🧠Mind Expanding Links 8 Dec 2023: more Metacrisis🌪️ remaking the internet🌐 what if money expired?💸 extreme longevity🧓quantum advantage⚛️circle packing⭕ unlearning economics📉

Building a Line in the sand

Mind Expanding Links is my regular curation for Memia subscribers of deeper dives, bigger thinks and other eclectica that I’ve come across while compiling the weekly newsletter.

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🙏🙏🙏

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🌪️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.)

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🌐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?

@BrianRoemmele

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: