leftclausewitz:
This isn’t so much a review as it is an address to a particular comment I’ve seen often come up among those who oh so desperately want to undo the project, to argue that the links made within NAB are irrelevant, and more generally the statements that are made whenever the politics of the lesswrong community are attacked. Whenever Yudkowsky’s politics are ‘conservative’ or not is argued over and over and over again in the horrid way characteristic of a group with a strong belief in the powers of language, and this argument has come up yet again in the conversation about NAB, that Sandifer’s choice to talk about Yudkowsky alongside Moldburg and Nick Land (two massive neoreactionaries) is a miscategorization to the degree that Sandier shouldn’t finish the book, that the book is communist propaganda, whatever.
I’m just going to provide my reading of the situation, as ya know, an actual communist. Because I’m of the opinion that while Yudkowsky may not be a ‘conservative’, his work definitely fits within the reactionary project, and that this key element explains a large degree of the way the lesswrong/rationalist community leans.
To sum up the key element; the major part of Yudkowsky’s project is a desire to work towards the creation of a beneficent AI who we can then give the resources to to run the world. To this end he has created a pair of think tanks, has written innumerable papers and thinkpieces, etc. Now, this is hard to take seriously but if we do take it seriously then this is merely a new coat of paint over a desire that is over two hundred years old.
You see, it’s easy to forget that feudalism (stay with me now) wasn’t just ‘having a king’, that the feudal system was a whole system wherein the whole hierarchy was justified in generally divine terms. And while the literary origin of the divine right of kings was in Bodin, Bodin’s work actually is a degradation of the concept; the fact that it needed to be expressed in the 16th century showed just how much it was being questioned. Because, before this period, while the King was not absolute the hierarchy he remained atop of was, it’s an amazing statement that no matter how many aristocratic intrigues and revolts occurred before the 17th century, not a single one of these revolts sought to end the whole edifice of monarchy. I can go on about this separately but a full discussion of it would take quite a bit of time and I’m not specifically talking about this.
But the thing about the divine right of monarchs is that in the end it is divine. Many who sought to bring back monarchs seek to merely turn the clock back to 1788, but some of the more intelligent reactionaries who wrote in the generation following the French Revolution noted that you would have to turn it back even further, that the beginnings of secular thought was the beginning of the demise of a fully justified monarchy. Because if God is not there in the foreground, justifying the difference between King and noble and noble and peasant, then the King is just some guy, your local lord is just some guy, and what the fuck justifies their existence over you?
This became worse and worse over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, with ever more and ever more complicated justifying measures appearing–for instance, a focus on the innate power of the blood which became a motif among reactionaries for centuries to come. But in the end these measures just didn’t cut it, and after the French Revolution it became harder and harder to justify Monarchy, or any sort of Autocracy, on divine or secular grounds.
I would argue that the reactionary project ever since the French Revolution is the search for a newly justified King, a King who could reestablish the hierarchy of old. But they come up on an issue, without the totalizing religious beliefs of old your hierarchy is always going to comprise of regular people, and unless you engage in nonsensical magical thinking (a trait actually increasingly common now even in mainstream works but constantly under challenge), you’re going to have to find another way.
And so, at the end of this line of thinking, we find Yudkowsky. How is it that neoreactionaries found such a home in the bosom of rationalism? Because they were, in the end, seeking the same thing. Moldbug declaring that he is, in the end, searching for a king is not a more radical view compared to Yudkowsky’s, only a more honest one. It takes away the varnish of technoutopianism of a beneficent and omnipotent AI and says that in the end a person will do. Because in the end a King is a King, regardless of how many philosophy classes he’s taken and, indeed, whether he is human or not. The two exist on the same plane within the same project: the AI Philosopher King is, to the Lesswrongers, ideal, but Moldbug says that he’d settle for Steve Jobs. It’s the same shit, the same longing for a newly justified King.
Firstly, I think there’s a basically correct insight here. I think there’s an essential similarity to the ideas of a philosopher-king and an AI-god, on a psychological level, and that it’s probably responsible for a lot of their appeal.
See, for example, Iain Banks’ Culture novels, which are a perfect liberal Utopia but also feature AI-gods that play to a lot of White Man’s Burden tropes, treat humans as second-class citizens, and literally act as a de facto ruling class who privately own 99.9% of all weapons and of the means of production.
I’m not sure what this shared something is, but it probably has a lot to do with the fact that “just put a good person in charge” seems to be … kind of the default way people imagine running things?
With that said, I have a lot of quibbles. (This, uh … this turned out a little long.)
For example: Eliezer has literally written several stories set in his ideal utopia after the Singularity, and there are no philosopher-kings. Instead, there’s vague mention of the “machines” which have fixed everything and quietly buggered off to maintain things in the background while humanity is left to rule itself. Also, he has explicitly written this essay arguing that AIs should fix death and disease and resource scarcity and then quietly bugger off to let us run ourselves.
As others have said, it’s not totally clear what the difference is between “we just need the right AI and they’ll give us what we need and run everything perfectly without bias”, and, not to put to fine a point on it, Communism, in which we just need the right government and they’ll give us what we need and run everything without bias. You might argue that this government will be democratic and an AI isn’t, but a) quite a lot of actual communists seem to disagree with you there, and b) there’s no particular reason you couldn’t program an AI to do what 51 percent of the population votes to do, either.
Yudkowsky has written this essay arguing that we should build an AI that’s a mindless tool designed to fix our problems, not a person; person-AIs can come later, as our equals. Being a mindless tool for humans to use seems like un-kingly behaviour to me.
It’s utterly unclear to me why you think God is necessary or even sufficient to justify monarchy. If you think Kings rule because they’re a naturally better type of person, then the existence of God is, if anything, going to encourage you to think thoughts like “all men are equal before God” and “even kings have to bow to God, so really we should put a collection of the wisest priests in charge”. Also, quite a lot of people have believed in the idea of kings without God, or God without kings.
Also, we still have massive amounts of inequality, quite a lot more of it in absolute terms, which makes me suspicious that we didn’ t abandon hereditary aristocracy because we started believing in equality more than all those ancients but rather because rapid economic progress means money collects in the hands of people who get in on the ground floor instead of people who spend generations building it up. And that loyalty to a single leader has grown increasingly less efficient compared to intra-unit loyalty as armies have grown larger. But that’s just a suspicion.
Moldbug doesn’t want a philosopher-king. He wants kings of a sort, yes, but a CEO-kings; kings in competition with a bunch of other kings in a system that nobody ultimately controls. This is the exact opposite of a philosopher-king uniting everybody because he understands everything and can do it correctly, or for that matter of an AI ruling us all because it controls everything and comprehends everything perfectly. It’s basically libertarianism-for-governments.
If you said to Yudkowsky “hey, how about we have a king?”, he’d laugh in your face. This makes me suspicious of the idea that he’s trying to justify a secret longing for a king.
“…work towards the creation of a beneficent AI who we can then give the resources to to run the world” - Yudkowsky doesn’t think an AI will require any particular resources to run the world, and has expended quite a lot of virtual ink defending this point.
“…after the French Revolution it became harder and harder to justify Monarchy, or any sort of Autocracy, on divine or secular grounds” - it seems to me that people have had no trouble justifying dictatorships at all, and indeed of our largest and most powerful countries Russia used to be ruled by autocrats and China currently is ruled by them. Rather, autocrats have had trouble competing on either economic or military terms, perhaps because they waste so much effort putting down the peasant uprisings you dismiss. (If anything, the French Revolution makes it easier to justify kings, because it lets people suggest the alternative is the French Revolution.)
“… before this period, while the King was not absolute the hierarchy he remained atop of was” - this really isn’t true at all, as a cursory reading of history would suggest. Are you perhaps using “before this period” to mean “for a short while in medieval Europe”? Because even then, it isn’t true.
“this argument has come up yet again in the conversation about NAB … that the book is communist propaganda” - *snort* what? @socialjusticemunchkin
“You see, it’s easy to forget that feudalism (stay with me now) wasn’t just ‘having a king’, that the feudal system was a whole system wherein the whole hierarchy was justified …” - seems like “build an AI” doesn’t feature any hierarchy, though. It’s just this one AI.
