fourteen years ago @allinwithchris.bsky.social wrote "Twilight of the Elites" about public disillusionment with Enron's fraud and the financial crisis, the churches giving cover to pedophilia, failed Middle East wars. 1/

we had a populist revolt… and elected people who are openly corrupt con-men, a President who was a good friend to, and perhaps co-connoisseur with, the organizer of an extraordinary pedophilia ring, people who are perpetrating new Middle East wars on paper thin pretexts. 2/

no wonder the public is nihilistic. empirical experience suggests the only choice they face is between the frying pan and the fire. /fin

i didn’t mean to. i removed the link text it automatically added when i pasted, but i guess i forgot to remove the link card bsky automatically adds.

i’ll redo.

yes! i don’t think Josh (the author) is in any sense “anti-AI”. 1/

i think the argument is that we want to develop intentionally, carefully, trade the entropy we generate for the best, safest, most “aligned” we can get, but the “e/acc” ethos is lock-in the first mover fast, and the first-mover is unlikely to be the best, or even good at all. 2/

so Anthropic/Dario, who he sees as genuinely trying to steer things well, is effectively stuck at the pace and kind of shittiness “e/acc” sets, because the e/accholes are running downhill, in entropy terms, and better actors can’t compete if they don’t match the pace. 3/

they are trapped, he says, and know they are. at least they know they are, which is better than pretending building dissipation machines as hard and fast as possible is definitionally progress. /fin

Yeah, he's not writing about "will the AI drop bombs?" 1/

Your interpretation of the 2nd Law is the standard one, I think. 2/

The essays are based on a less standard, but I don't think ridiculous, view that the tendency toward entropy in effect sometimes drives, rather than merely permits, local "syntropy" (order) in the form of dissipative structures that accelerate global entropy. 3/

The claim is not that nuking us all is the end state. From a teleological perspective, nuking us all would destroy a lot of dissipative structures, like humans and AI and our cars and inventions! 4/

It's that AI directly (by its energy costs) and indirectly (by its inventions and applications) is a dissipative structure, can be expected to accelerate the increase in entropy, so there is a kind of natural bias towards its development. But that should not be mistaken for a normative good. /fin

"Nature abhors a vacuum" is really just a colorful description of how gas diffuses with a side effect of imposing force where there is a pressure gradient, but you won't go too wrong imagining something more active. 1/

I'm not saying I fully endorse an analogous account of entropy, that the facts of physics amount to an "as if" of the teleological claim. But I'm not ready to fully dismiss it either. 2/

It does seem surprising from first principles how often surprising order emerges that do not contradict the 2nd law only because they accelerate some other disorder. 3/

Thinking of the 2nd law in purely statistical terms (the universe slips into ever less unlikely categories of states), you'd predict a kind of passive diffusion rather than emergence of these elaborate mechanisms that the 2nd law might tolerate but that seem extraordinarily unlikely. 4/

So a teleological intuition might be usefully descriptive. I'm not fully persuaded, but I'm not fully persuaded that not. In any case, that intuition is the premise of the essay. It might be wrong, but I think it demands more consideration than immediate dismissal. /fin