The whole trans-humanism thing (perhaps if we just called it Trans they would hate it so much they would find some other unlikely future to chase) and Long Termism speaks of people who hate their bodies and emotions and anything that would mark them as human. It has all the hallmarks of people trying to skip over the trauma of their lives to a place where none of that can touch them. On top of that they can rewrite the past and become the most powerful instead of the least, the most rich instead of the relative poor.
I don't know the story of Emile's break with the Long Termism group but his take on the situation today is quite compelling. Also, his brief description of the Alexander Thomas book made such sense of the mechanics of the evolution of Capitalism.
The somewhat dark conclusion, barring a natural catastrophe that does the job for us, is that we must reject and overthrow the followers of this vision to avoid being dragged into the supply side of the equation. Oh Joy!
Anytime the topic of aligning with human values comes up is an opportunity to talk about the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Earth Charter.
“So the thesis of this book stands or falls with the correctness of the decline rate that Brown gives us. Therefore I have calculated with several different parameters as regards the decline rate, and all point in the same direction. The difference between them is a few years at most. Therefore I assume that my thesis is solid, which is that the end of global net oil exports in 2030-2032 (Brown’s scenario) is a best-case scenario.
Collapse can, I think, begin in earnest already in 2026, only because of too little diesel exports. Observe that oil exports vanish successively, more and more, not all at once.” ?
This goes down as an all-time favorite PC for me, thanks so much for making this one happen! Always glad when the subject strays into philosophy as well, especially when it is for good reason as it was here, (although Stoicism is not pre-Socratic). The subject of existential risk is close to my own work as well because one of the things I’m writing about with climate change is the extreme resistance climate scientists have to publicly discussing the question as to whether warming could lead to human extinction, and that when they do, it is typically to say something like “this is not something that the IPCC is concerned about” when any physical scientist who can do the math knows that as things are going we don’t have much of a chance. (You both made sure to qualify your comments here with recognition of the possibility of a happy end, and I like the mention of the need for hope, as long as it does not encourage foolish complacence, which I believe the IPCC stance has unfortunately done for the vast majority of people.) It all boils down to a type of denialism and a career-saving dishonesty. I’m just a bit disappointed that your own discussion veered so quickly away from climate into the Silicon Valley nutters and the billionaire ego trips with their space fantasies and “long-termism” nonsense. Again, the way climate change is going, we don’t have time for colonizing anything in space but hey, as long as the IPCC says it’s not a worry then that will determine the thinking and discussions.
As to the concern that Tech Bros would have the arrogance to feel they can decide what the future will look like, I would say that they are not the right people for that, but that the idea that someone, or some people, could or would make such a decision undemocratically is not necessarily a bad thing, in theory, as long as they make sure that the future is welcoming and not restrictive. In other words, for people who say that some one person decides and then we don’t have a feminist view or an indigenous view, etc., I would say that this isn’t really necessary, again, as long as you make sure that all such views (you don’t even need to know what they are) are guaranteed a place in life’s table as long as they ensure that people are left alone to be who they are and mind their own business, not harming others, not taking the freedom of others, etc. And so of course this means that people who want a world where there is racism and sexism etc., are going to have their “freedom” to live in, or construct, such a world curtailed, but that’s something we clearly are going to have to live with. We know, without having to take a poll and a vote, that people want to be free. We also know that means freedom to be unmolested from the “freedoms” of others. Democracy is not always such a good thing, as the USA has now shown us. But again, this is in theory. In practice, I would only want myself being allowed to steer the ship, because I know I can trust myself to be kind and thoughtful, and this is the weakness of this line of thinking...
"Democracy is not always such a good thing, as the USA has now shown us". Are you sure that what we are observing is democracy. The facade is democracy, but peel back the curtain and it's anything but.
I hear you, but I'm not sure I agree, unless you care to clarify. What we have now leaves a very bad taste in everyone's mouth who did not vote for Trump as to what can happen with a democratic process. Assuming you are not implying that the election itself was somehow rigged, the democratic element was the election. Actions by the Administration following the election are meant to be therefore indirectly democratic: "what we are observing" with the current Administration's suite of drastic actions is arguably the result of a democratic election whereby an unlikely and unqualified candidate was chosen, and the current actions are arguably the candidate's exercising of promises made to his constituents, many of whom still support his every move, i.e. "we are getting what we paid for!" The desires of those who did not vote for him are of course not represented by these actions, but that is the way democracy in this case works. Of course, if you consider how the Administration and GOP members of the Senate and Congress are behaving, there seems to be a very high degree of (let's call it) swindling going on, and where the legality of these actions as well as the actions of the Administration are contested there is room for challenge, which is of course being carried out in some cases. I'm no lawyer, and while I would say that there's bad faith everywhere here, and dishonesty, I'm not sure any of it qualifies as undemocratic.
I’m not commenting on whether the election was fair, but more pointing to the fact that the undue influence of money in politics, corporate lobbying in other words, means that regardless of who ends up in power, the people aren’t represented. The revolving door between business, politics and the media ensure that the interests of the ultra rich always win the day. Trump is the ultimate expression of this, but it is just as true for the Democratic Party and Labour in the UK. Maybe this is just my jaded view, but I think it’s working just the way it’s meant to. The outcome as people feel more disenfranchised and powerless to improve their lives, is to leave the way open for more strong man authoritarians, who point the finger of blame at immigrants or people on benefits.
Oh yes, I absolutely agree. The power and money have been stacked against against us for a while now and it seems to me it has worsened. There seem to be very few politicians at higher levels who really represent the people. They seem to be barred entry. That's why I agree with the view that we need a total change. If it ever was a design flaw, it certainly doesn't seem to be now. Now, it seems intentional. But I think in the US this is in part the result of laws being enacted that pushed unelected power higher and weakened or removed checks and balances. I don't see a way around it outside a kind of revolution, one way or the other.
The segment of the conversation about a tiny group of self-appointed experts deciding the fate of the world vis a vis AI made me think of a similar small group of "planners" at places like the Rand Corporation and in government during the cold war, thinking the unthinkable--about nuclear war and how to fight one. The origin of the modern concept of extinction as something that human beings could inflict on themselves. Like the tech billionaires and other AI visionaries they took it upon themselves to decide the fate of millions, tens of millions. These arrogant men gave themselves license to tell the rest of us what was worth dying for, what was worth risking extinction for. (To be specific, the end of civilization, even the cessation of complex life on the planet, was preferable to domination by Godless Communism.) The powers that be have always decided for the rank and file what wars to fight, what causes are "worth dying for", but it was only with the advent of atomic weapons that these decisions could plausibly lead to the deaths of tens of millions, the collapse of organized societies and even risk extinction.
Since those heady days, the outrageous and absurd notion that a few experts should hold the destiny of mass populations, even of the world itself, in their hands has become more and more normalized. I think this has set the pattern for the kind of "brinksmanship" that the AI crowd is currently practicing with the fates of all of us. Their willingness to risk everything while offering promises of some vague and aspirational good that will ultimately come to pass seems in the minds of most people to be an unavoidable price we all have to pay for "progress". This is passively acquiesced to by most, conditioned by an unexamined deeply inculcated faith in progress, especially technological progress. And yet AI could hardly be a more blatantly obvious formula for unprecedented disaster.....
Even without the predicted AI apocalypse ( a concept which I think is more a product of
anxiety and panic that realistic assessment) our deepening dependency on these surrogate "minds" could lead to not a physical extinction, but the entrapment of our humanity, with its incredible reserves of unexplored potential, in algorithmically constructed channels that will direct our mental and emotional lives according to the machine's very limited logics. And really isn't this already happening?....
Just to keep in mind: the 2025 University of Exeter paper/brochure Emile mentioned when he said that the appendix 1 of the paper indicates that if we reach 2 degrees of warming by 2050 we could have “the total number of casualties of premature deaths to be greater than two billion.” The table in appendix 1 is labelled as “illustrative.” To use this word “illustrative” in this context is vague, because one has to ask, does this mean illustrative in the sense of being like a picture, as one might suggest that a table can be, or is it meant in the sense of the information contained being merely an example of a possibility, as opposed to facts, or at least a properly derived estimate? Since the report/brochure features over 100 endnotes, and because the numbers in question are so stark, one would expect to see some kind of indication by the report’s authors as to the nature of the data shown in appendix 1. But there are neither endnotes nor any text describing where these amazing numbers come from, or how they were arrived at. To me, to print the table like this is both irregular and problematic, because we’ve just seen its partial contents publicly commented upon as being some kind of projection by experts, when my feeling is that this table may not in fact indicate carefully derived estimates as much as examples of possibilities, or "illustrations." The document is not a research paper for those unfamiliar with it, but is a lot like a marketing brochure for the services of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries at the university that published it. It talks about how those in climate policy have failed us and there's no proper risk management and we would recommend doing it like this, developing this framework and that matrix and...
I was aware of the Exeter report but didn't recall having seen such vast impacts expressed by it and I think this may have been why. To be clear, nobody is talking about anywhere near 2 billion deaths with 2C that I've heard. The table indicates that at 2C "Heat and water stress drive involuntary mass migration of billions. Catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict” for this particular scenario, which help explain the huge death toll compared to academic research that finds for example 90,000 deaths across the EU with even 3C, not 2C, by 2100, they refer only to death by heat exposure or closely related causes. Not crop failure, conflicts, etc. But still, 2BN is huge. I've asked one of the authors to clarify and am waiting...
Fantastic interview! I love the humor and great observation about alignment and AI is which set of human values! And yes, we are super fucked!
The polycrisis does mean we will face challenges that will change civilization! It may also be the only thing that can change the societal values enough to avoid total extinction.
Yes, he is very optimistic to believe that things could be stable after four billion people die off. Remember the passenger pigeon? Read the chapter in Overshoot by William R. Catton about Succession and talk to ecologists about how many species have gone extinct after plague population booms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon But I also think that people alive at this moment don't get to know how the unraveling will end. Extinction may well be baked in as the solar energy imbalance has tripled in the last two decades and shows no signs of slowing down as we continue to set hydrocarbon emissions records year after year.
The whole trans-humanism thing (perhaps if we just called it Trans they would hate it so much they would find some other unlikely future to chase) and Long Termism speaks of people who hate their bodies and emotions and anything that would mark them as human. It has all the hallmarks of people trying to skip over the trauma of their lives to a place where none of that can touch them. On top of that they can rewrite the past and become the most powerful instead of the least, the most rich instead of the relative poor.
I don't know the story of Emile's break with the Long Termism group but his take on the situation today is quite compelling. Also, his brief description of the Alexander Thomas book made such sense of the mechanics of the evolution of Capitalism.
The somewhat dark conclusion, barring a natural catastrophe that does the job for us, is that we must reject and overthrow the followers of this vision to avoid being dragged into the supply side of the equation. Oh Joy!
Anytime the topic of aligning with human values comes up is an opportunity to talk about the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Earth Charter.
“So the thesis of this book stands or falls with the correctness of the decline rate that Brown gives us. Therefore I have calculated with several different parameters as regards the decline rate, and all point in the same direction. The difference between them is a few years at most. Therefore I assume that my thesis is solid, which is that the end of global net oil exports in 2030-2032 (Brown’s scenario) is a best-case scenario.
Collapse can, I think, begin in earnest already in 2026, only because of too little diesel exports. Observe that oil exports vanish successively, more and more, not all at once.” ?
https://un-denial.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/lars-larsen-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports-13th-edition-2024.pdf
https://un-denial.com/2024/07/29/book-review-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports-by-lars-larsen-2024/
This goes down as an all-time favorite PC for me, thanks so much for making this one happen! Always glad when the subject strays into philosophy as well, especially when it is for good reason as it was here, (although Stoicism is not pre-Socratic). The subject of existential risk is close to my own work as well because one of the things I’m writing about with climate change is the extreme resistance climate scientists have to publicly discussing the question as to whether warming could lead to human extinction, and that when they do, it is typically to say something like “this is not something that the IPCC is concerned about” when any physical scientist who can do the math knows that as things are going we don’t have much of a chance. (You both made sure to qualify your comments here with recognition of the possibility of a happy end, and I like the mention of the need for hope, as long as it does not encourage foolish complacence, which I believe the IPCC stance has unfortunately done for the vast majority of people.) It all boils down to a type of denialism and a career-saving dishonesty. I’m just a bit disappointed that your own discussion veered so quickly away from climate into the Silicon Valley nutters and the billionaire ego trips with their space fantasies and “long-termism” nonsense. Again, the way climate change is going, we don’t have time for colonizing anything in space but hey, as long as the IPCC says it’s not a worry then that will determine the thinking and discussions.
As to the concern that Tech Bros would have the arrogance to feel they can decide what the future will look like, I would say that they are not the right people for that, but that the idea that someone, or some people, could or would make such a decision undemocratically is not necessarily a bad thing, in theory, as long as they make sure that the future is welcoming and not restrictive. In other words, for people who say that some one person decides and then we don’t have a feminist view or an indigenous view, etc., I would say that this isn’t really necessary, again, as long as you make sure that all such views (you don’t even need to know what they are) are guaranteed a place in life’s table as long as they ensure that people are left alone to be who they are and mind their own business, not harming others, not taking the freedom of others, etc. And so of course this means that people who want a world where there is racism and sexism etc., are going to have their “freedom” to live in, or construct, such a world curtailed, but that’s something we clearly are going to have to live with. We know, without having to take a poll and a vote, that people want to be free. We also know that means freedom to be unmolested from the “freedoms” of others. Democracy is not always such a good thing, as the USA has now shown us. But again, this is in theory. In practice, I would only want myself being allowed to steer the ship, because I know I can trust myself to be kind and thoughtful, and this is the weakness of this line of thinking...
"Democracy is not always such a good thing, as the USA has now shown us". Are you sure that what we are observing is democracy. The facade is democracy, but peel back the curtain and it's anything but.
I hear you, but I'm not sure I agree, unless you care to clarify. What we have now leaves a very bad taste in everyone's mouth who did not vote for Trump as to what can happen with a democratic process. Assuming you are not implying that the election itself was somehow rigged, the democratic element was the election. Actions by the Administration following the election are meant to be therefore indirectly democratic: "what we are observing" with the current Administration's suite of drastic actions is arguably the result of a democratic election whereby an unlikely and unqualified candidate was chosen, and the current actions are arguably the candidate's exercising of promises made to his constituents, many of whom still support his every move, i.e. "we are getting what we paid for!" The desires of those who did not vote for him are of course not represented by these actions, but that is the way democracy in this case works. Of course, if you consider how the Administration and GOP members of the Senate and Congress are behaving, there seems to be a very high degree of (let's call it) swindling going on, and where the legality of these actions as well as the actions of the Administration are contested there is room for challenge, which is of course being carried out in some cases. I'm no lawyer, and while I would say that there's bad faith everywhere here, and dishonesty, I'm not sure any of it qualifies as undemocratic.
I’m not commenting on whether the election was fair, but more pointing to the fact that the undue influence of money in politics, corporate lobbying in other words, means that regardless of who ends up in power, the people aren’t represented. The revolving door between business, politics and the media ensure that the interests of the ultra rich always win the day. Trump is the ultimate expression of this, but it is just as true for the Democratic Party and Labour in the UK. Maybe this is just my jaded view, but I think it’s working just the way it’s meant to. The outcome as people feel more disenfranchised and powerless to improve their lives, is to leave the way open for more strong man authoritarians, who point the finger of blame at immigrants or people on benefits.
Oh yes, I absolutely agree. The power and money have been stacked against against us for a while now and it seems to me it has worsened. There seem to be very few politicians at higher levels who really represent the people. They seem to be barred entry. That's why I agree with the view that we need a total change. If it ever was a design flaw, it certainly doesn't seem to be now. Now, it seems intentional. But I think in the US this is in part the result of laws being enacted that pushed unelected power higher and weakened or removed checks and balances. I don't see a way around it outside a kind of revolution, one way or the other.
The segment of the conversation about a tiny group of self-appointed experts deciding the fate of the world vis a vis AI made me think of a similar small group of "planners" at places like the Rand Corporation and in government during the cold war, thinking the unthinkable--about nuclear war and how to fight one. The origin of the modern concept of extinction as something that human beings could inflict on themselves. Like the tech billionaires and other AI visionaries they took it upon themselves to decide the fate of millions, tens of millions. These arrogant men gave themselves license to tell the rest of us what was worth dying for, what was worth risking extinction for. (To be specific, the end of civilization, even the cessation of complex life on the planet, was preferable to domination by Godless Communism.) The powers that be have always decided for the rank and file what wars to fight, what causes are "worth dying for", but it was only with the advent of atomic weapons that these decisions could plausibly lead to the deaths of tens of millions, the collapse of organized societies and even risk extinction.
Since those heady days, the outrageous and absurd notion that a few experts should hold the destiny of mass populations, even of the world itself, in their hands has become more and more normalized. I think this has set the pattern for the kind of "brinksmanship" that the AI crowd is currently practicing with the fates of all of us. Their willingness to risk everything while offering promises of some vague and aspirational good that will ultimately come to pass seems in the minds of most people to be an unavoidable price we all have to pay for "progress". This is passively acquiesced to by most, conditioned by an unexamined deeply inculcated faith in progress, especially technological progress. And yet AI could hardly be a more blatantly obvious formula for unprecedented disaster.....
Even without the predicted AI apocalypse ( a concept which I think is more a product of
anxiety and panic that realistic assessment) our deepening dependency on these surrogate "minds" could lead to not a physical extinction, but the entrapment of our humanity, with its incredible reserves of unexplored potential, in algorithmically constructed channels that will direct our mental and emotional lives according to the machine's very limited logics. And really isn't this already happening?....
Just to keep in mind: the 2025 University of Exeter paper/brochure Emile mentioned when he said that the appendix 1 of the paper indicates that if we reach 2 degrees of warming by 2050 we could have “the total number of casualties of premature deaths to be greater than two billion.” The table in appendix 1 is labelled as “illustrative.” To use this word “illustrative” in this context is vague, because one has to ask, does this mean illustrative in the sense of being like a picture, as one might suggest that a table can be, or is it meant in the sense of the information contained being merely an example of a possibility, as opposed to facts, or at least a properly derived estimate? Since the report/brochure features over 100 endnotes, and because the numbers in question are so stark, one would expect to see some kind of indication by the report’s authors as to the nature of the data shown in appendix 1. But there are neither endnotes nor any text describing where these amazing numbers come from, or how they were arrived at. To me, to print the table like this is both irregular and problematic, because we’ve just seen its partial contents publicly commented upon as being some kind of projection by experts, when my feeling is that this table may not in fact indicate carefully derived estimates as much as examples of possibilities, or "illustrations." The document is not a research paper for those unfamiliar with it, but is a lot like a marketing brochure for the services of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries at the university that published it. It talks about how those in climate policy have failed us and there's no proper risk management and we would recommend doing it like this, developing this framework and that matrix and...
I was aware of the Exeter report but didn't recall having seen such vast impacts expressed by it and I think this may have been why. To be clear, nobody is talking about anywhere near 2 billion deaths with 2C that I've heard. The table indicates that at 2C "Heat and water stress drive involuntary mass migration of billions. Catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict” for this particular scenario, which help explain the huge death toll compared to academic research that finds for example 90,000 deaths across the EU with even 3C, not 2C, by 2100, they refer only to death by heat exposure or closely related causes. Not crop failure, conflicts, etc. But still, 2BN is huge. I've asked one of the authors to clarify and am waiting...
Fantastic interview! I love the humor and great observation about alignment and AI is which set of human values! And yes, we are super fucked!
The polycrisis does mean we will face challenges that will change civilization! It may also be the only thing that can change the societal values enough to avoid total extinction.
Yes, he is very optimistic to believe that things could be stable after four billion people die off. Remember the passenger pigeon? Read the chapter in Overshoot by William R. Catton about Succession and talk to ecologists about how many species have gone extinct after plague population booms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon But I also think that people alive at this moment don't get to know how the unraveling will end. Extinction may well be baked in as the solar energy imbalance has tripled in the last two decades and shows no signs of slowing down as we continue to set hydrocarbon emissions records year after year.