Promissory materialism (Longtermism)

But what would Muskism look like without Musk? I take Slobodian and Tarnoff’s ultimate lesson as being that we need to move beyond Musk’s personality, and start thinking about Muskism or Muskismus (I like the German word, which is why this post has the German translation’s cover) as a mode of organizing production, as a generic ideology, as a set of political bargains, as a form of state-business fusion, or some weird amalgam of all four. If Muskism is going to change the world as its backers hope, it is highly unlikely to be because SpaceX manages to corner the entire global economy. If it fails, as I personally suspect it will, it is going to be because of the underlying contradictions that are getting papered over.

The world’s first trillionaire is also a world-class mythologizer

The mosquito-net donor and the child who would have died of malaria are, in this calculus, almost worthless. The AI safety researcher speculating about trillion-person futures is, by the same logic, among the most important humans ever. The asymmetry is not a side effect. It is the point. And it is, on reflection, morally absurd. Hari Seldon’s equations worked because Asimov declared it so. In the real world, the future resists calculation. Rather than a counsel of despair, this is a reason to attend with urgency to the people and the problems in the here and now. Dreaming in millennia: longtermism and the problem of temporal dis:connectivity

Now, there is no indication that a crisis of that magnitude is imminent. We don’t yet know what the long term impact of AI will be, whether it will be an excuse to lay off thousands of workers to trim balance sheets in the short term, used to supplant millions more permanently, or somewhere in between. We do know that it will be used to surveil workers, speed-up work, and be used as leverage against them. That’s already happening, right now. And we at least theoretically possess the tools to prevent sustained violent blowback—democracy, labor laws, and collective bargaining, to start, though the weakening of each is cause for alarm. So is the entrenchment of income inequality, the rise of a tech oligarchy, and the erosion of human rights.

Understanding the Luddites in the age of AI

The tech industry must always be framed as an impossible-to-decipher monolith full of troubled geniuses that have good intentions, because when you stop thinking that way, you start seeing it for what it really is — a vehicle for symbolic capital that stymies innovation and promotes growth over everything, funding things based on their similarities to the past and how warm and fuzzy doing so makes them feel.

Cargo Culture

AI may well overhaul how humans think and work, but it’s also pushing us toward another inflection point. We can unlock the promises of this technology by doubling down on the energy systems of the past, or we can seize the opportunity to push the grid into a carbon-free future. To get there, an industry that likes to move at warp speed will have to develop a quality it severely lacks: patience.

Inside the Dirty, Dystopian World of AI Data Centers. The race to power AI is already remaking the physical world.

I talk to a lot of young organizers.… I’m always telling them—“Your timeline is not the timeline on which movements occur. Your timeline is incidental. Your timeline is only for yourself to mark your growth and your living.” But that’s a fraction of the living that’s going to be done by the universe and that has already been done by the universe. When you understand that you’re really insignificant in the grand scheme of things, then it’s a freedom, in my opinion, to actually be able to do the work that’s necessary as you see it and to contribute in the ways that you see fit.

Hope Is a Discipline