✈️🧠They say travel expands the mind… this essay has been stuck incubating for about a year now, but suddenly burst into fruit (with the superhuman assistance of Claude Opus 4.6, naturally…) high in the air somewhere over central Asia between Taiwan and Türkiye. Refined with back-and-forth1 in the airport arrivals concourse and then finished with somewhat jetlagged manual editing and AI illustration in the cafes of the bustling Galata Quarter in Istanbul. A rare burst of clear-minded productivity and AI-enhanced inspiration to finally get these concepts explored in writing! (Clearly I need to be between more often…)

Mindfood for the Easter holiday weekend, enjoy!

I. The Space Between

Every thought you have ever received from another human being has been mediated.

This is easy to forget. When you sit across from someone, making eye contact, reading microexpressions, feeling the vibration of their voice in your chest — it feels direct. Brain to brain. But it isn’t. Between your grey matter and theirs lies an elaborate chain: motor cortex to larynx to pressure waves to tympanic membrane to auditory nerve to temporal lobe. Even the most “direct” human communication passes through layers of encoding, transmission, and decoding. There has always been something in between.

What has changed — what is still changing, with gathering and perhaps irreversible velocity — is the scale, complexity, and now the agency of that in-between layer.

For most of human history, the intermediating substrate was thin: air, parchment, ink. The processing nodes — human brains — were overwhelmingly where the complexity resided. Today, the connective infrastructure between minds dwarfs the minds themselves in raw computational terms. The global internet processes more bits per second than all living human brains combined. The data centres, undersea cables, cell towers, protocols, algorithms, and now large language models that sit between one person’s thought and another person’s comprehension constitute a vast, thickening layer of mediation.

I want to propose a name for this layer, and a framework for understanding how it has evolved and where it is heading.

II. The Interstitium

In 2018, researchers at New York University’s School of Medicine announced the identification of a previously overlooked anatomical structure: the interstitium. It is a network of fluid-filled spaces woven through connective tissue throughout the body — surrounding the digestive tract, the lungs, blood vessels, muscles. It had been hiding in plain sight, dismissed as mere “dense connective tissue” in every anatomy textbook. Once recognised for what it was, it became potentially the largest organ in the human body.

The interstitium does not think. But it connects everything. It transmits signals, transports fluids, cushions organs against mechanical stress. Without it, the body’s specialised organs would be isolated, unsupported, and unable to coordinate.

This is the analogy I want to draw. Between human brains — the grey matter of civilisation — there has always been an interstitium: the connective, transmissive, mediating substrate through which thought moves from one mind to another. For a hundred thousand years, this interstitium was almost invisible. A vibration in the air. Marks scratched on clay. Now it is a planetary-scale computational infrastructure, and it is beginning to develop something that looks uncomfortably like agency.

The central claim of this essay is that the interstitium — the total mediating infrastructure between human minds — is undergoing a phase transition. It is shifting from passive conduit to active participant. And the consequences of this shift will reshape communication, cognition, economics, culture, and ultimately what it means to be human.

III. A Brief History of What Lies Between

To understand where things are heading, it helps to understand the trajectory. Each new intermediating technology has altered not just how humans communicate, but what kinds of thought are possible. The medium, as McLuhan insisted, is the message — but more precisely, the medium shapes the space of transmissible and therefore thinkable ideas.

Spoken Language (~100,000 BCE)

The first great intermediating technology was language itself. Before structured speech, primate communication was limited to gesture, facial expression, and vocalisations — rich in emotional content but impoverished in abstraction. Spoken language created a bandwidth explosion. It enabled the transmission of hypotheticals, narratives, plans, and — critically — instructions that could be followed in the speaker’s absence. Language was the original compression algorithm: it reduced the blooming, buzzing confusion of sensory experience into discrete, transmissible tokens.

But it was also radically constrained. Spoken language was ephemeral (no durability), limited to earshot (minimal reach), and one-to-few at best.

Writing (~3200 BCE)

Writing cracked the time barrier. A thought could now persist beyond the lifetime of the thinker. This single capability — durability — transformed everything. It enabled law, bureaucracy, accumulated knowledge, and history itself. Writing also introduced the first significant lossiness trade-off: the richness of vocal intonation, facial expression, and real-time feedback was sacrificed for persistence and portability.

Cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and eventually alphabetic scripts also introduced a new kind of intermediation: the scribe. For millennia, the interstitium required specialised human operators. Literacy was a professional skill, not a universal capacity. The medium itself created a priestly class of intermediaries.

The Printing Press (1440)

Gutenberg’s press did not change the nature of what could be transmitted — it was still text — but it shattered the topology constraint. Writing had been one-to-one (a letter) or one-to-few (a manuscript copied by hand). Print was one-to-thousands, then one-to-millions. The k-factor of ideas exploded. The Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment were all downstream consequences of a topological shift in the interstitium.

Legal Contracts and Institutions

An underappreciated class of intermediating technology: the formalised agreement. Contracts, constitutions, charters, and treaties are technologies for binding future behaviour. They sit between human minds not to transmit information, but to constrain and coordinate action over time. They are, in a sense, the interstitium’s first attempts at autonomous persistence — agreements that endure and exert force independently of the minds that created them.

The Telegraph (1844) and Telephone (1876)

The telegraph collapsed distance. For the first time, information could travel faster than a human being could carry it. The telephone went further, restoring the richness of the human voice — intonation, emotion, hesitation — that writing had stripped away. But both maintained a strict one-to-one topology.

Cinema (1895), Radio (1920s), Television (1950s)

The broadcast era introduced a profoundly asymmetric topology: one-to-millions, with a drastically attenuated return channel. The audience could not talk back in the same medium or at the same bandwidth — but they were never entirely silent. Box office receipts, ratings data, letters to editors, advertising revenue, word-of-mouth reputation, and purchase signals all constituted a trickle of feedback flowing upstream against the torrent of broadcast. The return channel was low-bandwidth, indirect, slow, and took unpredictable routes back to the source. But it existed, and content producers who ignored it did not survive long. The broadcast interstitium was not a one-way valve so much as a massively asymmetric one — a fire hose in one direction, a leaking tap in the other.

This asymmetry shaped the entire 20th century’s political, commercial, and cultural landscape. It created the conditions for mass culture, mass persuasion, and the curious phenomenon of millions of people sharing a parasocial relationship with individuals who could not know them in return.

The Internet and World Wide Web (1990s)

The web restored symmetry and created the first truly many-to-many topology. Every node could both transmit and receive at comparable bandwidth. The interstitium became a mesh. Bandwidth increased by orders of magnitude. Latency dropped toward zero for text and, eventually, for audio and video. The web also introduced a new quality: searchability. The accumulated interstitium became navigable.

SMS and Messaging (2000s)

Mobile messaging did something subtle but significant: it made the interstitium ambient. Communication was no longer an event — a letter opened, a phone call answered — but a continuous background hum. The always-on, always-connected pocket device dissolved the boundary between “communicating” and “not communicating.” The interstitium became the default state of being.

Social Media (2010s)

Social media platforms introduced algorithmic intermediation: the first time the interstitium began making autonomous decisions about which signals to amplify, suppress, or route. The platform’s recommendation algorithm sits between sender and receiver, and it has its own objective function — engagement, retention, revenue — that is orthogonal to the communicative intent of either party. This was the interstitium’s first acquisition of something like agency, however primitive.

Videoconferencing and Webcasts (2020s)

The pandemic era normalised high-bandwidth, bidirectional audiovisual communication at scale. But it also revealed the uncanny valley of intermediation: Zoom fatigue, the missing peripheral awareness, the cognitive load of decoding a tiled screen of floating heads. The interstitium was transmitting more data than ever, yet something essential was being lost. The medium was too thin for presence and too thick for efficiency.

Large Language Models and AI Agents (2024–)

And now the present inflection. For the first time, the interstitium can generate. It does not merely transmit, store, amplify, or route human-created signals. It produces novel text, images, code, and reasoning. An AI agent sitting between a human principal and a human counterparty does not function as a pipe or a filter — it participates. It drafts, summarises, negotiates, decides, and acts.

This is the phase transition: the interstitium is no longer connective tissue, it is beginning to think.

IV. The Intermediation Framework

To make this progression rigorous rather than merely narrative, I propose a framework for characterising any intermediating technology along seven dimensions. Together, these dimensions define the memetic propagation potential of a given medium — its capacity to carry ideas between minds and embed them durably in culture.

The Seven Dimensions

The seventh dimension — Agency — is the new variable. For most of human history it was effectively zero. It began to climb with algorithmic content curation. With AI agents, it is approaching values that demand a fundamentally different model.

The Intermediation Matrix

Categorising and quantifying each technology and dimension gives a matrix something like this:

Notes: Bandwidth figures are order-of-magnitude approximations for characteristic use. Lossiness is assessed relative to the full richness of face-to-face human communication. Agency scores are the author’s estimates based on the degree of autonomous signal modification.

Memetic Propagation Potential

From these dimensions, a composite index can be constructed:

The denominator is significant: lossiness degrades propagation linearly, as expected. But Agency appears as a squared penalty — or, depending on your perspective, a squared modifier. Why squared? Because when the medium itself has agency, it introduces a multiplicative uncertainty into both the content and the routing of the signal. The sender no longer knows what was said, and no longer knows who received it. Each unknown compounds the other.

At low Agency values (~0), the formula collapses to a straightforward propagation model. As Agency approaches 1, the MPP becomes increasingly unreliable as a predictor — which is itself the point. The framework predicts its own breakdown. When the interstitium thinks for itself, the memetic propagation potential of any individual human signal becomes subordinate to the medium’s own objectives.

This, perhaps, is where things are already heading.

V. The Thickening — A Quantitative Interlude

Consider a rough accounting of where computational “mass” resides in the global communication system.

The human brain operates at an estimated 10^16 operations per second (by some measures; the precise figure is debated, but the order of magnitude is instructive). With approximately 8 billion human brains, total human computational capacity is roughly 8 × 10^25 operations per second.

Global data-centre compute, as of 2025, is estimated at approximately 10^21 FLOPS — still several orders of magnitude below total human brain capacity. But this comparison is misleading in two ways. First, artificial compute is growing exponentially (roughly doubling every 18–24 months) while human brain count grows at ~1% per year. The crossover is a matter of when, not if. Second, and more importantly for this essay’s argument, the interstitial function of artificial compute — its role in mediating between human minds — is already dominant. Most human-to-human communication now passes through digital infrastructure. The interstitium is already thicker than the nodes it connects.

A useful thought experiment: if you were to weigh all the intermediating infrastructure between your brain and every other brain you interact with in a given week — the cables, routers, servers, cell towers, satellites, algorithms, language models — against the biological mass of those brains, the infrastructure would outweigh the wetware by a factor of thousands.

The interstitium was built as plumbing. It has become a mycorrhizal network — grown larger than the forest floor above it, carrying signals the trees did not send, connecting roots that did not know they were connected.

VI. The Five Breakthroughs — and the Sixth

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Hope you’re enjoying your weekend. Here’s my latest, *intermittent* 🧠Mind Expanding Links roundup of longer reads and deeper thinks which have been keeping my overactive mind occupied recently.1 (Outside of compulsively scanning through the AI and technology news wires, natch...)

The usual eclectic mix in this issue, hopefully something of interest for everyone:

• 💪On AI, privacy and power

  • 🤯Consciousness alone truly exists

  • 🚀OMG Claude Code

  • 👁️‍🗨️Why I support privacy

  • 👑Oligarchy, State, and Cryptopia

  • 🏰Resisting Digital Feudalism

  • 🚁Let Them Eat Drones

• 🔧On “skilled” labour

  • 🪜Nested hierarchies of skills drive career advancement

  • 🗺️Geography of GenAI labour impacts

• 🧠On brains

  • 🧭Brain mapping reveals similar neural patterns in real and imagined navigation

  • 📱Smartphone break for 72 hours alters brain activity patterns

  • 📉Brain decline begins at 44

  • 🍺🍺Two beers daily ages your brain a decade

• 🏛️On politics

  • 🔨Brokenism

  • 🔥Burning Down The House

  • 💰Capital beyond ROI

• 🧩Eclectica

  • 📚Inside arXiv

  • 🥗Metabolism, but not as you know it

  • 🌌Dark energy may reverse universe expansion

(Reminder: paid subscribers can see these posts in development, plus AI-generated analysis of the stories contained in the Memia Sensorium app.)

💪On AI, privacy and power

🤯Consciousness alone truly exists

What GPT 4.5 distils about consciousness, via Sam Altman. (Take with a pinch of salt… lots of pre-training and fine tuning in here to swing this one way rather than the other… but a glimpse of something bigger, nonetheless.)

🚀OMG Claude Code

I’ve been using Cursor for over 8 months now as my AI-enhanced IDE of choice, but for whatever reason their payments provider still won’t accept my credit card (I’m not alone… take my money already!)

So this week after I ran out of free credits again, I tried out the new Claude Code agentic AI coding app from Anthropic. Here’s my end-of-Friday-afternoon LinkedIn post after completing what I estimated would be a week’s worth of AI-assisted coding in… 3.5 hours:

Incredible. Another order-of-magnitude coding productivity boost *again* (but not free… chews through Anthropic API tokens… but when you think of the acceleration it provides, the value-for-money is exceptional).

The minimalistic command-line UI experience takes a few moments to get used to… but thereafter coding becomes a procession of pressing “1” over and over again, with near-perfect first-shot results each time:

(So far I haven’t dared press “2” … “Yes, and don’t ask again this session” … how crazy is that to just let the AI agent loose with a macro goal and it just achieves what we asked it to do… all current cognitive work is going to head this way far sooner than most people are anticipating…)

👁️‍🗨️Why I support privacy

Vitalik Buterin makes a compelling case for privacy in the digital age, as tech giants use AI to gain unprecedented access to our minds:

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In this issue:

• 🤖 💰Universal basic AI? thinking on how to distribute AI benefits more fairly

• 👑Economics of AI Cloudalism is the new technofeudalism

• 🌏 🚢 ⚔️Geopolitical tectonics my pick of the best sensemaking of what Trump 2.0 means for the rest of us, particularly here in the South Pacific. (In a week when Chinese warships started firing live rounds in the sea between Australia and Aotearoa…)

• 🏭New Economics manufacturing readiness, the mathematics of innovation and cooperatives as city states

• 🌌Our cosmos Earth’s technosignature and Io’s giant volcano

• 🧬Science and tech two excellent lectures on epigenetics and synthetic biology, plus a speculative quantum theory of prime numbers

• 🗣️SocialBit a new research study which finds midlife women speak 3,000 more words daily than men. (Just sayin.) Should we be measuring our social interactions as much as our fitness?

Hopefully a few nuggets of interest for everyone!

🤖 💰Universal basic AI?

The perennial question: is the current AI race going to result in more or less inequality between humans augmented with AI and those without?

• OpenAI’s Sam Altman thinks out loud about “Universal Basic Compute” as one theoretical way of distributing the benefits of AI more widely than the current trajectory.

• Despite the wide availability of open-weights frontier models like Llama, Mistral and Deepseek, the actual compute required to run the most advanced models is still relatively expensive and hard to come by. As a result most people and businesses still resort to paying a handful of US AI companies for the pleasure of hosting their own proprietary models.

• Former CEO of Stability AI Emad Mostaque’s new initiative is now renamed the Intelligent Internet (ii). At the end of last year he published an accessible primer paper outlining the vision for a decentralised, open, more evenly distributed AI commons. The arguments are compelling, if perhaps idealistic:

  • The problem:

    “Amidst the exciting realisation of these [AI] models, the world has under-emphasised one key fact—a handful of entities have amassed control over their development and deployment. The United States and China lead as global AI superpowers, trumping other countries’ private investments in the industry. Even within these superpowers, there are a small number of companies behind these revolutionary models….The leading companies in the AI industry have generally adopted a centralised, proprietary, and profit-centric business model. With the development of these models being resource-heavy, this is the sole approach that has so far been feasible and implemented successfully, resulting in the frontier of AI being dominated by large closed-source companies.”

  • The proposed solution:

    “A World Beyond Wealth Creation The Intelligent Internet paves the way for a change in how humans perceive and generate value, moving beyond narrow financial metrics to encompass broader societal benefits:

    • Holistic Value Metrics: New systems of value recognition will emerge, accounting for social impact, environmental sustainability, and long-term human prosperity alongside traditional economic measures.

    • Optimised Resource Allocation: The Intelligent Internet’s distributed nature allows for efficient sharing of computational resources and data, minimising redundancy and maximising utilisation.

    • Environmental Sustainability: By optimising resource use and reducing the need for redundant infrastructure, the Intelligent Internet can lower the carbon footprint of AI and computing technologies.

    • Purpose-Driven Innovation: With reduced focus on short-term profits, innovation can be directed towards solving humanity’s most pressing challenges, from climate change to global health issues.

    • Inclusive AI Development: The democratised nature of the Intelligent Internet ensures that AI development caters to a wide range of cultures, beliefs, and use cases, rather than being limited to the vision of a few companies.

    At the heart of this vision is a novel concept called Universal Basic Artificial Intelligence (UBAI). It’s about ensuring that the capabilities of artificial intelligence aren’t just the privilege of the few, but a public good available to all. The Intelligent Internet aims to empower individuals, businesses, and societies globally by distributing intelligence as a resource.

    Driving this revolutionary system is an entirely new economic model built around a digital store of value—one backed not by gold or government fiat, but by intelligence itself. Specifically, it’s supported by the computational power (measured in FLOPS, or floating point operations per second) that fuels the algorithms running this intelligent network.

    As more devices and systems connect and contribute processing power, the value of this digital currency strengthens and stabilises. This creates a virtuous cycle: network growth bolsters the store of value, attracting more participants and resources, which in turn expands the network further. It's a self-reinforcing ecosystem where technological advancement and societal benefit are perfectly aligned.“

    Here’s a conceptual diagram of the Intelligent Internet architecture:

    

    Emad discusses the Intelligent Internet concepts in a recent Cognitive Revolution podcast episode:

    
    Yes, idealistic… he’s a dreamer, for sure. But worth paying attention to… the alternative is that we end up with continuing centralisation of AI power.

    
    (Lots of big questions unanswered: HOW could core economic value be shifted to compute? And how would you divert all those Nvidia GPUs outside the profit-oriented economy?)

👑Economics of AI

On the topic of concentrating technological power…

Cloudalism

Yanis Varoufakis is as uncompromising as ever in his analysis of our new “cloudalist” feudal overlords:

The Revolution will be decentralised

Riffing on a similar theme, Joan Westenberg explores the evolution of power structures from medieval times to the modern digital age. She argues that recent technological advances have created a new form of consolidated control over society through data, algorithms, and digital infrastructure, which traditional political solutions fail to regulate because tech companies' economic and political influence are intertwined.

Decentralised alternatives like ActivityPub (Mastodon), Farcaster (Warpcast), Bluesky and Matrix protocol are all initiatives working towards a goal of re-establishing decentralised democratic control:

“The infrastructure of freedom won’t build itself. But neither did the infrastructure of control. Every system of power depends on the daily choices of millions of individuals. Will we shape the change toward digital democracy or submit to digital feudalism?“

Solo unicorn?

Conversely, will the rise of AI agents give birth to the first one-person unicorn company? At what societal cost?

Porter's 5 forces to model AI industry dynamics Link

From 1 year ago, an instructive tutorial on How to Use Porter’s 5 Forces to Analyse the AI Technology Industry.

(Do the the same age-old competition principles still apply in the dawning age of AGI…?)

Dwarkesh X Satya

Dwarkesh Patel’s content continues to be highly accessible and engaging (and he’s so personable!)… here he loosens up Microsoft’s Satya Nadella to discuss Microsoft’s AGI plan. (Coverage of this and Microsoft’s new Majorana quantum chip coming in Wednesday’s newsletter…).

This passage is illuminating: Nadella doesn’t think A[G]I will be a winner-takes-all market because of open-source competition:

“You could say, hey, there is a winner-take-all model- I just don't see it. This, by the way, is the other thing I’ve learned: being very good at understanding what are winner-take-all markets and what are not winner-take-all markets is, in some sense, everything. I remember even in the early days when I was getting into Azure, Amazon had a very significant lead and people would come to me, and investors would come to me, and say, "Oh, it's game over. You'll never make it. Amazon, it's winner-take-all."

Having competed against Oracle and IBM in client-server, I knew that the buyers will not tolerate winner-take-all. Structurally, hyperscale will never be a winner-take-all because buyers are smart.

Consumer markets sometimes can be winner-take-all, but anything where the buyer is a corporation, an enterprise, an IT department, they will want multiple suppliers. And so you got to be one of the multiple suppliers.

That, I think, is what will happen even on the model side. There will be open-source. There will be a governor. Just like on Windows, one of the big lessons learned for me was, if you have a closed-source operating system, there will be a complement to it, which will be open source.

And so to some degree that's a real check on what happens. I think in models there is one dimension of, maybe there will be a few closed source, but there will definitely be an open source alternative, and the open-source alternative will actually make sure that the closed-source, winner-take-all is mitigated.”

(Question arising: If it’s a “winners (plural) take all” market… how many winners is considered optimum?)

🌏 🚢 ⚔️Geopolitical tectonics

The first month of Trump 2.0 has seen tumultuous attention-grabbing, limbic-hijacking headlines as what’s left of the “rules-based order” seemingly disappears down the gurgler and Trump’s unpredictability / base motivations / bizarre gameplay baffle the commentariat.

Like many I’ve been mainlining geopolitics podcasts and lectures for the past few weeks - two of the more measured macro takes on the US’ suddenly changing position on the world:

(Otherwise not sure what to make of the rest of ARC 2025 talks filling up my Youtube feed this week… the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is a neocon think-tank aiming to “unite conservative voices and propose policy based on traditional Western values”. Ew.🤢)

This chap, however…more my kind of chess player:

Pax Pacifica no more?

Down here in the Pacific, last week saw a new Cook Islands-China strategic partnership “opening up the Pacific to China”, sparking tensions with New Zealand.

Literally only a few days later three Chinese military frigates began live firing exercises in the sea between Australia and New Zealand. A wake up call for many… although not a lot can be done about it militarily. “Increase defence spending to 2% of GDP” when your GDP is a fraction of China’s or the US’s isn’t going to cut it…

Australian ex-PM Malcolm Turnbull is fatalistic about the likely pro-China direction of Pacific and ASEAN nations if the US suddenly withdraws its military influence from the region. (He’s also scathing of the AUKUS deal signed by the Morrison government and gives it a very low probability of surviving much past this year’s general election…)

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(It’s been quite a while since I put out the last Mind Expanding links roundup…my aim is to get back into a monthly rhythm in 2025 to share these links and I was hoping to get this one out in January … but so much going on with DeepSeek (etc…) in the last week that I missed the deadline as well…🙄)

In this issue:

• 🌍💥⚠️The Collapse is Coming Peter Watts and Dan Brooks discuss survival adaptation strategies for after the civilisation collapse by 2040-2050

• 💰Stockholm Syndrome, but for capitalism? increasing positive sentiment towards capitalism over the last century, apparently

• 👑💸Oligarchic global wealth distribution patterns and power structures

• 📈📉Dwarkesh Patel X Tyler Cowen will AI's impact on future economic growth be limited or explosive?

• 🏛️Governing tomorrow a provocation towards new governance frameworks suited for distributed, uncertain futures

• ⚖️Copyright in the age of AI really good overview of the current legal battles over AI training data … and the stakes being played for

• 🧪Living intelligence futurist Amy Webb on how combined AI, sensors, and biotech will completely transform business. Your existing AI strategy is out of date already.

• 🧬Understanding human evolution a new DNA study reveals extensive natural selection in humans over 14,000 years

• 🎙️Podcasts Another excellent Dwarkesh conversation, this time with physicist Adam Brown discussing mind-bending frontier theoretical physics

• 📚Books latest book roundup: the TSMC story, evolution theory evolving, nuclear war and the latest tech fiction from Cory Doctorow

• ☕🧠This week: coffee is good for you (clinging as always for bias-confirming data!) a new study finds coffee consumption improves cognitive function in heart patients

Hopefully something of interest for everyone! As always, please feel free to share things you’re reading that you think Memia’s audience would enjoy too.

🌍💥⚠️The Collapse is coming

From last year: The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? A dialogue between evolutionary biologist Daniel Brooks — co-author of A Darwinian Survival Guide - Hope for the Twenty-First-Century and sci-fi author Peter Watts (author of the mind-bending Firefall series — absolute must-read first-contact canon) exploring humanity's paths to survival through the impending global collapse predicted around 2040-2050:

“Peter Watts: In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.

In response to all of this, the last COP was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. We’re headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas.“

“Daniel Brooks: Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.“

Brooks’ fatalist position in a nutshell:

• Homo sapiens will likely survive as a biological species, but "technological humanity" faces significant challenges to make it through. Preserving valuable aspects of modern civilisation like medicine and technology through the collapse will be essential.

• The goal is to shorten the recovery period after collapse from potentially thousands of years to perhaps a single generation, by making strategic preparations and behavioural changes now rather than trying to prevent the inevitable collapse itself.

• The “survival guide” strategy focuses on:

  • Working around rather than confronting existing power structures

  • Developing small, local, self-sufficient communities

  • Redistributing populations away from climate-insecure megacities

  • Embracing evolutionary principles of adaptation and variation

• He also challenges neo-protectionist views about separating humans from nature, arguing that human-environment interaction is natural and necessary.

Once again, my mind races at the juxtaposition between “shorten the recovery period after technological collapse from potentially thousands of years…” and the current “multi-trillion dollar race to build a superintelligent sand-god” … I have no idea which one will turn out to be correct but I’m here for the ride...

💰Stockholm Syndrome, but for capitalism?

A research team from Boston University has published a comprehensive AI analysis of 400,000 newspaper articles spanning decades, revealing a growing positivity towards capitalism over time.

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My Sunday 🧠Mind Expanding thinking out loud... attempting to reconcile two conflicting “north star” philosophies in my own mind: (1) techno-accelerationist Extropianism and (2) ecological preservationism.

(Inspired partly by ’s excellent Technological MetaModernism Coursenotes, in particular the summary of the modern Extropian E/acc movement:

"e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life… Parts of e/acc (e.g. Beff) consider ourselves post-humanists; in order to spread to the stars, the light of consciousness/intelligence will have to be transduced to non-biological substrates…

To which I my instinctive reaction is:

What follows are edited extracts from a dialogue with the new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, going into an initial exploration of the topics. (Sidenote: the new Sonnet feels like another significant step up in my co-thinking toolset, it really seems to grok my questions even more than the previous Sonnet 3.5 or ChatGPT).

Background: the Extropian movement

The Extropian movement emerged in the late 1980s as a transhumanist philosophy and social movement, primarily developed by Max More, who wrote The Principles of Extropy in 1988. Extropianism advocates for using science, technology, and rational thinking to improve the human condition and transcend biological limitations.

Key principles of Extropianism include:

1. Perpetual Progress: The belief in continual technological and social advancement

2. Self-Transformation: Using technology to enhance human physical and cognitive capabilities

3. Practical Optimism: A proactive approach to human advancement

4. Intelligent Technology: Advocating for the development of technologies like AI, nanotechnology, and life extension

5. Spontaneous Order: Favoring decentralized, voluntary social organization

6. Dynamic Optimism: Maintaining a positive, action-oriented outlook towards technological progress

Extropians often support:

• Life extension research

• Cryonics

• Space colonization

• Artificial intelligence development

• Genetic engineering

• Cognitive enhancement

The movement has influenced broader transhumanist thought and tech culture, particularly in Silicon Valley. However, it has also faced criticism for what some see as an overly optimistic view of technological progress and potential disregard for social implications.

What is the relationship between Extropianism and nature / biological conservation?

Extropianism and natural/biological conservation are traditionally thought of as being in tension. Extropians generally view unmodified nature and biology as constraints to be transcended rather than preserved in their current state, which creates several points of philosophical and practical friction with conservation movements:

1. Natural vs. Artificial

• Extropians reject the notion that "natural" automatically equals "good" or "preferable"

• They challenge the conservation movement's tendency to romanticize untouched nature

• They view biological evolution as a blind, inefficient process that can be improved upon through directed technological intervention

2. Transformation vs. Preservation

Read more

It’s been quite a while since I put out the last Memia Mind Expanding links post… (busy busy busy with the book…😰)

So…I’ve built up quite a backlog! Here’s my first attempt to catch up with the usual links to interesting longer reads, deeper thinks and other eclectica that have caught in my net over the last several months… plenty more to come in future issues as I get back on top of things.

(As always, please feel free to share things you’re reading that you think Memia’s audience would enjoy too).

In this issue:

• 🧠🔒🛡️ Firewalls for the mind

  • 🎯 High agency information diet Intentional design and goals for information consumption

  • 🌐 Seeing like a network How dense information networks are changing society and culture

  • 🔕 Ping minimalism protecting precious attention from constant digital interruptions

• 🌀 Meta Metacrisis

  • Perspectiva’s Jonathan Rowson on Deactivating the H2 (Horizon 2) Minus Vortex

  • 🎛️20 control dials shaping the future Nate Hagens’ latest Frankly episode

• 💭 Thinking about AI

  • 🔮AI Predictions and thinking about job impacts and the economy

  • 🪖A new report on ethical considerations of AI in military use

  • 📈 AI business strategy winning at Vertical AI

  • 🔗 Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on crypto + AI applications

  • 🏰 Substrate Monopoly the future of power dynamics in a virtual and intelligent world?

• ✨Eclectica

  • 🔄 Feedback techniques an alternative to the "shit sandwich" approach

  • 🧠🗺️ Mapping consciousness the state-space of conscious experiences

  • 🤔 Chief Philosophy Officer every firm should have one

  • ⚛️ Websim for quantum particle interface simulation🤯

Thanks for reading!

Read more

With my own book dominating proceedings for me over the last few months I haven’t had much time to keep up with the continuing avalanche of quality books being released. Hopefully that is about to change🤞. As such, here’s a short roundup of recently released books (and one older one) which have made their way onto my aspirational “what I should read next if I had time…” bookshelf.

Reading list summary

(For efficiency, the summaries in the list below are largely AI-generated from the book websites themselves and lightly cross-checked and edited by me… accuracy and signal-to-noise ratio hopefully still high enough…links provided to the source for original text).

Books covered in this post:

1. Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom

2. Read Write Own by Chris Dixon

3. We Can Do Better by Maja Göpel

4. Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia

5. One Hundred Years of Insanity by Bob Lloyd

6. In the Long Run by Jonathan White

7. Gigatrends by Thomas Koulopoulos

8. The New Creatives: How AI Changes the Face of the Creative Industry by Seema Sharma

(Special shout out to book-recommender-in-chief @InaBeek for many of these!)

Suitably vanilla GPT-4 Turbo intro para (including the obligatory “delves”…😂):

“In an era where the rapid advancement of technology and the complex challenges of global issues demand our attention, literature continues to serve as a crucial lens through which we can explore and understand these shifts. From the philosophical inquiries of Nick Bostrom in "Deep Utopia" to the critical examination of AI's impact on the creative sectors in Seema Sharma's "The New Creatives," the following collection of books offers diverse perspectives on how humanity might navigate a future punctuated by digital transformation, existential threats, and the call for systemic change. Each title not only delves into the intricacies of its subject matter but also proposes pathways towards understanding and, potentially, solutions. Here’s a closer look at these compelling works, each a piece of the puzzle in our quest to better understand the implications of our rapidly changing world.“

1. Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom

   

   • ISBN: 978-1646871643

   • Overview: "Deep Utopia" explores a world where superintelligence has been safely developed, ushering humanity into a state of post-instrumentality, where human labour is obsolete and human nature can be fully shaped by technology. The book questions the meaning of life and human existence in a world where all technical problems are solved, posing philosophical and spiritual dilemmas in an era of technological abundance.

2. Read Write Own by Chris Dixon

   

Read more

Lots to tickle your neurons In this issue:

• 🌌Theories of everything a survey across the current conventional and challenger theories of the physics of our base reality: is the Universe fundamentally quantum mechanical, computational, a collection of evolving assemblies, postquantum… or a combination of all of these? Can we hack physics with a quantum buffer overflow? Also a roundup of the latest findings from the decade-long 🔭 Dark Energy Survey of the cosmos…

• 🤖💭Thinking wider around AI some diverse perspectives outside the usual narratives on AI: AI’s “North Star”, LLMs still have a toddler's intelligence, how AI will exploit the human brain’s reward function… and four rights-based pillars upon which to build AI regulation.

• 💯The Great Simplification x100 ecological economist Nate Hagens for 100 episodes of his thoughtful, constructive podcast series on big picture issues facing human society.

• 🧭The value of understanding values an exercise to identify the moral values underpinning the current “hyperobject” metacrisis …and then intuit values for future AGI to prioritise sustainability and human well-being?

• 🎲Miscellany the usual roundup of mind expanding links defying categorisation, including: the role of devices as new gatekeepers in journalism, South Korea's Data Dam project to capture value from national data of significance, and the latest from the EFF on privacy-focused legislation.

• 🎥🎧Watching and Listening recommendations for your weekend entertainment: a podcast about the last Soviet cosmonaut, the provocative apocalypse movie Leave The World Behind featurig “kamikaze Teslas” and Space Engine, the universe on your desktop.

Enjoy!

🌌Theories of everything

The quest to explain all reality

Part of my southern hemisphere summer holiday was spent re-listening to Don Lincoln of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) presenting the 24-lecture series The Theory of Everything - The Quest to Explain All Reality. The course takes the listener on a comprehensive journey through modern physics all the way from Newton, Maxwell (electromagnetism) through Einstein’s special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, the Higgs field, today’s consensus on the Standard Model of Particle Physics and then on to the most contemporary theories of what else the universe is made up of other than barionic matter (atoms like us): dark matter and dark energy (see Dark Energy Survey below).

This is my second time through the lecture series and I definitely understood a *bit* more this time around… it’s a challenging listen but a highly recommended entry point if you’re on a mission to skill up in the latest in fundamental physics…

(Recorded in 2017… due an update on all the new discoveries since then!)

🏗️Assembly theory of everything?

British computational chemist Lee Cronin published a radical new paper introducing Assembly Theory, a new approach to measure complexity of any object in the Universe based upon its “evolutionary” history. From the abstract:

“Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution with the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics. These laws underpin life’s origin, evolution and the development of human culture and technology, yet they do not predict the emergence of these phenomena. Evolutionary theory explains why some things exist and others do not through the lens of selection. To comprehend how diverse, open-ended forms can emerge from physics without an inherent design blueprint, a new approach to understanding and quantifying selection is necessary. We present assembly theory (AT) as a framework that does not alter the laws of physics, but redefines the concept of an ‘object’ on which these laws act. AT conceptualizes objects not as point particles, but as entities defined by their possible formation histories. This allows objects to show evidence of selection, within well-defined boundaries of individuals or selected units. We introduce a measure called assembly (A), capturing the degree of causation required to produce a given ensemble of objects.“

Andrew Cote explains it as introducing a new “measure” of how evolved any system is:

Cronin discusses at length with Lex Fridman - engaging and fascinating new approach:

🔣Computational theory of everything?

As previously covered many times, the Wolfram Physics Project proposes (controversially!) that the fundamental theory of physics is computational and can be modelled using complex hypergraphs that exhibit emerging properties like space and matter:

Read more

In this issue:

• 🌪️More Metacrisis A deeper dive into the thinking and research of Daniel Schmachtenberger and team at The Consilience Project: generator functions, the third attractor and quadratic funding / metacrisis.xyz, a technology experts' collective for smart responsest to the Metacrisis.

• 🌐Remaking the Internet Concerns over centrally-controlled AI models and censorship / Cory Doctorow’s new book The Internet Con: Advocating dismantling big tech for internet freedom / Jaron Lanier on disintermediating big tech.

• 💭Thinking about AI A whole spectrum of perspectives on AI's impact on jobs, pay, and society / evolving, living books cowritten with AI / how do you decentralise AI?

• 🧠Learning about AI Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRa) / Stephen Wolfram in conversation on AI and the Universe

• 💸What if money expired? Revisiting the controversial theories of early 20th-century German entrepreneur and self-taught economist Silvio Gesell

• 🌍Planetary boundaries and unlearning economics two recent podcasts from global thought leaders in both fields…

• 🙊Approaching disinformation from two sides behavioural science / markets in fact-checking

• 🏙️Miscellany: everything else: quantum advantage / extreme longevity / circle packing / exactly why is Saudi Arabia building a Line in the sand? / the plastic archaeology of Lego / Taiwan's society and economy as a global beacon.

• 📚Reading list An end-of-year roundup of reading suggestions for the southern hemisphere summer break (or the shorter northern hemisphere “holiday season”!)

Last Mind Expanding Links post of 2023, enjoy. Thanks for reading this year🙏🙏🙏

🌪️More Metacrisis

Following on from Daniel Schmachtenberger’s articulate 1-hour stream of consciousness rant a month or so back (See Memia 2023.44 A (brutal) introduction to the Metacrisis), I’ve been digging a bit deeper into the field. Some resources to share:

• Reminder, definitions of the Metacrisis and associated concepts (interestingly none of these topics or organisations have a Wikipedia page1… I wonder why…?):

  • The polycrisis is the collection of interconnected crises facing humanity that threatens our future.

  • The metacrisis refers to the overarching, systemic crisis that underlies and connects various individual crises. It is more about the fundamental flaws or vulnerabilities in systems that give rise to multiple, seemingly separate crises.

  • Generator functions refer to the dynamics that give rise to the patterns of human behaviour, which in turn contribute to the crisis dynamics, catastrophic risks and dystopias

  • The third attractor is the idea that there is a third path that humanity can take to address the metacrisis, beyond the two paths of 1) business-as-usual, which will lead to increasing instability and collapse, or 2) an attempt at centralised control, which could easily lead to authoritarianism. The third path is a decentralized, collaborative approach that leverages exponential technologies to create a more resilient, antifragile world. It's a vision of a future where humanity works together to create a more sustainable, equitable, and thriving world.

• The Civilization Research Institute (CRI) a global think tank with a lofty goal:

  “The Civilization Research Institute works to support the emergence of a mature global civilization

  • capable of wisely stewarding the unprecedented power of exponential technologies;

  • in concert with an enduringly healthy biosphere;

  • while avoiding the twin failure modes of catastrophes and dystopias.”

• The Consilience Project is a publication of the CRI:

  “The Consilience Project publishes novel research at the leading edges of global risk mitigation, governance design and culture. Our content explores the key challenges and existential threats facing humanity, and the underlying problems with current approaches for addressing them. We outline how our social systems and institutions need to be redesigned if free, open, non-authoritarian societies are to survive.“

• Schmachtenberger is a founding member at The Consilience Project, here’s another recent recording of him in conversation (=monologue!) covering his own intellectual journey and layering up the crises one on top of the other to try to understand the underlying dynamics:

• And here’s his collaborator at Consilience Chris Eddy in a very accessible conversation on the challenges he is working on, plus discussing a recent quadratic funding round for metacrisis.xyz

• Metacrisis.xyz is:

  “a collective of technology experts exploring wise responses to the metacrisis“

  (Some very bright people here…)

• Quadratic funding is a democratic crowdfunding mechanism that aims to promote fair and inclusive funding for public goods, such as open-source software, scientific research, and public art projects. It combines modest individual contributions with larger matching sums from sponsors or contributors, ensuring that everyone has a voice in the funding process.

(My 2c: underlying all of the Consilience / XYZ approach is the hypothesis that there actually ARE core generator functions and they CAN be solved… it may be that this is just another level of (meta-)spectatorship…watching infinitely complex systems interacting without the ability to model them accurately…yikes.)

🌐Remaking the internet

AI and future history…

If the World Wide Web as we know it becomes subsumed inside large AI models controlled by large internet companies… and these models are censored… what does the future look like?

The Internet Con

The prolific independent writer and thinker Cory Doctorow has been all over my wires on this topic in the last month, mostly in the context of his new book: The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation:

Read more

In this issue:

• 🏛️Policy steering rooms A practical concept for using physical spaces for complex decision-making in government. 📈🔍

• 🌡️Climate economics > politics? In the runup to COP28, the economics of meaningful action to address climate change look further away than ever:

  • 🌳Unscalable, unjust and unfixable Carbon offsets are not working.

  • 🏠Insurers retreat What happens when no-one will insure property any more?

  • 🗳️Democracy is rigged say climate scientists.

  • 📉Contesting the Growthocene how to escape the hypnosis of economic “growth” as measured by GDP?

• 💥Collapse anticipation

  • 🚨10 reasons our civilisation will collapse yikes.

  • 🌳Resilience Planning now is the time to start planting in the suburbs…

• 🗣️Cognitive infrastructure under attack our collective ability to make sense of the world is increasingly at risk at failure.

• 🧠Intelligence explosion (but safely)

  • 💭AI Revolution: Azeem Azhar’s reflections on a year with ChatGPT and what’s next.

  • 👥Collective Intelligence humans+AI = safety?

  • 👼Make It Be Good AI safety is too simple, says Yann LeCun.

  • 🧹Time to clean house? is new AI infrastructure the opportunity to completely rethink IT, cloud and data architectures?

• 🔮Spimes, wranglers, and biots a discussion of the concepts in Bruce Sterling’s book “Shaping Things”.

• 🌌On physics

  • ☢️Nuclear fusion pathways a must-see lecture on nuclear fusion development from Ian Chapman, CEO of the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

  • ⚛️Quantum wave collapsing? A trip through Roger Penrose’s theory of how the quantum wave function and consciousness are intertwined.

  • 🕳️Spacetime is a 2D hologram the physicist attempting to “make” space-time in the lab.

  • 🛸UFOs and the New Physics if UFO observations were real, what would that mean for physics?

• 📚Bookshelf Latest book recommendations on virtual reality and AI to wait until they’re available as a GPT.

• 🌈Miscellany

  • 🌳Datafication of nature: Discussion on 'smart' natural areas. 🔌🌍

  • 🌀DMT experiences psychedelics and hyperconnected brain states.

  • 🟰Equations: 17 equations which changed the world.

Enjoy! (Or at least, be updated… some pretty stiff content below on climate change and overshoot…)

🏛️Policy steering rooms

First up, I found this article by public sector innovation practitioners Geoff Mulgan and Giulio Quaggiotto enlightening: Creating useful policy steering rooms, leveraging the existing use of “situation rooms” for crisis management and special operations:

“The problem: Helping policymakers mobilise the knowledge they need to make good decisions is tricky.

Why it matters: This is hard, especially for complex issues like climate change or industrial policy.

The solution: Physical spaces that embody the four dimensions that decision-makers need to keep in mind.“

The authors propose creating “Policy Steering Rooms” for complex, intractable policy challenges, using four walls arranged as follows:

“THE PATTERNS – The first wall would bring together the patterns: what are the key facts and trends that decision-makers need to be aware of, some about the external environment, some about trends, some capturing performance indicators for government itself.

THE PROVEN – The second wall would bring together what’s proven (and proven to be problematic): it would gather the hard evidence – interventions with strong support, and also problematic ones that seem promising but don’t work, drawing on the work of ‘What works’ centres, evaluations and evidence maps, systematic reviews and syntheses of all kinds. Such evidence maps can also increasingly make use of large language models trained on reliable research.

THE PROMISING – The third wall would bring together the promising ideas: innovations of all kinds that might be relevant, whether coming from other countries, other sectors, or emerging on the market.

THE POSSIBLE – A fourth wall would capture the possible: picturing where might the whole system be in 10-20 years, in other words, what is the broader context for the actions taken now.”

Boom. Now add in VR / XR…

Anyone in government wanting to trial a (virtual) Policy Steering Room for some of the most intractable questions on AI policy right now… hit me up…!

(This isn’t a completely new idea… Project Cybersyn was a Chilean government project from 1971-1973 which used similar operations rooms to aid in the management of the national economy.)

🌡️Climate economics>politics?

As reported in this week’s newsletter, 2023 will almost certainly be the hottest in 125,000 years. With COP28 less than 2 weeks away, the temperature is turning up (literally) on the effectiveness (and transparency, and legitimacy…) of the UN’s climate efforts… but the global fossil-fuel-based neocapitalist economy is still operating on (low-intelligence) autopilot accelerating towards the edge of the cliff…

🌳Unscalable, unjust and unfixable

• Commentary on a recent paper by US Climate expert Joe Romm on carbon offsets: carbon offsets are unscalable, unjust, and unfixable – and a threat to the Paris Agreement:

  “Today, every major offset program still has the same exact problems researchers and investigative reports have been identifying for more than two decades. That suggests the core problems are inherent to offsets and intractable – the impossibility of ensuring additionality or of counting them accurately or of solving the double counting problem in a just way…[T]he U.N. has failed in the last two decades to prove it can create or run a credible official regulated offset market—the Clean Development Mechanism. The flaws in the CDM have been detailed again and again in the literature and media, yet the UN has failed to fix them.“

🏠Insurers retreat

• The global insurance industry (which could have actually intervened over 20 years ago) is now instead just sidling off the stage. In The Crash to Come, Jonathan Mingle examines the US insurers exiting home insurance market in California and other states… and the onward implications on the housing market:

  “Insurance companies have responded to climate disasters by raising premiums and dropping customers. Now there’s a new housing bubble waiting to burst.“

🗳️Democracy is rigged against climate

• Climate scientists say that Democracy itself is rigged:

¡Do Not Panic!

Climate Scientists Say Democracy is Rigged

In 1988 the climate scientist James Hansen testified to Congress that the era of global warming had arrived and catastrophe could be expected if nothing was done. It was a testimony that made headlines around the world. Hansen became known as the father of global warming…

Read more

2 years ago · 54 likes · 4 comments · Nate Bear

📉Contesting the Growthocene

• Underlying all of this… the hypnosis of economic “Growth” as measured by GDP? Matthias Schmelzer writes in Illuminem: Contesting the growthocene: from capitalist realism to ecological reduction:

  “Earth system governance has failed. After decades of ineffective climate politics, it’s time to acknowledge this failure. We are presently at 1.2 degrees of global warming – the effects are already immense: floods, droughts, displacement, extinction, etc. Yet according to the IPCC, existing government policies have us on track for 2.4 to 3.2 degrees of global heating this century – so in the lifetime of some of us. We are firmly on track to catastrophic climate endgame scenarios – and I must say, I am deeply scared.

  The core reason for this failure lies not mainly in insufficient governance structures, as important as they may be, but largely in the hegemony of growth in our societies, which in the form of “green growth” dominates sustainability discourses, and in the economic structures of our capitalist, growth-dependent economic system. If we do not overcome the age of growth – and remember, that all IPCC scenarios model a continuation of economic growth that leads to the world economy being 4 to 7 times larger by 2100 than today – without leaving the growthocene, earth system governance will continue to fail.”

  He suggests five primary policy directions for a world “beyond growth":

  • Universal basic services

  • Green job guarantee

  • Cancelling Global South debt

  • Curbing unequal exchange in international trade

  • Instituting policies for ecological reparations.

  Sounds idealistic… but what are the alternatives?

💥Collapse anticipation

🚨10 reasons our civilisation will collapse

Alan Urban writing in Climate Action Australia goes into a really clearly explained, accessible overview of the 10 reasons our civilisation will collapse. Just can’t get enough of this Overshoot graph:

Worth reading in full, AI-generated summary of the 10 reasons:

Read more

In this issue:

• 🔮Have some foresight Singapore’s 30-year foresight capabilities.

• 💫Physics and Cosmology

  • 🌌Forbidden by gravity A new 3D map of matter from the Dark Energy Survey.

  • 🤯 Living in a simulation? The Second Law of Infodynamics and its implications…

  • 🔄 Backwards time travel quantum entanglement to go back in time

• 🧠Neuroscience / Intelligence / Consciousness

  • 🗳 Neuropolitics fMRI reveals cognitive biases affecting political views.

  • 🤔📈 Consciousness and entropy Consciousness as a side-effect of brain state optimization.

  • 🤖💭 Assembly theory is Intelligence the cooperative assembly of neural sub-networks?

• 💸Economics

  • 💶 The end of Europe? More from Yanis Varoufakis

  • 💳Why credit money matters Steve Keen challenging orthodox economics again

  • 🤝 Governing for the Common Good Mariana Mazzucato's new economic paper.

  • 💰 Capitalocene is "Anthropocene" as too anthropocentric?

  • 📉 Post-growth vs. green growth degrowth all the way, baby…

  • 🌿 Economics of decarbonisation UBI through carbon pricing?

  • 🇨🇳 Belt and Road 2.0 China's BRI initiative shifts focus to smaller, greener projects

• 🤖AI

  • 📖Dictionary in embedding space word positions relative to synonyms/antonyms.

  • 👩‍💼 Turing transformation AI could transform the economy and labour markets by raising everyone UP

  • 👎 Don't be a DECEL Noah Smith chastising those who would slow technological progress

• 💥Plural noun for crisis?

  • 🌾 Cruel fantasies Monbiot on the UK agricultural reforms .

  • 🌳 Fast-moving ecological crises Mike Joy argues that behaviour change is essential over policy

  • 🔀 Converging crises the world's top industrial countries lack any kind of coherent approach

  • 🌍 Modelling the drivers of Metacrisis Nate Hagens and Daniel Schmachtenburger lay it all out

• 🎨Miscellany

  • 🪦Dead internet theory the Internet is becoming overwhelmed.

  • 🧬Dublin Longevity Declaration a new proposal for radical life extension research.

• 📚Reading List

  • 🌏 Earth for all steering humanity away from catastrophe.

  • 🕵️ Foundry fast-moving near-future spy thriller based on semiconductor geopolitics

Something for everyone I hope, enjoy!

🔮Have some foresight

A magnificent paper from the Singapore government's Centre for Strategic Futures, Conversations for the Future Vol. 3 showcases how foresight capabilities are now embedded in their government planning and operations after 30 years of practice:

“For a small, open and globalised country, planning for the future is a vital skillset. The government must have the curiosity and bandwidth to assess

what lies ahead and how future changes will affect Singapore. Long-term thinking, complemented by the agility to adjust strategy and policies to

meet future challenges and seize new opportunities, has long been in our DNA.”

— Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong

They make it look so effortless… but this muscle takes decades of constant exercise to build up and I would argue is a key component of Singapore’s international success in so many areas. My own country Aotearoa has much to learn and emulate.

💫Physics and cosmology

• 🌌Forbidden by gravity A new view of all the objects in the universe A new model provides the most complete 3D map yet of matter in the universe, using new techniques and data from the Dark Energy Survey:

• 🤯Are we living in a simulation? University of Portsmouth physicist Melvin Vopson has put forward research discovering what he calls Second Law of Infodynamics: Information IS Energy:

  “the second law of infodynamics states that the information entropy of systems containing information states must remain constant or decrease over time, reaching a certain minimum value at equilibrium.”

  He has proposed experimental tests that could reveal if our reality is actually a computer simulation:

  “My studies point to a bizarre and interesting possibility that we don't live in an objective reality and the entire universe might be just a super advanced virtual reality simulation.“

  Mindblowing stuff.

• 🔄Backwards time travel? University of Cambridge physicists have shown that by manipulating quantum entanglement—a feature of quantum theory that causes particles to be intrinsically linked—they can simulate what could happen if one could travel backwards in time.

  

🧠Neuroscience / intelligence / consciousness

Read more

In today’s post:

• 🌡️📉Understanding Entropy?

  • The Second Law Stephen Wolfram's new book and podcast interview

• 💭Philosophy and Psychology of AI

  • ⚖️🤖If you can’t tell does it matter?Do we need new laws for human-Like AI?

  • 👀It's in the eyes AI will be able to sense what we’re thinking before we know ourselves

  • ❓AI, doubt thyself how Google taught Bard to doubt itself

  • 💻AI is the new OS? Some profound insights from Andrej Karpathy

  • 🗜️Language modeling is compression new research looking at LLMs in the abstract

• 🍎Anti-Apple groundbreaking research from CERN's antimatter factory

• 🌍Keeping on overshooting a new paper from Kiwi conservationists identifies the “behavioural crisis” driving anthropogenic ecological overshoot.

  • ⌛Get Prepping …so what to do about that?

• 📚Reading List A couple more books on AI to ask Anthropic Claude to summarise in bullet points

• 🗂️Miscellany Everything else

  • 🛰️📍The Story of GPS Hurray for Ronald Reagan

    • 👶The origin of conscious awareness new research on babies’ motor skills

    • 🌌Galactic Colonisation sim I could watch for hours

    • 🏢21st Century Architecture in the 20th Century - the original plans for the still-incredible Habitat67 in Vancouver have been rendered in VR

    • 💫3 Body Bot hypnotic physics sims

Thanks for reading, enjoy!

🌡️📉Understanding entropy?

Stephen Wolfram’s work on computation continues to evolve… his new book The Second Law discusses The Second Law of Thermodynamics (Eg: heat always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder regions of matter (or 'downhill' in terms of the temperature gradient).

David Galbraith discusses: Wolfram’s Computational Interpretation of the Second Law and a Physics Based View of Evolution:

“Wolfram suggests that the 2nd Law is the result of the interplay between observers with limited computational ability and systems which cannot be quickly computed by such observers (CI), where a theory of observers is needed to define things more rigorously.”

Here’s the man himself in a 100-minute interview on the Machine Learning Street Talk podcast… get your mental chops around this:

(I use Summarize.tech to help me understand 10% of what he’s talking about…).

(His theory of a “Ruliad” of computational rules underpinning the physics of the Universe is not uncontroversial).

💭Philosophy and psychology of AI

⚖️🤖If you can’t tell does it matter?

With ever-more convincing AI chatbots, avatars and robots arriving ever day, Colin Gavaghan of the Bristol Digital Futures Institute (previously with Otago University) asks: Do we need new law for human-like AI?:

“Are mandatory disclosure laws the answer?

AI agents are certainly being optimized to pass for human, with a view to sell, persuade, seduce and nudge us into parting with our attention, our money, our data, our votes. What’s less obvious is how much mandatory disclosure will insulate us against that. Will knowing that we’re interacting with an AI protect us against its superhuman persuasive power?

There is some reason to think it might play a role...[but also a] ... reason to be somewhat sceptical of mandatory disclosure solutions is that telling me whether something was generated by AI tells me little or nothing about whether it’s true, or about whether the person I’m talking to is who they claim to be...

...What about emotional manipulation? Will knowing that I’m talking to an AI help us resist the sort of emotional investment that will help the AI lead me into bad decisions?

My answer for now is: I just don’t know. What I do know, from many hours of personal experience, is that I am by no means immune to emotional investment even in the very weak AI we have now. They don’t even need to look remotely human. I’m even a sucker for the blatant emotional nudges from the little green owl if I don’t do my DuoLingo practice!

Vulnerable and lonely people are going to be even easier prey. Phishing and catfishing are likely still to be problems, whether the fisher is a human or an AI. Imagine trying to resist that AI Abraham Lincoln (or Taylor Swift or Ryan Gosling), when it’s been optimized to hit all the right sweet-talking notes.

👀It’s in the eyes

We don’t really stand a chance against AIs equipped with cameras: Our Eyes Give Away Our Decisions Before We Can Express Them and our internal cognitive decision-making process isn't as covert as we imagine it to be:

“A recent study demonstrated that our eyes can reveal decisions we’re making, even if we aren’t consciously aware of it. This eye-brain connection, especially the subtle eye movements known as saccades, gives away clues about our cognitive processes.

The intricate dance of our eye movements offers more than just a passive view of the world. Rather, our eyes are predictive indicators of our impending decisions. As technological advancements like eye-tracking continue to evolve, potential applications in market research, product design and behavioral studies become increasingly profound. Recognizing this untapped power of our gaze can provide valuable insights into understanding consumer behavior and decision-making processes.”

❓AI, doubt thyself

How Google taught Bard to doubt itself:

Read more

In today’s post:

⏳Interesting times it’s so over / we’re so back.

• 🧬Close call new genetic research reveals a population "bottleneck" of less than 1300 humans total 930,000 years ago.

• 🛶Our time on the River how we arrived at imminent biodiversity collapse.

• 📉The first stages of civilisation’s collapse…? History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme?

• 📈…Or an unprecedented opportunity? Collapse isn’t the end…it’s only the beginning…

• ⛏️Never run out of resources accelerationists on future material abundance.

🤖💭AI cogitations Deeper perspectives on the continuing torrent of AI releases.

• ✍️Meet Mediocrates AI, meh.

• 🛠️LLM product patterns Patterns for building systems with large language models.

• 🏛️AI and Leviathan AI and its impact on liberal democracies.

• 🗳️Human-centric mechanism design AI for designing fair societies?

• 🇮🇳 India’s AI opportunity Microsoft report on AI governance in India, the world’s most populous nation.

• 🌐Global AI Governance…or not? Joanna Bryson is sceptical on global AI governance.

⚛️ Quantum monism: Is the whole Universe just one single (entangled) quantum object?

🛡️ Future proofing leadership: A recent interview with Cynefin founder Dave Snowden as he passed through Aotearoa.

📊 Data Lakes…warehouses…meshes what are they, exactly?

📝 Miscellany: And an assortment of other noteworthy links including:

• 📓 Exocortex do note-taking apps actually make you smarter?

• 🌐 Three-legged stool: a vision for a new digital public sphere

• 🚶 Car-free city: Pontevedra in Spain is has been banning cars for 24 yearas

• 🌞 Open ventilation building: climate-adaptive architecture

• 🐍 Snake Parasites in a brain: Yikes

📚 Reading and watching List

• Memia’s regular crop of streaming and book recommendations

Thanks for reading, enjoy!

⏳Interesting times

A spectrum of perspectives interpreting our tumultuous times with various levels of pessimism through optimism. (The fundamental question arising from the last few months for me: will technological accelerationism be constrained by ecological limits?)

🧬Close call

New genetic analysis from a team at the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health estimates that the population of ancestors of all today’s humans fell by 98 per cent to only 1280 “breeding individuals” around 930,000 years ago — and the population remained very low until around 815,000 years ago. (A phenomenon known as a population “bottleneck”). How history turns on a knife-edge…

🛶Our time on the River

Tom Murphy writing in Resilience: Our time on the river. How did we get to today’s imminent biodiversity collapse? (🎩 @samrag for sharing)

📉The first stages of civilisation’s collapse…?

Michael T Klare leverages off geographer-historian Jared Diamond’s bestselling 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed to speculate that We Are Witnessing the First Stages of Civilisation’s Collapse:

“Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?…As Diamond argues, each of those civilizations arose in a period of relatively benign climate conditions, when temperatures were moderate and food and water supplies adequate. In each case, however, the climate shifted wrenchingly, bringing persistent drought or, in Greenland’s case, much colder temperatures. Although no contemporary written records remain to tell us how the ruling elites responded, the archaeological evidence suggests that they persisted in their traditional ways until disintegration became unavoidable.”

📈…or an unprecedented opportunity?

Conversely: Futurist Nafeez M Ahmed writes the Age of Transformation newsletter offering “systems-thinking for the global phase-shift”. He is way more optimistic about our current time… The Collapse of Civilisation is an Unprecedented Opportunity:

“Collapse is not the end - it's the beginning. The fear and uncertainty of this time signals the obsolescence of old ways of being. As we step into the unknown, truly new ways of being are emerging. Our challenge is to seize on and amplify these opportunities…

[there is] a wider body of evidence suggesting that the rise and fall of civilisations in history is part of a longer process of human cultural evolution. This research draws on the seminal work of the late ecologist Crawford Holling, who spent decades studying natural systems, from predator-prey dynamics to forests.

Holling found that all ecological systems experience a life cycle which goes through four stages: growth, conservation, release, and reorganisation. Holling called this the ‘adaptive cycle’…

Since then, scientists have found that the adaptive cycle is applicable to social systems and organisations, and can be used to understand processes of political change…Holling’s framework can be used powerfully to make sense of the huge social-ecological system that is human civilisation.”

⛏️Never run out of resources

For an even more optimistic (accelerationist) take on humanity’s future material abundance, Marian L. Tupy and David Deutsch partner on We Will Never Run Out of Resources:

“The supply of minerals is theoretically finite, but human knowledge and creativity are limitless.…the cost of energy is bound to fall. The sun is effectively a nuclear fusion reactor converting millions of tons of mass into energy every second. Someday soon we will be able to capture as much of that energy as we like via super-efficient solar panels. The difficulty won’t be harvesting that energy but getting rid of waste heat by radiating it into space. We may find it more convenient to make our own fusion reactors. All the elements found on Earth other than hydrogen and helium were made by transmutation in various kinds of stars. In the distant future, we could use artificial fusion not only for energy but for artificial transmutation, to make whatever elements we like. All we need is abundant energy and hydrogen, which is plentiful in the water that covers most of the Earth’s surface and is the most common element in the universe.

Long before humans have extracted all the useful atoms in the Earth’s crust and oceans, we will develop the technological sophistication to obtain vastly more atoms and energy from asteroids, planets and beyond. In that future, just as has always been the case, the only bottleneck will be the rate at which new knowledge can be created. And nothing prevents us from improving that rate too. Knowledge is the ultimate resource and there are no limits on creating it.”

All of which I have generally agreed wholeheartedly with until very recently… but the complexity and fragility of the biological ecosystems which sustain us has reared up as an existential issue which could cause a mass extinction event well before humanity+AI colonises the solar system... this is the dualist superposition of our time.

🤖💭AI cogitations

Some deeper takes on the AI torrent flowing around us…

✍️Meet Mediocrates

Russ White: Meet Mediocrates: when AI does all the heavy mental lifting

“Dear ChatGPT, Please Do All My Thinking for Me, Thanks!

Mediocrates decided reading books so he could learn to build solid arguments and elegant writing skills was far too much trouble. It is easier to let a chatbot do your writing for you. Reading an entire book or research paper was for chums. He decided too many books and papers were being published anyway, so he would let a chatbot summarize new books and papers.“

(The hole in this argument IMO: he uses the term “My thinking” to refer only to the unaugmented human mind - but “my” sense of identity is now well expanded to include the “holobiont” of Human body, brain PLUS AI augmentations. If “My thinking” includes my brain PLUS GPT, AI is only part of that…)

🛠️LLM product patterns

Eugene Yan scans patterns for building systems & products with LLMs. A useful framework:

Read more

Memia Mind Expanding is my ~fortnightly curation of links to deeper dives, bigger thinks and other eclectica that I’ve come across while compiling the weekly newsletter. Thanks for subscribing!

In today’s post:

• 🚫Don't delegate understanding avoiding ignorance

• 🧠More thinking about AI the pitfalls of AI hype and the philosophy of AI dreaming and understanding

• 📄The future of documents? how might AI transform information encapsulation?

• 🌍☔🌡️On climate change climate modelling and the limits to growth

• 🏙️♻️On urban design fresh regenerative urban strategies from Australia and the latest on sponge cities

• 💭Miscellany everything else: never ending stories, China convergence, representation theory, industrial pop culture, quantum neuromorphism and the power of fungi🍄

• ⚫🔭Space stories How Voyager 2 was rescued and early black holes spotted by JWST

• 📚Reading list even more books which I will be asking GPT-4 to summarise in bullet points🤫

Enjoy!

🚫Don’t delegate understanding

An impassioned post from Obsidian CEO Stephan Ango (@kepano on Twitter): Don’t delegate understanding. This aligns with a lot of my thinking these days as I continue to “try to make sense of it all”…

“Don't delegate understanding.

There is a parasite, I see it everywhere. It consumes your health and wealth. It preys on ignorance and is easy to catch. It’s so common you may not even notice you have it.

The parasite has a simple and attractive proposition: let me take care of this hard thing for you. Trust me, I know better. Instead of understanding it yourself, you choose to give the parasite control over your health, education, money, housing, business, identity, data, infrastructure, climate, justice. Even your beliefs.

The parasite has three stages: acceptance, extraction, intervention. …

…The three stages of the parasite are interdependent. Every stage benefits someone who is not you. Everyone tells you this is just the way it is. Never mind that the parasite is living large.

Why? Extraction and intervention pay well. Education and prevention do not. The incentives are aligned to make the parasite persuasive. You are alone against a coordinated system that is exceedingly effective at packaging problems you should never have with solutions you should never need. A symbiotic loop.

You must recognize the parasite in its earliest form. To inoculate yourself don’t delegate understanding.

If you build your own understanding you will be the one who earns the dividends.”

🧠More thinking about AI

Some more long-form thinking about AI in amongst the torrent of new models and use cases:

Capitalism’s willing executioner?

Ted Chiang in The New Yorker asks: Will AI become the new McKinsey?

“I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you.”

The Generative AI Trap

Insightful from Alberto Romero: The LK-99 Superconductor Buzz Has Exposed the Trap of the Generative AI Revolution:

I found the buzz around RTSC (room temperature semiconductors) uniquely valuable to illustrate how AI plays tricks in our minds—not the systems but the concept. Until now, I didn’t have a clear contemporary example to get the point across but the circumstances have changed: even if the LK-99 ends up being nothing, it’s a contender to lead the global conversation on which new tech will disrupt the world the fastest. As such, it can provide insights about generative AI unavailable otherwise.

I don’t think anyone expected generative AI to face a competitor for the title of “most revolutionary technology of the century” so soon (or never). The LK-99 and its hypothetical RTSC properties—whether real or not—give us a serendipitously unique opportunity to see what is and isn’t reasonable in the discourse around the supposedly inevitable AI revolution…

It took a possibly greater tech discovery to evidence that we're collectively living inside the febrile dream that is the generative AI hype bubble. As an AI lover, I don't mean it to disregard the ability of ChatGPT and the like, which is undeniable, but to underscore how people’s response to AI progress—and the predictions that stem from that response—are disproportionate.”

AI is dreaming

Read more

Memia Mind Expanding is my ~fortnightly curation for paid subscribers of links to deeper dives and bigger thinks and other eclectica that I’ve come across while compiling the weekly newsletter. Thanks for reading!

In today’s post:

• 💭Grappling with complex systems a look across several frameworks trying to understand humanity's major challenges:

  • 🔋Energy blindness: an accessible overview of the prolific energy philosopher Nate Hagens’ theory The Great Simplification

  • 🌐The ecosystem of wicked problems another polycrisis causal loop diagram

  • 👁Carbon tunnel vision and Earth crisis blinkers: taking the lens broader than just carbon emissions

  • 🙄Moodsplainers climate systems are complex, get back to work

• ⚙Further down the stack what lies beneath AI

  • 🪄Monopoly on magic fantastic deep-dive into pivotal chip-maker-maker ASML

  • 🔬Garage chip startup does startup Atomic Semi signal a future of chip manufacturing in your garage?

• AI roundup

  • ☠AI and bio-engineered/chemical weapons risks grave threats

  • 🧪AI and bad recipes a supermarket AI chatbot goes wrong…

  • 📊Meta, Llama and open source insights into Meta's strategy to open up Llama to the world

  • 🧠Multiple AGI personality syndrome how many AGIs fit in one neural network?

  • 🎓RLHF explained really good article on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

  • 📉📈AI job crunch some recent insights on how AI is affecting tech labour markets

• The quantum realm stretching my mind

  • 🧠Bounded-error quantum polynomial time beyond the hype: what can a quantum computer actually do? (P versus NP problem 101)

  • 🤯Field theories trying to get my head around Quantum (thermal) field theory complexity and failing

  • 💫Gravitational memory a potential direction in the search for a theory of quantum gravity

• Miscellany everything else

  • 🛰️Elon Musk, space oligarch satellite dominance concerns

  • ☢️MAD is mad two dark videos on how quickly nuclear war could escalate

  • ⚡Photonic AI light-based AI computation advancements

  • 🌹Dreaming in-scent-ives evidence that certain fragrances impact cognitive function 🧠✨

• 🎙️Mind expanding listening a couple of podcast recommendations for your weekend

Enjoy!

💭Grappling with complex systems

Several links on the topic of the complex systems underpinning humanity’s major challenges in the early 21st century.

🔋Energy blindness

Energy economist and philosopher Nate Hagens continues to build up a huge body of work at his podcast The Great Simplification, exploring “the systems science underpinning the human predicament”.

He and his team have managed to condense down their various systems theses as to what is going on with the world’s economy and climate… and what is coming in this animated video (really accessible, 15mins at 2X speed, lots of crisp insights).

It contains some real pearler quotes:

On the “carbon pulse” and energy blindness:

“we're all alive during the carbon pulse. The few hundred years where humans are drawing down Earth's energy battery millions of times faster than it was trickle charged by daily photosynthesis.”

On debt, economic growth and the energy surplus:

“Debt allows us to spend resources from the future and call it economic growth.

This phenomenon has become so pervasive in the last 50 years that we think it's normal to consume today and pay tomorrow. The developed world is now using debt to enable the extraction of things we couldn't otherwise afford to extract to produce things we otherwise couldn't afford to consume. This strategy has an expiration date because all this new money will one day be spent on real things requiring energy.”

On consumerism (my emphasis):

“In a materially rich modern world, the habituation to the action of consumption leads to the wanting of things, culture wide, being stronger than the reward we get from having them. This is a fundamental problem for an economic system that's turning billions of barrels of oil into microlitres of dopamine.”

On the global economy:

“Like a shark needing to swim to get oxygen flowing through its gills, our current economic system has an imperative to grow in order to satisfy prior financial commitments. We can't stop nor can we slow down or the system will crash.”

Here is the extended version: a 3-hour presentation which takes “33 core myths and stories prevalent in modern culture and contrasts them to our underlying biophysical (biological and physical) realities”:

🌐The ecosystem of wicked problems

From 2019, Christian Sarkar and Philip Kotler presented this causal loop diagram at the Drucker Forum. Try to get your head around this without AI!

Read more

Mind Expanding is my ~fortnightly curation for Memia subscribers of links to deeper dives and bigger thinks and other eclectica that I’ve come across while compiling the weekly newsletter. Thanks for reading!

In today’s post:

• 🤔Wait and see waiting for this week’s potentially world-changing room-temperature superconductor results can be replicated…

• 📈On intelligence

  • 🧠Determined more by brain shape than connectome?

  • 💡An emergent property of physics?

  • 🌳Will AI look at slow-thinking humans as we look at trees?

• ⏳Post-Anthropocene physics, humanism and population collapse

• 📰Headline grabbing more curious news algorithms

• Miscellany other links including:

  • 🍃The EU’s ambitious new nature restoration law

  • 🙈A metabolic future with continued plastic waste

  • 🌌Supermassive dark stars in the early universe?

• 📚Reading list book recommendations including the self-assembling brain and futures with AGI

🤔Wait and see

Like everyone I’m tracking the potentially world-changing hype around the announced discovery of room-temperature. ambient-pressure superconducting material by scientists in South Korea… more in next week’s Wednesday newsletter once the dust settles. Can the results be replicated?

On intelligence

Three illuminating perspectives on intelligence:

🧠Brain shape

A recent study published in Nature claims to overturn the century-old paradigm of how brains work, identifying that the overall shape of an individual’s brain has a far more substantial impact on our cognitive processes, emotions, and behaviour than its intricate neuronal connectivity.

The research contrasts “eigenmodes” of brain geometry against those of the traditional connectome:

💡Emergent property of physics

Sam Altman knows a thing or two about (artificial) intelligence:

(The heritage of this concept goes back at least 34 years, to an essay in The Long Now Foundation: Intelligence as an Emergent Behavior or, The Songs of Eden by American inventor Danny Hillis.)

🌳AI thinks we’re like trees

The most profound insight on AI accelerationism that I’ve come across recently:

⏳Post-Anthropocene

As we officially enter a phase of “global boiling” (saving that for Wednesday’s newsletter, too…), some perspectives on the “Post-Anthropocene” era:

Post-Anthropocene physics

• From 2021, University of San Diego physics professor Tom Murphy’s textbook Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet: Assessing and adapting to planetary limits is an accessible guide to the physical constraints which are yet to significantly permeate any of our societal or economic thinking:

  

  “Where is humanity going? How realistic is a future of fusion and space colonies? What constraints are imposed by physics, by resource availability, and by human psychology?  Are default expectations grounded in reality?

  
  This textbook, written for a general-education audience, aims to address these questions without either the hype or the indifference typical of many books.  The message throughout is that humanity faces a broad sweep of foundational problems as we inevitably transition away from fossil fuels and confront planetary limits in a host of unprecedented ways—a shift whose scale and probable rapidity offers little historical guidance.“

  In one picture: what comes after fossil fuels?

• One review of the book gets straight to the point: How, precisely, we’re fucked:

  “We have grown up on the side of going up, but we will die in the age of coming down. At the end of our lives, our lifestyles will end with us. What goes up must come down. Like good old junkies, we believe that another fix is around the corner. We think it’s renewables, we think it’s green energy, that if we just unite to stop carbon emissions, we can go on like before. But carbon is just one problem. As math tells us, if we keep using more and more energy to power AI and virtual worlds and blast off to space, we’ll boil the oceans even if that energy is renewable. We can’t keep growing forever. On a finite planet, it’s just not physically possible.“

  (This seems absolutely fundamental to understanding humanity’s future: I plan to go deeper here to understand Murphy’s arguments against feasibility of nuclear fusion and space-based solar in particular…join me.)

• Post-Anthropocene humanism

  An essay from Editor-in-Chief Nathan Gardels in Noema magazine, Post-Anthropocene Humanism:

  “…what will become of human centrality as our species is knocked off its pedestal by machines more intelligent than we are and de-centered by the humbling realization that survival depends on reducing our outsized footprint on this fragile planet? 

  The vise [vice] of these two developments is prompting a rethinking of what humanism might mean in the oncoming future.“

  Including a note on the thinking of the prescient James Lovelock who died 1 year ago:

Read more

In today’s post:

• 🌍Regrowth Economics exploring a new monetary model aligning incentives with biodiversity

• 📚Other Climate Reading on technology, degrowth and climate doom-loops

• 💩Enshittification and the Crap-ocalypse - Cory Doctorow and Ted Gioia on the AI-driven deterioration of the online world

• 🤖Thinking about AI some deeper thinking and insights about the impact of artificial intelligence from George Monbiot, Ethan Mollick, Bruce Sterling and Mario Gabriele

• 🧬Biotech new breakthroughs in biotechnology including J. Craig Venter Institute’s latest work exploring the evolution of the “minimal cell”.

• 🌌 Cosmology thinking about the universe's evolution, the detection of a “cosmic bass note” of gravitational waves and the Panspermia hypothesis.

• 📚 Reading latest additions to the virtual bookshelf including a new book from Deepmind (and now Inflection AI) co-founder Mustafa Suleyman.

• 🎧 Listening a podcast on building a “Second Brain” with Jerry Michalski, now in his 24th year of curating “Jerry’s Brain” online.

• 🎁 Miscellany some not-altogether-uplifting stories, including what to eat in a global catastrophe, the ultra-dark Universe 25 rodent society experiment from the early 1970s and Trainspotting at 30.

Enjoy!

ICYMI

Here’s a roundup of my public speaking and media appearances in the first half of the year:

🌍Regrowth economics

Riffing a bit further on Wednesday’s Memia post:

Ultimately, the world’s global economic and monetary system is broken. Pretty much every climate and biodiversity metric shows that Western capitalism (…and Chinese “state communism” just as much…) is destroying the planet’s ecological resources at an alarming rate. Optimistically, slowing and starting to reverse these trends will take at least 2 decades:

Even the FT is running increasingly urgent commentary on this:

”Climate change requires …new theories. To fix a system’s breakdown, we need to fix the system that causes it: capitalism. But our theories are predicated on maintaining that system, searching for ways to make “the business case” and gain market advantage when addressing climate change. That is as absurd as making the business case to not commit suicide. We prioritise the bottom line when the practices that contribute to it threaten the survival of the planet: the endless pursuit of economic growth, a view of nature as merely a limitless source for materials and sink for wastes, and the mindless consumption that drives it. We are facing an existential crisis, not an exercise in theoretical advancement.

In response, research theories must now treat economic systems as intertwined with the primacy of natural ones. Otherwise, by 2030, damage to the global climate will be irreversible regardless of the ushering in of new technologies and business models. We need to be more fully engaged with the natural world during our studies and more fully engaged with the social world in sharing our findings.“

The EU’s recent 2023 Strategic Foresight Report agrees:

“The need for a new economic model, focused on the wellbeing of people and nature, decoupling economic growth from resource use and shifting to more sustainable production and consumption. Up to 75% of Eurozone businesses are highly dependent on natural resources. Economic, social and environmental sustainability are inextricably linked.“

Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics from 2017 sets out a framework for conceptualising “overshoot”…

…but so far, lots of talk (me included…). No definitive answers. No action.

Given the growing urgency of the crisis, my thinking is turning towards ways to reframe the global economy *beyond* “sustainability” and towards “regeneration”? I came across this excellent thread from Robert Ferry proposing a new foundation for “Regrowth Economics”:

Ultimately the big idea:

What if, in order for central banks and governments to write more wealth into existence ("print money"), they would be required to demonstrate to the world that they had made some real and measurable progress on environmental regeneration?

Effectively, re-introduce a global monetary standard. Instead of gold, or Bitcoin, constrain money supply based upon ecological restoration, enforcing staying within the planet’s ecological boundaries. And by doing so (the theory goes…) this would align economic incentives with biodiversity.

There are plenty of data resources out there upon which to base such a standard:

• As covered on Wednesday, the Global Footprint Network manage the Ecological Footprint which forms the basis of Earth Overshoot Day.

• ClimateTrace: Independent Greenhouse Gas Emissions Tracking:

  

• PurpleAir - Crowdsourced global air quality monitoring

• Also the Ecoregions 2017 resource from RESOLVE, based upon an important 2017 scientific paper: An Ecoregion-Based Approach to Protecting Half the Terrestrial Realm.

  “How can we save life on Earth? It happens within each community, ecoregion, and country as we choose to leave room for nature to thrive. This map charts our progress.

  Scientists now believe that to avoid the worst of the current extinction crisis and to keep temperature rise below 2^oC and also avoid negative biospheric feedbacks, as much as 50% of the land and seas must be kept natural. To this end, we can convert the ecoregions map into a tool for measuring our progress towards the goal of half-protected where lands could be under various forms of conservation management and ownership, from government, to indigenous peoples' or privately-held lands. The map presented here intersects the amount of habitat now protected and the amount of unprotected habitat remaining that could be brought under conservation“

Overcoming the Oracle Problem

But *HOW* do you base global money supply on biocapacity indicators? Let’s leave that story for another day… but the fact we’ve been using outdated macroeconomic models based upon a unconstrained USD de facto reserve currency means it’s certainly highly feasible.

One of the key challenges will be to get around the classic “oracle problem” — familiar to those working with blockchain technology — effectively how to validate ecological data sources as “objective” (eg reliable to an agreed level of consensus) rather than “subjective” before placing them onto a shared (blockchain…) ledger and using them for a smart contract (eg to regulate money supply).

This opens up a whole can of technical worms… but I imagine that there are some decentralised consensus oracle services being developed out there right now to provide accurate measurement of ecological indicators.

(Kim Stanley Robinson went some way to describing a similar mechanism with the “Carbon Coin” in his book Ministry for the Future).

Sidestepping political inertia

Incumbent political and financial power structures will be mortally threatened by these changes and will create a depressing inertial drag which will last for decades to come…

But the unavoidable fact is… momentum towards ecological regeneration needs to be increased *NOW*…there is no time to wait for governments and UN talking shops… Simply put: humanity needs to prioritise whatever it takes to place over 50% of the planet’s surface permanently under managed conservation, regrowth economics or no economics.

Grassroots up initiatives

The mission to restore 50% of global surface back to nature will need to start from the grassroots up. And this will need to happen *in parallel with* lagging changes to global ecological and economic governance, however long that takes.

Some grassroots initiatives I’m tracking (thanks again Robert Ferry for some of the links):

• Ecosystem Restoration Communities: A global movement of everyday people that are reversing ecological destruction across six continents.

• Common Land: Restoring landscapes to create a brighter future on planet Earth

• Homegrown national park: a US initiative encouraging native planting:

  "In the past, we have asked one thing of our gardens: that they be pretty. Now they have to support life, sequester carbon, feed pollinators and manage water."

• A couple of initiatives here in my home country Aotearoa:

  • The New Zealand Plant Conservation Network vision is that “the rich, diverse and unique native plant life of New Zealand is recognised, cherished and restored”.

  • Regenerate New Zealand aims to crowdfund purchases of pine tree blocks and restore back to native forests after harvesting

I’m sure there are some crypto-token initiatives bubbling around which are working on providing an “oracle” on the Ethereum (or other cryptocurrency) networks… upon which a parallel economy might start developing for these grassroots initiatives, trading goods and services grounded on biodiversity. Then let’s wait a few years until governments catchup with a biodiversity credits system.

📚Other climate reading

Two other climate links worth delving into:

• Just dreaming? Jason Hikkel: On technology and degrowth

  “In sum, green growth scenarios play loose with science, assume incredibly unjust arrangements, and gamble with the future of humanity—and all of life on Earth—simply to maintain ever-increasing levels of aggregate output in high-income countries, which, as we will see, is not even needed.

  Ecological economists point out that when we scale back our assumptions about technological change to levels that are, to quote the physicist and ecological economist Julia Steinberger, “non-insane,” and when we reject the idea that growth in rich countries should be maintained at the expense of the Global South, it becomes clear that relying on technological change is not enough, in and of itself, to solve the ecological crisis. Yes, we need fast renewable energy deployment, efficiency improvements, and dissemination of advanced technology (induction stoves, efficient appliances, heat pumps, electric trains, and so on). But we also need high-income countries dramatically to reduce aggregate energy and material use, at a speed faster than what efficiency improvements alone could possibly hope to deliver. To achieve this, high-income countries need to abandon growth as an objective and actively scale down less necessary forms of production, to reduce excess energy and material use directly.“

• Ecological doom-loops John Dearing, Gregory Cooper and Simon Willcock: Why ecosystem collapses may occur much sooner than expected

  “Around the world, rainforests are becoming savanna or farmland, savanna is drying out and turning into desert, and icy tundra is thawing. Indeed, scientific studies have now recorded "regime shifts" like these in more than 20 different types of ecosystem where tipping points have been passed. Around the world, more than 20% of ecosystems are in danger of shifting or collapsing into something different.

  These collapses might happen sooner than you'd think. Humans are already putting ecosystems under pressure in many different ways—what we refer to as stresses. And when you combine these stresses with an increase in climate-driven extreme weather, the date these tipping points are crossed could be brought forward by as much as 80%.“

💩Enshittification and the crap-ocaplyse

Such a great new word from independent writer Cory Doctorow: TikTok’s Enshittification:

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.“

• Here he is discussing the problem with ABC’s Future Tense Podcast: Cory Doctorow: Platform capitalism and the curse of "enshittification".

Meanwhile writer Ted Gioia explores similar themes in 30 signs you are living in an Information Crap-ocalypse:

Read more

(A bit later than scheduled hitting “send” this issue… lots going on in the last week…thanks for your patience🙏)

Links in today’s post:

• 🔮🤭New Zealand’s leading futurist (it says here)

• 🧬🔣Human+AI holobionts a shift in biology understanding - humans as meta-organisms including microbiota - extended with AI

• 📚Embedding all of human belief: Project Tenet aims to encode all religious beliefs and more for machine learning

• 💸Poisonous predictions: the inherent philosophy underpinning of McKinsey's ludicrously optimistic AI economic potential projections

• 🧑‍💼AI not killing jobs. Yet. Contrary to fears, AI has not caused significant job losses so far

• 🌍AI to solve global problems: AI's potential in addressing climate change, biodiversity loss, and inequality

• 📉📈The global economy - where to from here? discussion of future global economic scenarios

• 🔀💻Quantum computing for economic modelling: A new breakthrough demonstrates quantum processing for far faster complex economic modelling…could this bring a new age of “technosocialism”?

• 🧠How brains work: Neuroscience and psychology insights:

  • 😶‍🌫️Brain circuits for consciousness: new research has identified the parts of the brain implicated in conscious awareness

  • 🤝The neuroscience of trust how easily hacked we are…

  • 😴Weird dreams an AI-based theory explains why we dream

  • 🐙Do octopuses dream? research shows octopuses display REM-like sleep cycles

• Miscellany

  • 🛍️The end of brands as we know them: The impact of generative AI on marketing

  • 🔬Mechanistic interpretability: Understanding how Large Language Models "think"

  • 🗺️Mapping the future Simon Wardley’s futurist methodology

• 📚 Reading List a few more book recommendations for your virtual shelf

Enjoy!

ICYMI

🔮In what could be described as a clear case of the blind leading the blind, this week Aotearoa news outlet BusinessDesk labelled me “New Zealand’s Leading Futurist”(™🤣) when I was interviewed on the latest Business Of Tech podcast: What's in store for Aotearoa, with Kiwi futurist Ben Reid.

(That’s very flattering, I’ll take it.🤭)

The podcast was recorded last Friday just before the NZ Hi-Tech Awards when I sat down with the most excellent Peter Griffin in Ōtautahi and we had a long conversation about emerging technologies and their implications for Aotearoa's future. A really free-flowing and wide-ranging discussion, take a listen. (And I highly recommend the whole Business Of Tech podcast series, Peter and colleague Ben Moore are doing superb work since they started just a couple of months ago.💯)

🧬🔣Human+AI holobionts

The Economist ($walled, sorry) explores the concept of “holobionts” — meta-organisms made up of animals, plants AND the microbiota that live on and inside them. This represents a paradigm shift in how we think about biology:

“How many cells are there in a human being?” ...One answer is around 37trn. This is the number, in a typical adult weighing 70kg, that trace their descent from the fertilised egg which brought that human into existence.

Look at it another way, though, and you arrive at a figure roughly twice as large. That adds in the archaean, bacterial, fungal and protist cells which occupy the mouth, gut, skin, lungs and almost every other surface, nook and cranny of the human body. These cells contribute only about 0.3% to a person’s body weight. But being, on the whole, much smaller than “proper” human cells, they are almost equally numerous.

Metagenomics analyses simultaneously the genomes of everything [in a sample of biological matter]...

...The best studied animal holobiont of all is Homo sapiens. Topologically, a human being is a torus—a three-dimensional object with a hole through the middle. The hole in question is the alimentary canal. Nearly the whole surface of this torus is home to microbes, though different parts have different inhabitants. By far the largest numbers of them live in the lower gut.

These gut microbes extend the digestive capabilities of the human holobiont in the same way (though not to the same degree) as happens in termites, by breaking up fibrous plant polymers into smaller molecules that the other 37trn cells can metabolise. But they produce lots of other molecules, too, some of which send signals to the holobiont’s animal cells. Those cells, moreover, often signal back.”

Further to my recent musings about human/AI symbiosis — including that there is an uncanny resemblance between current gut-bacteria/human relationships and future human/AI relationships — my Twitter bio now starts: “Human-AI holobiont”.

(This also implies that the definition of “biont” abstracts beyond just DNA-based genetics to some new kind of gene+memetic bio/digital information substrate…)

💭Going deeper on AI

A roundup of deeper (and broader) thinking about the current AI acceleration which doesn’t always make the cut for the weekly scanning emails…

📚Embedding all of human belief

Project Tenet is an open source community initiative to embed all of human belief.

(In machine learning, “embed” refers to the process of converting complex, high-dimensional data into a lower-dimensional, dense representation that captures its key features).

The first visual projections based on a few religions are shown below:

The Alexandria Index is a core component of this initiative which collates together all of the core religious texts and their (machine-readable) embeddings:

Read more

Links in today’s post:

• 🌐🌍Technopolar hegemony vs EarthStack economic and geopolitical power continues to concentrate into the hands of multinational tech companies. Is global open source govtech the only way to address this?

• 💭Thinking about AI applied statistics

  • 🐍AI Ouroboros AI models training on AI-generated content risk misperceiving reality

  • 🗣️ ChatGPT as strategist: don’t replace your strategy team (yet)

  • 🔀 The digital twin IS the strategy an article I wrote from 2020

  • 🔓 Is Open Source AI winning? Alberto Romero thinks not

  • 📚 Ted Chiang on AI the sci-fi author provides an insightful commentary on AI in the FT

  • 🤖 AI learning from AI detaches from reality.

  • ⚠️ Model evaluation for extreme risks an important new paper from Google Deepmind provides a process to evaluate potential extreme harm from new AI models.

  • 🌳 AI Alignment = planting trees? an exploration of Greg Kieser's work with the Reforesters initiative, promoting AI alignment with ecological restoration

  • 🔮 Networking in the Mind Age contemplating evolution beyond humans

  • 💻 Universal Basic AI? a new human right?

• 🧩 Miscellany quick mentions of several other topics:

  • 🌍 Global morality isn't declining according to a new study

  • 🧠 Hyperdimensional computing, a new approach promising more power-efficient AI problem-solving.

  • 🦠 Slime mold and the definition of intelligence.

  • 🤯 The Gödel metric

• 👽 The aliens are already here? The latest UAP rabbit hole…

• 🏙️ Les Espaces d'Abraxas a look into the backstory of French social architecture from the 1980s

  Memia is a reader-supported publication. To help me keep put in the time to write these newsletters every week (and to keep me topped up with caffeine…) please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. In particular if you read this for work! 🙏

🌐🌍Technopolar hegemony vs EarthStack?

A common theme for my writing the Memia newsletter over the last 3 and a half years has been the concentration of economic and political power in multinational, hyperscale technology companies. In particular this imagined 2030 scenario, “MicrosoftStarlink, SinoStack nations“ from ⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa #8 a year ago:

“Over the course of the 2020s, the bifurcation between mainstream Western (US) and Chinese technology stacks continues until it reaches the point where there is very little interoperability at all…

…Throughout the 2020s, the consolidation of Western cloud computing infrastructure into just three giant US technology firms (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud) continues and by 2028 these three firms make up over 95% of computational capacity throughout Western nations. Despite soothing assurances about “privacy” and “data sovereignty”, there are lingering suspicions that US intelligence services have back doors into this infrastructure…

…Around the world, national Governments become increasingly dependent on these huge scale, vertically integrated cloud data centres, communications networks and technology stacks. Most small country governments can only afford to do a deal with one giant to build an onshore data centre: either Amazon, AlphabetMeta or MicrosoftStarlink. Part of the deal includes provision of all government digital services. Core services like citizen identity, passports, welfare payments, elections all get purchased from the cloud company’s services catalogue.

As these changes become rapidly embedded, it becomes clear that no government is ever going to be able to change the stack they are operating on and the concept of “sovereignty” becomes more about which tech giant is running your country’s tech infrastructure than who was voted in or out of Parliament at the last election. The map of the world becomes a colour-coded eyechart with AlphabetMeta strong in the US and in the EU, MicrosoftStarlink dominant in the US, UK, Singapore, Australia and Aotearoa and Amazon strong in the US and also around coastal Asia...

In October 2030, Aotearoa is all geared up for its first fully digital election running on Microsoft Office Elections - MMP Edition. At the moment the polls open…. all of the MicrosoftStarlink cloud computing network worldwide goes offline in a massive cyberattack…“

(Echoes of Malka Older’s excellent Infomocracy series of novels…)

This was written before the implications of progressively more powerful generative AI models had hit the mainstream.

Political scientist Ian Bremmer also riffs on these themes. His article from October 2021, The Technopolar Moment- How Digital Powers Will Reshape the Global Order articulates how technology companies are becoming de facto superpowers. And his recent TED talk is even more explicit:

“If China and the United States work to exert much more power over the digital world and technology companies in those countries align with those governments, we will end up in a technology cold war. And that means the digital order will be split in two.

If, on the other hand, technology companies persist with global business models, and we retain competition between the digital and physical worlds, we will have a new globalization, a digital global order.

Or if the digital order becomes increasingly dominant and governments erode in their capacity to govern, and we've already seen the beginning of this, technology companies will become the dominant actors on the global stage in every way and we will have a techno-polar order. And that will determine whether we have a world of limitless opportunity or a world without freedom.“

With OpenAI actively hiring geopolitical research scientists… plainly some tech giants are thinking along similar lines. Are there solutions to addressing this problem?

The pacing problem

In her article Congress vs. the “Pacing Problem[s]”: Policy lags technology and it’s only getting worse, Marci Harris outlines the fundamental cause:

In order for national governments to keep up with emerging tech, fundamentally they need to catch up… and then keep pace. Which means becoming technology organisations themselves. Yeah right. (But don’t let that stop you trying, politicians and bureaucrats!!!)

EarthStack?

Right now if I’m honest, the only real scenario I can see hurtling towards us is Ian Bremmer’s all-too-real Technopolar hegemony. So what are the viable alternatives?

I continue to gravitate towards some of the (admittedly hyper-libertarian) thinking of Balaji Srivinasan and his nascent Network State theory. With nation state governments currently being left behind in this race, if they want a hope of being relevant in future then they need to band together to create “network” technological states.

How?

This week (in response to continuing Indian handwringing after Sam Altman’s swaggering visit), Balaji proposed the open-sourcing of the nascent “India Stack”, the new software platform which is rapidly digitising India’s national payments and identity services for over a billion people. I had an even bigger idea:

I can envision the creation of “EarthStack”, a rapidly evolving open source repository sponsored by nation states, city states, network states (governments of every shape and size) to actually co-invest in technological capability and innovation while also retaining some semblance of democratic accountability and providing a counterweight to growing hegemonic powers of hyperscalers.

💭Thinking about AI applied statistics

A roundup of longer links about AI

Read more