Ask A Genius 782: Nature’s Productions by Humans

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/21

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I think that whatever nature can produce then it’s possible for us to produce it too. It’s just a matter of figuring out the appropriate sort of processes and structure to make that happen potentially in different substrates. Regardless, it’s the same natural universe; if nature can do it we can do it consciously. It’s just a little bit harder because they’re trying to do it on much slower time scales. So, the idea is that there is a probability or a possibility of a future era of pervasive novelty where digital architecture plus artificial intelligence software can master creative endeavors. I would posit that there would be open-ended algorithms to permit sort of a widening horizon of creativity in those ways and some constrained and within that, more or less those kinds of algorithms would begin to slowly and then very rapidly master areas of creativity under current human domination. 

And I think that would then usher in the sort of novelty across the board where it may become a natural thing for upgraded people to not simply have to play a song for instance that they really like over and over again but they could have variations on that song every single time cater to their neurology. So it’s sort of new music variations on the other stuff they like but I think in all ways it could be like this where there’s just continual production of novelty to sort of keep up the interest of either hybrid people or artificially constructed beings who sort of keep their interest up what would require a sort of a continual refreshing input of information and entertainment. I think we’re kind of seeing some of that when there’s a real challenge in Covid for people to keep things interesting. What do you think?

Rick Rosner: On one level you’re positing the singularity that AI and machine learning will be able to do anything and you’re suggesting that in order to be entertained, future humans and future Trans human, whatever we turn into, will require a constant novelty. I would take it one step further and would say that even constant novelty wouldn’t necessarily be novel. If we’re so smart in the future we’ll see through the surface novelty and see the patterns underneath and may fail to be entertained. 

I’ve been reading about this a little bit and also looking at the art that’s been generated by the new high level machine learning artists who take prompts from humans and then make art like Queen Elizabeth in the style of Frank Frazetta. Within a minute you’d get an AI artist generating Queen Elizabeth in one of those swords and sorcery holding up a sword kind of a 1970s Schwarzenegger poses that Frank Frazetta did. I’m sure somebody’s done like a bunch of fake presenters already and stuff looks completely convincing and this is causing a certain amount of controversy, consternation, distress, and excitement and you see how good the AI artists are. And also the humans take a look at the first effort of the AI and then they tweak it. I don’t know how you tweak the product where you tweak it with words or whether it gives you like slider bars but you can keep doing further iterations of the art until you arrive at something that is the most satisfying version of what you asked for.

Some people think this is the end of human art and artists. Some people think it’s just the beginning to a whole new world of human machine partnership to generate new wonders. You’re suggesting that it’s possibly the source of an endless fountain of novelty. I would suggest looking back to see what tech did historically.

Jacobsen: Printing press, what happened?

Rosner: Well for one thing, religious authorities or people who thought it was their job to protect Christians thought it was a threat to Christianity that if you could generate novels; books of made up stuff, that this would corrupt people. For a century or more it was said, I don’t know maybe in America at least, that the average household to have only two books the Bible and Pilgrims Progress. Anything beyond that was evil and salacious, that just reading about made-up people and the stuff they did would be corrupting. So I’m sure that would include plays like Shakespeare and all that stuff. And then we grew to be at home with novels and find them entertaining and to a great extent world expanding to be positive. We have morons now in America at least attacking novels if they happen to be about gay people. Some assholes School District just this past week banned 41 books including the Bible because kids might be exposed to stuff. I’m hoping this wave of assholes with power is just a blip but who knows.

In general, people have a positive outlook about novels but novels became threatened by other media; radio and movies and TV and you have one medium supplanting the others and changing them. The publishing is in trouble because there are so many other ways to be entertained but people are still generating plenty of really good novels.

Jacobsen: Even if we take a total human lifespan now, say double in a bit extra life compared to 250-300 years ago in the most developed nations, that’s not enough time to consume even the new stuff that’s being generated here on the earth probably. 

Rosner: Yeah, thousands of new books appearing every day now most of them purely shit, most of them self-published but still enough good books but no, you couldn’t absorb them all. We’ve got eight billion people in the world and people for the most part have more ability to produce and create than ever before.

Jacobsen: So this seems to me like the human cuss of that. The creativity is there.

Rosner: Yeah, we’re going to get to that. I still read the newspaper, the LA Times and they still have a comic strip page which I can no longer really read. I’ll look at one strip which is Dilbert, which is occasionally interesting even though the creator, Scott Adams is a Trumpy asshole who’s pretty insane. He’s like the My Pillow guy of comic strips but he’s still kind of okay but most of the comic strips are just purely shit or just not good. Maybe they’re not all pure shit but most of them just aren’t great. Comic strips used to be great or at least pretty good when everybody read the newspapers in the 1930s, 1920s but the divergence between graphic novels which are comic books and comic strips and newspapers is Titanic. Now comic books get made into 250 million dollar movies and even if the original plots in the comic books because a lot of movies are made from comics that were written 50 years ago.

You have the best, the most talented people in entertainment working to make these dumb fucking comic books from 50 to 60 years ago. They really weren’t that dumb. Stan Lee products were I don’t know, they were slapdash but they weren’t as shitty as comic strips are today. And now you have excellent writers, directors, actors, artists, and wardrobe people just doing 10,000 people, most of who are really good at their jobs making great stuff. You’ve got a huge divergence, comic strips comic books used to have the same level of quality, now not.  Getting ready for this, I was pricing lab created diamonds. A flawless one carat mine diamond that somebody dug out of the earth in South Africa and then sold on the market via De Beers, a D color which is the finest most colorless diamond and flawless, a one carat stone might sell for 20 grand. 

So I priced three carat lab grown diamonds, near flawless F color, which is something that anybody would be proud to have to receive as an engagement ring, you get a three carat one of these for 4000 bucks. If it were a natural diamond, with that same stone would probably be over forty thousand dollars.  The lab grown diamond is just as sparkly, just as beautiful. They do things with a lab-grown diamond or there are indications where a well-trained Jeweler and stick it under a microscope and tell you whether it’s natural or man-made but really when it’s on your finger who’s going to know except that you’re wearing a three carat diamond engagement ring and your fiancé teaches second grade. Obviously he wouldn’t be able to. But the diamond is just as great and has all the same properties of the mined diamond. 

10 years ago, 12 years ago you might be able to get a lab-grown half carat diamond at most. Now I think you can grow diamonds without limit. I think the website I looked at was selling diamonds up to either six carats or 12 carats which is gigantic whatever quality you want to pay for, for roughly 10 percent of the price of… Now, De Beers is kind of a corrupt organization. Diamonds exist in enough profusion around the world. They’re the most common precious gem compared to emeralds, ruby, sapphires and De Beers is managed to control the market and artificially prop up the price for a century and artificially create demand.

There weren’t for the most part diamond engagement rings until 110, 120 years ago when De Beers created the idea that it wasn’t really an engagement ring unless it had a big fat diamond in the middle. In order to sell diamonds they created the idea of the tennis bracelet in the 70s and the eternity ring in the 80s or 90s. They’re always you know creating demand and now they’re working I’m sure to control the man-made diamond market so it doesn’t entirely destroy the diamond market. But here’s a deal where technology has made diamonds, has wiped out the value of diamonds by 90% as long as you don’t care that a jeweler might be able to tell and you shouldn’t. 

And so it’s technology destroying a market unless De Beers manages to somehow hold on which they probably will because they’re a big powerful company. They were banned from doing business as De Beers in America for 20 years or more because they were just so big and corrupt and powerful that the US didn’t want their bullshit over here. Also, lab-created diamonds are not blood diamonds. You get a diamond for 90% off without worrying that people died because of that fucking diamond. Well you’re going to have disruption as AI creates shit mostly in early days in partnership with humans that is just at least is kick ass and likely more kick ass than what humans alone can create. Where am I going with this? As I’ve been talking about, this is a familiar situation where new technology leads a radio. Fucking radio is a piece of shit. Radio sucks. Radio used to be in the 1930s one of our most entertaining media, the most entertaining forms of expression because it was pre-TV and people would cross back and forth between radio and movies, the two most entertaining media at the time. 

And then TV came along, fucked up movies but not as bad as it fucked up radio and now nearly a century later radio is just pure shit. So this people working with AI and then people with built-in AI working with AI and then AI that is sufficiently sophisticated in the 2050s generating its own shit in syndicates which are still run by 2050 by people who knows what’s happening in 2080. But the new forms of entertainment, like I’m writing this book that’s set 15 years from now and people have choosies which are like movies/video games except they’re totally immersive like you can watch the movie but if you like the world of the movie or if you like the world of a video game it’s built out enough that you can spend a fuck load more time in it choosing your own adventures or just choosing to hang out.

Jacobsen: So this is more in line with what I’m getting in terms of the future novelty. That’s a more concrete example from your text.

Rosner: So, I was just reading about the Metaverse and I watched part of a documentary on the Metaverse and Zuckerberg’s Metaverse: a) it looks like shit, b) in Zuckerberg’s Metaverse people only exist from the waist up. I just read an essay that said that that’s mostly because Zuckerberg doesn’t want people fucking in the Metaverse 

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: It’s also because people can wear VR kind of rigs on their upper body in their arms and it’s just more convenient to just only worry about your upper body but it’s also bullshit because I guess people have been fucking in second life forever. I think the essay included a term called TTD which is time to dig, which is how long before somebody figures out how to hack the technology and give people genitals. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing] they’re assuming men are the most driven for this activity.

Rosner: Yeah, this is a commonly held belief, a belief that is a cliché, it’s so commonly held that any technology you can come up with will be driven forward by porn, by people using it to jack off and will be used for porn and driven to new heights by porn. The technology and sexual gratification are completely intertwined. But with a Metaverse that doesn’t suck you’ll be able to immerse yourself in it, to live in it. There were these books in the 70s and 80s called Choose Your Own Adventure and so I took the name choosies from that. They were annoying little books for kids where if you decide that he should go left and turn to page 68, if you decide that our hero should go right and into the cave go to page 88. They just branched out and there are probably six different endings because the branches tended to merge just because otherwise it became too unmanageable and a little Scholastic Book for 295. 

But the choosies, they will be able to keep branching and be able to surround you. If you want to return to high school and live in a world where you made different choices and weren’t such a fucking loser, you’ll be able to go back to high school for fucking forever. It’ll kind of be Matrix style, it’ll suck at first where it’ll get really good really fast and I don’t know I read yet another article that showed what people might look like according to some AI predictor that said the people will turn into these weak newt like things because they’re in Matrix style tanks all the time, they just spend all their time in these gratifying worlds with heads that are like misshapen to better fit VR rigs. As with science fiction, none of these predictions are individually 100% correct but in general you get a sense of the landscape of what’s coming which is increasingly immersive, increasingly powerful, increasingly not being able to be equaled by humans.

Jacobsen: Can you repeat that part, please, the term? On augmented humans.

Rosner: All right well obviously unaugmented humans will increasingly be unable to match the creativity and power and entertainment value of shit done by humans plus AI. It’ll lead to worlds of vast novelty, it’ll lead to vast appetites of novelty and extreme jadedness and I just read something else where somebody called it a Cambrian explosion.

The Cambrian explosion was where conditions became ripe for evolution to go crazy. I don’t know what the conditions were exactly but there was a 50 million year period where life just became like super fast and evolutionary terms incredibly diverse. And so whoever said there’s a coming Cambrian explosion was talking about the next 50, 60 years where there’s going to be an explosion in consciousness; things that are conscious, things that do information processing, things that can generate just a whole jungle of new beings, powerful new beings, wildly creative new beings. Shit is just going to get weird.

We’ve talked about this that there will be strata, there will be levels of human existence depending on what these group… people will group themselves by how much rapid change they can handle. It’s the same thing as saying there will be different levels of people being technologically Amish, the people who are the most fundamentalists, the most afraid of change will live lives that look like ours now or even with some backlash against… they’ll live lives of being what we consider normal life spans without too much super high powered medicine and technological rejigger-ing of our bodies, people will live 80 years, 90 years, 100 years, 120 years in their natural forms maybe entire cities but in enclaves where a human life kind of mostly looks like it does now. And then from there you’ll have like constantly bubbling and changing levels of human plus AI existence, as humans plus AI and AI plus AI become braver and braver and more and more powerful at embracing these wild new existences punctuated with devastating conflicts were entities use technology to fuck with each other and fight for dominance. Who knows what dominance will look like? Dominance might involve probably will involve a certain times computing power.

We’re going to fight over water in the next 10 years and we’re going to fight over other resources that are being fucked up by there being a billion climate change refugees sloshing around the world. We might fuck up the oceans enough that we’ll be fighting over protein but maybe not because we’ll probably learn how to generate protein. But anyway Wars over scarce resources which might eventually include computation. 

And shit like Bitcoin, which not that I think Bitcoin will survive in its current form but that other things that require vast amounts of computation and then people will figure out how to make you know simple computation super cheap. Will people fight over Quantum computation or other forms? I don’t know but anyways it’s a jungle of novelty is coming.

[Recording End]

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