Reckons

The problems facing Canada or the world—not just climate change but the housing crisis, the toxic drug crisis, or growing anti-immigrant sentiment—aren’t problems caused by a lack of intelligence or computing power. In some cases, the solutions to these problems are superficially simple. Homelessness, for example, is reduced when there are more and cheaper homes. But the fixes are difficult to implement because of social and political forces, not a lack of insight, thinking, or novelty. In other words, what will hold progress on these issues back will ultimately be what holds everything back: us.

It’s not stealing to build the future if you believe it has belonged to you all along.

Planetary thinking embraces the liminal phenomena and complex butterfly effects that tie us together, but it must also contend with the diffuse patterns of terrestrial agency that will shape our response to the planetary condition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our efforts to adapt to climate change, which will further create the future’s winners and losers. Some geographies will suffer such intense drought that they may be fully vacated, while others such as Canada and Kazakhstan will gain millions of grateful climate migrants and be able to harness their human capital to become new power centers. The world will no longer be bureaucratically divided into investment grade categories set by ratings agencies that label them as a “developed market” (DM) or “emerging market” (EM), but between climate resilient and non-climate resilient zones. If institutionalized orders such as the late 20th-century multilateral system tended to be established only after major wars, would an entropic drift into regional spheres of influence be preferable to a World War III among dueling hegemons? In this scenario, conflicts may flare from Ukraine to Taiwan, but they would be ring-fenced within their respective regions rather than becoming tripwires for global conflict. Regions that strive for greater self-sufficiency, such as North America and Europe today, could reduce the carbon intensity of their economies and trade, but potentially at the cost of undermining their interdependence with and leverage over other regions. Such is the double-edged nature of an entropic world.

avid users of these chatbots are self-selected to be enthusiastic and open-minded about the field of AI

Rather than appealing to some vague notion of the awesomeness of progress, or the malignity of technology, we want, collectively, to coordinate on paths of technological development that will have spread benefits as broadly as possible, while mitigating for, or compensating for the costs.

LLMs should not be viewed as a substitute for high quality human generated knowledge. They should instead be viewed as an obligate complement to such knowledge - a means of making it more useful, which doesn’t have much independent worth without it.

Do you want to change within the existing system, or do you want to change the system? If you’re going to change the system, can you change the system by still using the same forms, the same organizations, the same language, or do you actually have to try to speak differently?

If misinformation is a societal disease, it should be possible to cure societies of various problems by eradicating it.

To establish effective AI governance, then, is the challenge for civil society organizations and social innovators.

We wouldn’t, and we won’t, unless he can convince us doing so is the only way to solve every problem that terrifies us. Climate change, the cure for cancer, an end to war or, at least, an end to fear that we’ll be victimized by crime or terrorism, all of these have been touted as benefits of the coming AI age. If only we can reach the AGI promised land.

established artists, who found AI a potent site for imagination decades ago, had the benefit of AI being speculative. At that point, speculation was an imaginative philosophical exercise, rather than a political one.