[AKN #28] How we will fail to create the future
another krappy newsletter #28
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‘ello, puppet!
Fun fact. I always thoughts that was an actual greeting they used in England until I looked it up 30 seconds ago. Ends up, that isn’t even a real phrase.
Here is Sam S setting the record straight one decade ago:
My mind is blown right now for three reasons:
I repeat: this isn’t an actual phrase people say. It is a quote from Pirates of the Caribbean?? Like that is the actual origin?
It is a sarcastic term of endearment. I always meant it! What the hell is a Poppet that this is sarcastic god dammit.
The infinite leverage of writing online. This guy is sassing me from a decade ago! We were always taught to think of time travel as an Arnold Schwarzenegger cyborg showing up to murder us. In reality, time travel is a 43-year old white guy named Sam S sitting bare ass on a leather couch watching Pirates of the Caribbean for the twelth time giving his two cents on Yahoo! answers.
Damn. I don’t know how I am going to recover for the rest of this intro.
I had this whole thing where I was gonna be like “And by puppets, I of course mean it in the polite British way and not the mean spirited Trumpian way.” But now the whole setup is ruined!
I just want to hide, but…
Oh well.
On to the newsletter!
Table of contents:
How will we fail to create the future?
Things I enjoyed reading/learning this week
1. How will we fail to create the future?
In a previous edition of the newsletter, I spoke about how excited I am for the future.
Flying cars. Space travel. Robots. Space manufacturing.
The world is going to be very exciting! Just like the Jetsons!
However, I also started to think about how garbage we are as a species and how we are almost certainly going to fuck this up.
You probably think I mean some version of “we are going to destroy this planet before we get to the future”, but actually I believe a more probable outcome is we destroy this planet before we get there BECAUSE we don’t allow innovative people to fix it.
We die a preventable death that is made inevitable by social regulation.
Here are two ways that I could see this manifesting:
Canceling inventors
Many famous inventors are insane.
This article does an excellent job of covering what I mean by that.
To quote that piece:
Any survey of groundbreaking industrialists will reveal that they’re almost always a bit nuts. There are a great many examples cut from the same outlandish cloth as Steve Jobs, Howard Hughes, and Henry Ford. To restrict ourselves to people from our own time: Jeff Bezos declared in high school that he meant to move all of humanity into space and preserve the Earth as a huge international park; Peter Thiel is some kind of shadowy philosopher-vizier; Larry Page has poured a fortune into futuristic prototypes ranging from augmented reality glasses to self-driving cars to high-altitude balloons that broadcast internet service wherever they go; Elon Musk is Elon Musk
The article goes on to give several other examples including a 72-year old industrialist from 1800 who allowed burglars to break into his factory to rob them so that he could serve them vigilante justice. Phenomenal. Love that inventors spirit.
All of this is to say that inventors are not normal people who see the world in a normal way. They say and do things differently which is great in certain contexts (ie: disrupting an industry), but leaves a lot to be desired in other contexts (ie: ruffle the public’s feathers in such a way that will sick the cancel hounds upon them).
Inevitably, we will have cases (if we haven’t already) where a brilliant person with the means to solve an enormous problem that plagues the human race will say something that will move us to remove that person from their platform. We will celebrate how we removed someone who made us uncomfortable, but what will be the cost?
A couple examples of people who may have been cancelled today:
Isaac Newton low key created physics, calculus, and basically science. He also spent an insane amount of time studying alchemy, chronology, and Biblical interpretation. Would we be OK following the advice of a person who spent his free time working on those things today? I would have a hard time listening to a guy who lists “looking for the Philosopher’s Stone” as a hobby.
Thomas Edison. Transformed the world around him by introducing lighting, power, and the day’s most popular entertainments. I am sure you knew that. But did you know he had a popular reputation as an asshole? How do we generally treat rude intelligent people today? Would we have allowed this type of person to actually invent the precursors for the device that we would later use to complain about him being an asshole?
I wonder if there is some intricate balance that can be struck here of allowing inventors to invent whilst not casting them out fully. How can we let builders build whilst simultaneously minimizing social damage of allowing the bull to roam freely in the china shop?
Intelligence being wasted working on stupid shit.
One of the biggest threats to progress is the number of intelligent people that do stupid shit because it pays a lot of money.
Rather than work on the ethics of robotics or something that will obviously be very important very soon, we have people working on optimizing Twitter for advertisers.
As important as making sure I know about the discount on Birkenstocks is, I feel ensuring that we don’t accidentally unleash an artificial general intelligence that enslaves us may be a better problem to work on.
How can we ensure that more people are able to work on building the future instead of having to narrow mindedly focus on jobs that pay well?
2/ Things I enjoyed reading/learning this week
Volcano snail
Nature is fucking crazy. This thing is straight out of the gates of hell.
A phenomenal read on one of the fundamental issues with journalism today: “hall monitor journalism.” As an aside, I love Glenn’s Substack. I don’t agree with everything he has to say, but it is refreshing reading something that is actually written by the author. Not crowd sourced to the legal department of a newspaper and sanitized. I want to hear what actual smart people think, not what they think I want to hear.
This is perhaps the most enlightening look into the absurdity of San Francisco. They removed several famous names from schools because of their checkered past. In this interview, the interviewer asked the person who lead the SF Board of Ed through this decision making process about the process used to determine that checkered past.
I don’t even know what to say other than I would recommend reading this transcript. My favorite part is when the interviewer asks about whether or not they incorporated historian’s feedback into this process. To which the answer was no. The interviewer then goes on to give several examples of schools where they are removing the name for a historically inaccurate reason. It is wild.
Pair this with the actual spreadsheet where they documented their reasons for removing all of these names.
As well as this Twitter thread pointing out some of the more insane ones:
The Mars Rover lands in 9 days. Great article on the path it is going to take and how it is going to land.
We are about to land on and explore Mars and I feel like no one talks about it. I get this feeling like so many people think space is this stupid game that rich people and scientists play. But it is important. You will all see! Super stoked to see what we find with this rover. Fingers crossed for signs of life! Or at least a Transformer. Even if it is a Decepticon.
Closing time
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If you enjoy what you’re reading, I’d really appreciate you sharing it with your friends.
Sharing the volcano snail is exactly the kind of content I keep coming back for. It’s not very useful but that bit of info will stick in my head for a long time. The way the mind works is deranged.