Is it the end of the world? At least, the world as we know it?
Is it the end of the world? At least, the world as we know it?
These may or may not be the End Times. They are undoubtedly end-of-an-era times
Two-minute video summary of this week’s post:
All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is… When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals… All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, (1930)
KPMG to have half its consulting work done by low-cost workers, robots
AFR headline, 17/9/25
It's the end of the world as we know it
And I feel fine
Buck, Mills, Berry, Stipe (1987)
Unless you’re Very Online, or at least Very Substack, you probably missed last week’s debate over whether we are living through a “revolutionary epoch”. One that is either the end of the world or at least the end of the world as we know it.
In a recent post, Substack heavy hitter
pointed out humans often imagine themselves to be living through a historical era of unprecedented importance and are almost always mistaken. He’s even coined a catchy moniker for this phenomenon – the Temporal Copernican Principle.Here’s the tl;dr iteration of deBoer’s TCP hypothesis: “I continue to maintain the basic point that a) we are definitionally more likely to live in ordinary times than extraordinary and b) we are conditioned to overstate our own uniqueness and importance.”
He makes a strong case but runs into the boy-who-cried-wolf-for-reals problem. From the earliest days of any civilisation, there are those gleefully forecasting its imminent demise. Lots of these doomers – maybe 99.999 per cent of them, if it’s a long-lasting civilisation – turn out to be wrong. But sooner or later, one of the Cassandras is proven right.
Until eight decades ago, humanity lacked the technology to destroy the world. Granted, the world hasn’t been blown up yet, but I’d argue there’s little cause for complacency. The Cuban Missile Crisis could have gone south. Likewise, if Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov hadn’t decided what appeared to be incoming American missiles probably weren’t incoming American missiles, all or most of the human race may have perished on or shortly after 26/9/83.
As deBoer himself points out, lots of intellectual heavyweights do believe we are living through extraordinary times or soon will be:
Some people who routinely violate the Temporal Copernican Principle include [Yuval Noah] Harari, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, Francis Fukuyama, Elon Musk, Clay Shirky, Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Tom Friedman, Scott Alexander, every tech company CEO, Ray Kurzweil, Robin Hanson, and many many more. I think they should ask themselves how much of their understanding of the future ultimately stems from a deep-seated need to believe that their times are important because they think they themselves are important, or want to be.
Scott Alexander is the pen name of Scott Alexander Siskind, the San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist behind
.In a rebuttal to deBoer, Alexander-Siskind conceded some events, such as asteroid strikes, appear to be relatively uniformly distributed across time. So, it’s plausible but vanishingly unlikely you and all your contemporaries will find yourself on the business end of a meteor shower.
However, as Alexander-Siskind observes, “techno-economic advances” have been coming thick and fast since the first industrial revolution kicked off around 250 years ago.
From 1860 – 1960, an embarrassment of transformative technologies – aeroplanes, automobiles, atomic energy, electricity, penicillin, radio, railroads, refrigeration, telephones and television – came online.
There were also two world wars, lots of minor ones, a global pandemic, a bloody revolution, a bloody civil war, a Great Depression, several devastating famines and a Holocaust during this period. So, you know, swings and roundabouts. But, overall, life for those in the UK and elsewhere in the Anglosphere was much less nasty, brutish and short in 1946, when the afore-quoted John Maynard Keynes died, than it had been in 1883 when he was born.
In no small part due to Keynes, there were also three glorious post-war decades when the wealth generated by technological advances was distributed far more equitably than was the case before or since.
The pace of technological change slowed significantly after 1960, with predictable consequences for both productivity and economic growth. There have been technological advances, notably in information technology, since 1960. But they are small beer compared to the bounty of 1860-1960. And from circa 1980, the benefits of productivity gains in Anglosphere societies have primarily gone to the ownership/shareholder/managerial class rather than the average worker.
(Historically, it might have been assumed the Left would have taken umbrage at this upward redistribution of wealth. But it’s belatedly fallen to the dissident Right, notably the MAGA Republicans, to call for a fairer distribution of life opportunities.)
In short, the pie hasn’t been growing as quickly as it once did. Plus, those wielding the carving knife have become shameless about carving off an extra-large slice for themselves.
That’s resulted in the emergence of an 80:20 society where the top 20 per cent are increasingly removed – financially, culturally, politically and geographically – from the bottom 80 per cent.
That’s had one or two downsides.
Struggling non-Boomers increasingly hate wealthy Boomers.
Working-class battlers and lower-middle-class strivers increasingly hate self-righteous upper-middle-class cosmopolitans.
Even relations between men and women have grown increasingly fractious, which seems unlikely to improve cratering replacement rates.
It’s logical to assume hypergamy would be turbocharged in two-tier societies, given the very different experiences on offer in the corporate boxes, as opposed to the cheap seats. (In more egalitarian societies, the choice isn’t as stark.)
Dating apps weren’t around back in the Keynesian era. But today’s dating app data shows the dating market, like many markets nowadays, is a winner-take-most proposition. The top 20 per cent of men get almost all the matches, while the bottom 80 per cent get hardly any. Unsurprisingly, that arithmetic doesn’t work out happily for anybody other than the small proportion of men deemed ‘high value’.
That’s the bad news.
The Singularity
The potentially good news is that AI could be the answer to all, or almost all, of our problems. If – and it’s a big if – the coming technological Big Bang event can be harnessed for (equitably distributed) good, many class, generational and geopolitical conflicts would disappear overnight. In a society of endless abundance, why get too worked up about anything?
The afore-listed Ray Kurzweil is best known for popularising the concept of the Singularity. The idea of a Singularity had begun bubbling up long before Kurzweil brought it to wider public attention. In 1965, I.J. Good imagined an ‘intelligence explosion’ created by an ‘intelligent agent’ that could constantly upgrade itself.
In a 1993 essay, The Coming Technological Singularity, computer scientist and sci-fi author Vernor Vinge speculated that a “superintelligence” would emerge and then advance at an incomprehensible (for humans) rate. He predicted this would happen between 2005 – 2030.
Kurzweil has been more specific and more conservative than Good and Vinge. Even during the interminable AI winter, he remained focused on AI. Famously, Kurzweil predicted the Singularity would happen in 2045, but he has conceded it may happen sooner.
Believers in the Singularity argue technological progress tends to proceed exponentially. That being the case, humanity should – barring unforeseen events – reach a stage where techno-economic advances start piling on top of each other in ever more rapid succession, abruptly thrusting us all into a sci-future it’s near impossible to imagine.
(If you want to try imagining it, think about the likelihood of an illiterate medieval peasant who never left their village foreseeing the Industrial Revolution, let alone any of the technologies that emerged between 1860-1960.)
The consensus among those who study these things is that once the Singularity hits, humans will morph into some sort of human-machine hybrid and be able to achieve something approaching immortality and omniscience.
This morphing of humans and machines is well advanced, as demonstrated by the fact you’re probably reading this with your mobile phone on your person, or at least within grabbing distance. Can you remember the dread you felt last time you realised you’d left home without it? Or is it now simply inconceivable that you could set foot outside your home without it?
If you have access to a mobile phone, you can access much of the world’s knowledge, meaning you’re already something close to omniscient. Immortality is probably still some way off, but you can rest assured lots of ageing but affluent tech bros are investing heavily in ‘radical life extension’ technologies.
More to come
The point I meant to get to 1000 words ago is that the Anglosphere was already undergoing a significant political realignment before ChatGPT dropped in late 2022. It seems AI agents will now begin to automate away lots of well-paid, high-status white-collar jobs.
Cognitively elite, upper-middle-class professionals – who’d been grazing contentedly in a lush paddock for several decades – have spent much of the last eight years trying to process the incomprehensible fact that most people don’t share their worldview or value system. (This may just have something to do with the fact that most people don’t share their level of financial insulation either.)
Many of those “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” professionals could find themselves, most unexpectedly, joining the ranks left behind or at least surplus elite class over the next 12-18 months.
On which, more next week.