A core part of the longtermist project is making it very clear to people today that 21st century humanity is far from the peak of complex civilization. Imagine an inhabitant of a 16th-century medieval city looking at their civilization and thinking “This is it; this is civilization close to its epitome. Sure, we may build a few more castles over there, expand our army and conquer those nearby kingdoms, and develop a new way to breed ultra-fast horses, but I think the future will be like this, just bigger”. As citizens of the 21st century we’re in the position to see how wrong this would be, yet I think we’re prone to making a very similar type of error.
To get past this error, a fun exercise is to try to explain the scale of 21st century civilization in terms of concepts that would be familiar to our 16th century friends. Then we can extrapolate this into the future to better intuit the scale of future civilisations. Here are two ways to do so:
Military power: The United States military is the strongest armed force in the world today. How do we convey the power of such a force to citizens of the distant past? One way would be to ask them to consider their own military—foot soldiers, bowmen, cavalry, and all—and then ask how many such armies would be needed to rival the power of the modern-day US military. I’d guess that the combined armies of 100 medieval kingdoms would struggle to pose a challenge to the US military. Ditto for the 21st century. I expect the combined strength of 100 US militaries[1] to struggle to make a scratch in the military power of future civilizations.
Infrastructure and engineering capability: Men and women of the distant past would view modern-day human civilization as god-like engineers. Today, we build continent-spanning electric grids to power our homes and construct entire cities in a handful of years. How do we communicate this engineering prowess to our 16th century medieval city counterparts? I’m no civil engineer, but I estimate that the largest state governments of today could rebuild the entire infrastructure of a medieval city in a handful of months if they tried. Ditto for the 21st century. I expect that the civilisations of the future will be able to rebuild the entirety of Earth’s infrastructure—cities, power grids, factories, etc. - within a few months. To put that into context, imagine a civilisation that, starting in January, could rebuild London, Shanghai, New York, every highway, airport, bridge, port, and dam, by the time summer rolled around. That would certainly qualify them for the title of a supercivilisation!
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Again 100 is a rough guess—it could be more or less, potentially by orders of magnitude.
Strongly agree. I think the TESCREAL/e-acc movements badly mischaracterise the EA community with extremely poor, unsubstantiated arguments, but there doesn’t seem to be much response to this from the EA side.
What does this refer to? I’m not familiar.
Other thoughts on this:
Publicly, the quietness from the EA side in response to TESCREAL/e-acc/etc. allegations is harming the community’s image and what it stands for. But ‘winning’ the memetic war is important. If not, then the world outside EA—which has many smart, influential people—ends up seeing the community as a doomer cult (in the case of AI safety) or assigns some equally damaging label that lets them quickly dismiss many of the arguments being made.
I think this is a case where the the epistemic standards of the EA community work against it. Rigorous analysis, expressing second/third-order considerations, etc. are seen as the norm for most writing on the forum. However, in places such as Twitter, these sorts of analyses aren’t ‘memetically fit’ [1].
So, I think we’re in need of more pieces like the Time essay on Pausing AI—a no-punches-pulled sort of piece that gets across the seriousness of what we’re claiming. I’d like to see more Twitter threads and op-ed’s that dismantle claims like “advancements in AI have solved it’s black-box nature”, ones that don’t let clearly false claims like this see the light of day in serious public discourse.
Don’t get me wrong—epistemically rigorous work is great. But when responding to TESCREAL/e-acc ‘critiques’ that continuously hit below the belt, other tactics may be better.