260927: Principles for a New Utopianism
I read Stephen Cave's/the DeepMind Institute's "Principles for a New Utopianism" this morning. I thought it was surprisingly not bad and even actually good! It hits most of the basic, but important points often neglected in similar discussions. (History & dark side of utopianism, limits to human happiness.) It offers a vanilla progressive vision of the future, the good life, yes—healthcare, free pre-K and university education, improvements to democratic process. And it peppers in a few pieces of tech ideology (Seeing Like a State, top-down v bottom-up) alongside obligatory quotes of continental philosophy. (Lyotard's Postmodern Condition anyone?)
What I liked:
Stephen's subtle implication that Lenin/Trotsky/Mao/Hitler/Pol Pot were actually Longtermist idealists making Yudkowskian bargains for the future of Man. No price, in the present, is too high to pay if it "locks in" eternal conditions, or threatens extinction. Faced with the infinite, the finite is always a bargain, and Holocaust-level events are mere blips, a blink of History's eye.
Stephen's emphasis on humility and pluralism. These are probably the two most important dispositional takeaways from the post-Enlightenment 19th and 20th centuries: humility, via the Jane Jacobs, James C Scott, Chesterton's fence lineage; pluralism, via the William James, cultural relativism, ecology & complexity lineage.
Stephen's assertion we need a grittier, more concrete and detailed vision of how AI could or would change the world for the better. Right now, accelerationists tend to posit, and then deify, an omnipotent ASI capable of overcoming all obstacles & solving all problems. And this rhetoric holds for both doomers and foomers! A lot of post-Jacob Coxon X discourse has been about this: Those who fear singulatarian apocalypse should articulate specific visions and mechanisms of doom; they mainly fail to persuade by keeping vague.
Stephen's utopian realism: "To be perpetually happy, we would need to become something quite different – whether more than human (as Jesus said: those in Heaven 'will be like the angels'), or perhaps less than human (like Homer’s Lotus-eaters, those poor addicts, lost in reverie)."
"Medium-termism," as a Schelling point. Brilliant rhetoric! Goldilocks has found her time-horizon that is not too short, nor too long, but just right! Discursive warfare weeps.
Stephen's reminder that utopian visions cannot be fixed (cf. Nozick's cavemen), but ever-changing, in the intergenerational realignment turmoil integral to the process we call History.
Several bones to pick:
Cave's bland advocacy for free & universal University (and pre-K) education is stuck in the 19th C. University diplomas, and students' pursuit of credentials, have been strongly decoupling from actual educational attainment. We do not need to take Robin Hanson's hardline to believe that education is mostly about signaling—we need only have attended a college in the 21st century, and paid a modicum of attention to student and parent priorities. Learning is not the point, and motivation is primarily extrinsic. Why the state should continue to subsidize a massively expensive, zero-sum credentialing frenzy is unclear to me. Why we want our three-year-olds to be institutionalized into an education system that was built to make them factory workers—again, unclear. Children spending all their free hours from age 3-22 is not my idea of utopia.
Cave wants us to be more like Scandies, because they score so well on happiness surveys. I think happiness surveys are extremely epistemologically dubious, and linguistically mediated, institutionally administered self-reports track real hedonic conditions only loosely. Moreover, the Scandies are staring down some quite serious and properly 21st century crises. Their extremely generous maternal & paternal benefits have had negligible impact on fertility. Their ability to extend services to migrants is questionable. And like the rest of the (UBS-oriented) EU, Scandy countries are not just demographically but culturally stagnant. This isn't an argument against Universal Basic Services (UBS)—it's an argument that they are not the panacea Cave, and many progressives, believe them to be.
Two bite-sized projects I'd like to take on, inspired by reading Cave's essay:
A lexical study on the concept of "flourishing," which is so often used as a handwavey filler (a faux load-bearing pillar) that educated people use, in the 21st C, to talk vaguely about holistic/thick, non-optimized well-being. "Flourish" just means to flower, to bloom—so it's not a bad organic metaphor. But do we know what it means? Does it have any cash value over rival terms? Does it meaningfully help us specify/envision one future over another? What does "flourishing" exclude?
A study of Industrial Revolution-era utopian thinking. What futures were the poets and philosophers in the 18th C dreaming of, for steam engines and railroads and mechanical looms?
I'd also like to take on a comprehensive survey of science-fiction, speculative fiction, black-futurist manifestos, etc to take stock of our utopian imaginary. But that is far too large a project for a single individual.