through the memoirs of industry titans such as Schwarzman and Guy Hands, spoke with people who have worked inside Wall Street and City firms and interviewed scholars who study this species of finance, I came to see private equity in more virological terms, like a pandemic.

A coronavirus replicates by injecting its RNA into the cells of a target organism. Once inside, the RNA hijacks its host’s resources to build more copies of the virus, weakening and sometimes destroying the host in the process. Private equity’s business model is similar. A private equity firm pools cash from investors, then uses those funds, along with an extraordinary amount of money borrowed from other sources (the “leverage”), to take over a target company. Having acquired its target, a private equity firm may fire the management team, install new executives and decimate the workforce, or move it offshore. It can also liquidate the company’s own assets to pay back investors and line the pockets of the firm’s partners before selling the company to a new set of investors, a tactic sometimes known as a “buy, strip and flip”. (...)

“The predatory practices of private equity exacerbate inequality and eviscerate our economy by taking money from productive businesses” – retailers, hospital chains, manufacturing companies – “and giving it to largely unproductive ones,” Brendan Ballou, a US Department of Justice antitrust lawyer, writes in Plunder. Chief among these largely unproductive businesses are private equity firms themselves. Worse still, the private equity owners can make ludicrous amounts of money whether or not the companies themselves succeed – a decoupling of financial and commercial success that makes a mockery of the basic premise of capitalism.

by Alex Blasdel, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Stephen Schwarzman, the Blackstone Group. Richard Drew/AP

Survivors fleeing firestorm after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

via:

Ry Cooder

Banksy
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