via Babelcarp/Lew Perin:
In an AI-mediated utopia where you live forever, if you run out of possible new aesthetic and intellectual insights there’s always another cup of tea.
a review of a book written by a renowned technopagan philosopher, by a dude with a psychology background, and a pull-quote which I vehemently disagree with:
While one might hold that that the interestingness value that an individual can derive from the works of Shakespeare would be permanently depleted after a few decades of study, what about the enjoyment value of a nice cup of tea? Drinking tea may not be a source of an intense flash of value, the way that an epiphany into some deep truth about human nature may be…but it is quite renewable. The 162,330th cup of tea, on your 200th birthday, may not be less valuable than the one you had a century earlier. And whereas the supply of human-accessible profound truths might be limited, you can always put another kettle on.
After I commented on Mastadan that these guys are so far up their own asses, Lew asked:
Do you mean that kind of utopia is inconceivable?
Or do you think it’s so unlikely that it would be irresponsible for anyone to spend any time thinking about it?
having read the whole review now rather than just the quote, i just don't buy any of it and I think Nick Bostrom and the AI-god philosophers are basically court jesters. Bostrom's idea of "deep utopia" just sounds like Doctorow & Stross's rapture of the nerds, but much more dense and much less fun to read. To Alexander's point, I might read fiction set in a "deep utopia" but they are fundamentally different spaces than what we have now, and i think would require new stories which we are unprepared to tell. & so i don't think the current batch of technology is capable of producing super-intelligence so the basic premise is tough for me to think of as anything other than a funny fiction.
but even at the basics, even the quote you pulled, that there is only "so much" to get out of art, rather than as an ever-lasting lens to your own reality just makes me think these people believe and think fundamentally differently than i do. it mis-understands the very purpose of life, and of art, to me.
like "oh we'll get bored of the art people have been connecting with their whole lives for centuries unless a Really Cool Imaginary Computer just, like, shoves the thoughts and memories of a Very Smart Art Critic in to you to help you blog about art in deep utopia and that doesn't change you as a person at all"? fuck off, stand in front of a painting and cry and not know why you're crying for years until you have enough experiences that it clicks. i don't need the ghost of an art critic beamed in to my head or to simulate living a decade in Van Gogh's sanitarium to "get it", i need to live my own life of beauty and of hardship of my own to contextualize art in to my own life. i don't think deep utopia would have or be capable of producing beautiful art like this, or that we could connect with beautiful art without having art critics from the beforetime beamed in to our head.
that is the core problems of any deep utopia to me, that the art would be boring and the people wouldn't have anything to talk to each other about.
i don't think a "billion IQ deep utopia" can exist or would be something even a god-like intelligence could manufacture in any "real" fashion while still carrying human social creatures which exist and grow in the context of other human social creatures. maybe that's in some of the pages Alexander didn't write about, but solutions of the social problems a deep utopia would reveal are found in the "shallow" utopia processes they scoff at. (and i don't mean "social problems" like how the state defines them, but problems of being social with others)
how is any common social footing or community or simple humanity found in a world where a godhead can nut you off better than any partner could and then tell you a bedtime story better than any parent could in 6 dimensions and 17 invented languages it'll make sure you understand; in a place where not even that 160000th cup of tea would be real, or unique, or hand-picked, or at all nestled in the unfolded web of humanity that currently takes a leaf from a plant in china in to my cup and my gut in America? what do you talk about with your buddy when everyone lives in their own pocket universe with its own perfect ruleset?
i guess if i wanted to read 500 pages i could find out what Nick Bostrom thinks the concept of "fulfilling friendship" looks like in deep utopia but this stuff still seems like an incredibly self-centered and soul-less future, like the "philosophical" extension of "LLM make video game real good so we don't need writers or developers, just me the CEO and my middle manager buddies talking to chat bots that nut us off", or at the very least like a fast food drive thru experience.
These are all interesting things to think about but they are, imo, a distraction and naval-gazing. it's neither responsible, nor irresponsible to be these folks, but i don't take seriously any of them who have been "in between" AI/VC/tech and philosophy the last fifteen years, these washed up dudes that people suddenly want to take seriously because the langle mangles sound like they understand tangents and plot, and some day they may be able to tell bedtime stories that don't go off on tangents and lose the plot every 128k tokens, de-legitimizing the same humanity they want to induct in to "deep utopia".
I think this batch of modern AI-informed philosophers mostly serve as a distraction for these rich, powerful boys who keep accidentally committing financial crimes to not invest in the "shallow" utopia of clean water and healthy food and serviceable public infrastructure and naval-gaze about a future where they don't need to think about the poor people they don't want to think about, and that is why I call Bostrom a court jester. I'm not worried about X-risk or X-success, i'm worried about the next 15 years of life on this real Earth, and I wish these people would pull their heads out they asses about it.