Motus Mentis

The future has never been so opaque. This is qualitatively new.

In the past, there would always be an assortment of possible timelines ahead, but they were each at least somewhat visible. Though we might have no way of knowing which possible future among many might come to pass, we could look a fairly long way into each of them with reasonable confidence.

But now, given the ever-tighter coupling of everything to everything else (see this post from ages ago), the exponential acceleration of mutually reinforcing technologies toward some sort of “Singularity”, and the recent introduction into history of a genuine, wholly unprecedented wild-card — AI — the (even vaguely) predictable future is radically foreshortened. Behind it is just a mysterious, highly charged fog — and the foreshortening is accelerating as the singularity approaches. (And like a cosmological singularity, you don’t know when you’ve passed the event horizon, beyond which all possible future timelines pass through the singularity itself.)

What’s more: as that foreshortening accelerates, and predictability collapses, two things happen.

The first is that the human institutions that organize and administer our lives, which, as always, still must make decisions by deliberation and debate, have less and less time to do so as everything in the increasingly connected and computer-driven world accelerates and the “decision-space” collapses. (This problem is particularly acute for “democratic” systems with divided — often bitterly divided! — sovereignty.) Soon, as the world’s “event-clock” ticks faster and faster, it’ simply will no longer be ‘s going to become impossible for such systems to keep up. This will drive systems either toward breakdown, fracture, and collapse, or toward ceding essential decision-making to unitary executives — the fastest and most capable of which will almost certainly be AI systems themselves. It’s hard to imagine how humans, after such an abdication, would ever reclaim their sovereignty.

Second, as the future becomes more and more opaque, the “low time-preference” that civilization-building (and civilization-maintaining) has depended on throughout all of history becomes less and less of a rational choice. This inevitable effect will drive people harder and harder toward prioritizing present consumption and security over any sort of long-term investment or planning.

I’d like to offer some ideas about what to do about this predicament, but to do so I’d have to be able to examine various possible future timelines and contingencies with some degree of confidence — which, as I’ve just explained, it’s now almost impossible to do. So I guess we’ll all just have to increase our time-preference along with everybody else, make ourselves as secure as possible, hunker down, and ride it out.

Buckle up!