Economist Robin Hanson, a man on the list to have his brain frozen post-mortem, has written an essay entitled This is the Dreamtime. This is the picture he paints.
Our distant descendents, scattered throughout the galaxy, barely getting by. The extraordinary scale of interplanetary civilization serves to recreate the conditions of primitive hunter-gatherer life: because planets are so far apart, they will encounter each other only rarely; and because population growth will outpace income growth, and eventually we will run out of major discoveries, almost everyone will live at “subsistence level.”
They will be, in many respects, akin to our own ancestors. But they will be rational, whereas we are as deluded as we have ever been. So says Hanson—he of the icebox covenant.
Oh, and the vast majority of them will be “brain emulations”: human minds, cloned into cyberspace, digitally enhanced, living in robots, and working as wage-slaves. Substack’s John Psmith represents it thus:
Imagine Groundhog Day, but set up by a malevolent demiurge to extract the most efficient possible labor from you, and with no escape. This is literally the world Hanson describes — a world containing a quadrillion emulated human consciousnesses, most of them drugged or psychically mutilated to be more productive, operating right at the Malthusian limit where the value of their labor just exceeds the cost required to keep them running.
Like so many economists, Hanson’s model of the world (we might describe it as polished shabbiness, consisting as it does of obsolete metaphysical conceits taken literally, then to their logical conclusion, leavened with much too much self-recursion and roasted over the flame of an advanced intellect until crystalline) seems to lead him to the most terrible dystopia. And then he is duty-bound to pretend that he likes it fine.
Our robot descendants might actually be forced to slave near day and night, not to feed kids but just to pay for their body rent, their feed-stocks, their net connection, etc. Even so they’d be mostly happy.
This is from another piece, Poor Folks Do Smile, in which he points out that life at subsistence level is pretty good, because “our ancestors were designed with pleasure and pain to motivate them in a near subsistence world.” Poor folks do smile, after all—go to an African village and you’ll find they’re happier than we.
Our descendants will be similarly adapted to find joy and meaning in their near subsistence lives. And intense pain may well be eliminated in favor of other ways to inducing the required focus. Contact with virtual worlds and with a vast larger society will be far cheaper for them that it was for our ancestors, though contact with a real wild nature will be more expensive.
It’s true that the poor are mostly happy…but only in the irrational south, where community (and wild nature) still live! And those communities within western cities who have not been totally literized and have kept the tribal spirit alive.
But our guys are not happy. They are sad. The literate disenchanted westerners who have to slave away every day, for their supper, serving only themselves, are not happy. This condition of servitude is only tolerable with a healthy dose of communal solidarity–if it’s your loved ones you are serving. The machine-inhabiting brain-emulations of Hanson’s fantasy, if they are truly to slave day and night, won’t have any time or energy left over for conviviality or love, and they will be miserable.
That’s the funniest part of all of this: Hanson has to pretend his obvious dystopia isn’t actually a dystopia, and if pressed will probably respond smugly that the future is bound to offend our precious sensibilities, his bedside indifference being the mark of a cultivated inner strength. Yet it’s awfully telling that his future vision is tailor-made to offend everyone’s precious sensibilities but his. Hanson’s friend Eliezer Yudkowksy once recommended that aspiring writers try and imagine a future society that is good in many ways, perhaps even a utopia, but has happened to evolve exactly contrary to the writer’s own most cherished beliefs. So devout mechanists like Hanson or Yudkowsky might write a utopia which has achieved universal harmony through religion. And this would actually be challenging and therefore intellectually productive, unlike what we have here, which is basically the laziest most autopilot thing ever.
Our distant descendants will also likely have hit diminishing returns to discovery; by then most everything worth knowing will be known by many; truly new and important discoveries will be quite rare. Complete introspection will be feasible, and immortality will be available to the few who can afford it. Wild nature will be mostly gone, and universal coordination and destruction will both be far harder than today.
The rationalist’s world is so mean it’s a miracle he can live in it. Well, no, that’s not true at all. He’s pleased with himself, he’s well fed, and he knows it all. That’s enough to eke out a half-decent ebb and flow at least as well as any modern person. Is he emptyish inside? Who knows. I barely made it through adolescence before snapping out of that epistemic hole. Not that I’m all that. I’d still be stuck there but for the grace of God.
And it’s wrong! The mind will not go in a computer! You have no reason to believe this will work - except your irrational dogmatic attachment to the metaphor of the brain as a computer and everything as mechanism.
To read guys like this, you would think the life of the mind was defined by scarcity, that we can only take a few grim scraps and make the best of them with so much love and elbow grease. But this could not be further from the truth. To quote David Bentley Hart:
All rational activity, from the merest recognition of an object of perception, thought, or will to the most involved process of ratiocination, is possible only because of the mind’s constant, transcendental preoccupation with an infinite horizon of intelligibility that, for want of a better word, we should call God.
~
We can learn a lot about a thinker by the eyes through which they prefer to examine their own culture. For the Jewish prophets, Christ included, it was God’s eyes. For Daniel Quinn, it was hunter-gatherers. For Marx, it was the working class. For Robin Hanson, it is just these demeaned yet optimally adaptive legions of future people, who will doubtless spend much time “shaking their heads at the demographic transition, where we each took far less than full advantage of the reproductive opportunities our wealth offered.”
They will be amazed at the strange religious, political, and social beliefs we acted on, and how we preferred a political system, democracy, designed to emphasize the hardly-considered fleeting delusory thoughts of the median voter rather than the considered opinions of our best experts.
They will, in short, view us exactly as Robin Hanson now views us, and lament our irrationality above all, along exactly the same lines as he. How curious.
Perhaps most important, our descendants may remember how history hung by a precarious thread on a few crucial coordination choices that our highly integrated rapidly changing world did or might have allowed us to achieve, and the strange delusions that influenced such choices. These choices might have been about global warming, rampaging robots, nuclear weapons, bioterror, etc. Our delusions may have led us to do something quite wonderful, or quite horrible, that permanently changed the options available to our descendants. This would be the most lasting legacy of this, our explosively growing dream time, when what was once adaptive behavior with mostly harmless delusions become strange and dreamy unadaptive behavior, before adaptation again reasserted a clear-headed relation between behavior and reality.
Our dreamtime will be a time of legend, a favorite setting for grand fiction, when low-delusion heroes and the strange rich clowns around them could most plausibly have changed the course of history. Perhaps most dramatic will be tragedies about dreamtime advocates who could foresee and were horrified by the coming slow stable adaptive eons, and tried passionately, but unsuccessfully, to prevent them.
Psmith again:
Our wealth has temporarily outstripped our population, and our communications ability temporarily outstripped our ability to colonize the stars. We live in a time of myth and heroes and romantic individualism, there was nothing like it in the past, and there will be nothing like it in the future. Hanson thinks that our quadrillions of impoverished descendants, in the rare moments when they don’t need to work, will think and dream and fantasize about us and our era. Their religious myths and their soap operas will be about our time and our lives.
This rationalism fetish is culturally dependent! It’s objectively astonishingly myopic to think it’s the one thing exempt! Hanson is mythmaking like the Lakota and the Nuer! Fuck!
And it’s not even a good myth. The fruit is not good. Hanson’s brainchild is this Lovecraftian horror of economic rationality. Yudkowsky’s has everyone annihilated by Claude any minute now. These are not healthy, life affirming myths. A people’s theology is its destiny. Let’s be very careful now.
Now why—why not believe that we literally have a choice? All of these guys claim to deal in inevitabilities. And perhaps this depravity does indeed logically follow from a model of the universe void of God and meaning. But even granting their bogus axioms–why grim galactic civilization? What’s the point of it? Even if this all were but a collision of atoms, couldn’t we just not do something so obviously stupid? Why not use our current flash of abundance to build something really special and beautiful—or at least, livable?
My first principle is that this world, whatever else it might be, is a Story. What kind of story, we do not know, or perhaps the apostolic churches alone do—opinions differ. For my part, I find it highly unlikely we’re heading for slow eons of stagnation, trillions of sad-sack cyborgs impotently re-litigating our own foibles. This thing is a story, and it’s built to be interesting, and it’s clearly careening for a climax. At least in my view.
Let us accept this story of a life in its full mystical richness and throw ourselves into it as best we can. The dismal scientist may keep his consolation prize—he’s gonna need it.