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Show Notes
Is Technology intrinsically good, bad or neutral? In this episode, we will go into the depths of Technology Philosophy & Ethics, what it actually is, its historical developments, the current movements of the present and what the future likely holds. What is e/acc, what is EA? What is Degrowth? We will also discuss spiritual and religious elements, in as much as they relate to Science and Technology.
Navigation:
- Intro (01:34)
- What is Technology Philosophy & Ethics? (02:33)
- Historical Developments (04:17)
- The Present (23:44)
- Our Views (49:06)
- Conclusion (54:45)
Our co-hosts:
- Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt
- Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro
Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news
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1. Intro
Bertrand Schmitt
Welcome to episode 53 of Tech Deciphered. This episode will be about technology philosophy and ethics. This is a bit far from our usual topics around investment and building companies, but we felt it was an interesting moment in time, especially with the development of AI, to talk about some of this, I would say what’s behind some of the reflection in tech around where we should move forward, how much we should accelerate, should we even consider a pause in some developments?
Bertrand Schmitt
Is technology intrinsically good, bad or neutral? We’ll try to go into the depths of some of these questions. We’ll also talk about e/acc, about EA, about degrowth, and we will also discuss some spiritual and religious elements in so far as to how they relate to science and technology.
2. What is Technology Philosophy & Ethics?
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Wonderful. Let’s start with what is technology, philosophy, and ethics? Basically, define the philosophy of technology as a subfield of philosophy. We have a good start there. It’s part of philosophy. Let’s start there.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
It actually studies the nature of technology and its social effects. It has several branches. Ethics is probably the one that’s been most published about recently. What are the ethics of AI, et cetera? Relations between science and technology, human-technology relations, there’s been some interesting debates as well around that, in particular in countries like Japan who always seem to be at the forefront of some of the stuff that happens around virtual and digital things and actual humans.
Bertrand Schmitt
Are you thinking about virtual girlfriends?
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Virtual girlfriends, virtual wives. You could get married to virtual wives. Obviously, the political dimensions of technology has also been hotly debated recently. Who owns semiconductors? Who owns AI? Is AI centralised or not? Is this an arms race? Is this going to be a source of geopolitical danger?
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Obviously, there’s different views around technology. There’s obviously the view that technology is autonomous, but it does determine society. It’s a human construct. It’s co-evolutionary, so it evolves at the same time as we should, and there should be boundary conditions around it and how we evolve.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Basically, this leads to anything between technophobes, people that hate technology, people that are technophilia, I’m not sure that would be the right word, but that have technophilia, that love technology like you and I, Bertrand, we love technology in some ways. Then there’s people at the edges of this that go on different angles like technology anarchy and a bunch of other things.
3. Historical Developments
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
That’s basically a very broad definition of technology philosophy. But maybe moving to a little bit of more of an understanding how we got here, let’s go through history, Bertrand.
Bertrand Schmitt
I must say, first of all, people who really hate technology, I guess they should go back to living in huts with no fire.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Maybe even before huts, maybe before there were huts, there was fire, there wasn’t huts. There were caves.
Bertrand Schmitt
Go back to caves or go on trees, I guess, because at the end of the day, the story of humanity is connected with technology. Obviously, we will not be here talking on Zoom about technology and philosophy if we are not believer in some ways of technology. At least, we have to be the children of technology.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
If we go back, the history of technology philosophy actually goes back to the Greeks. Even the Greeks have been talking about this technology thing, about how there are these things that we create, technology, we human, that try to emulate nature. If we go back in time, just the beginnings of technology philosophy are really related to Greeks. The first notion is that technology should in some ways emulate nature, or it’s trying to emulate nature.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Then at some point, I think this is around Aristotle, he starts saying, “Wait a second. No, that’s not quite accurate. Technology should not be trying to emulate nature. There should be a fundamental distinction.” They call it an ontological distinction between what is created by nature and what is created by human beings. Therefore, technology should be what is created by human beings.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Out of that, there’s been this fundamental difference that we still have today, what was man-made versus what was not man-made. Today, it’s even more complex because there’s what’s nature-made, what’s man-made, and what’s machine-made. Just to make life even more complex, we have all these different ontological distinctions.
Bertrand Schmitt
What’s inspired by nature, what’s a copy of what nature could do, but done automatically by machine. In this [inaudible 00:04:44] from what could be done by nature. It’s not as easy as it used to be in some ways.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
For a long time, I think we’ve had this notion of history where technology in some ways, and I think this is related to something we’ll talk in later, which is medieval times and all these, we’ll talk about it later as well, the [inaudible 00:05:04] and these fake news from very, very far back of what happened in medieval times. But science and technology has always been alongside us.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
There’s this notion that around medieval times that religion and the church hampered the development of technology. That in some ways was promulgated by a late Renaissance. A lot of people that then came much later than that, such as Bertrand Russell and a few others, that in some ways, Catholicism, Christianity, later with Protestantism, hamper the development of science. And that in some ways, men were being held back from all their potential by developing tools that would increase, one, their productivity, but would also increase the classic utilitarian notion of the product itself that we were creating.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Obviously, one of the most famous examples is the famous heresy Declaration on Galileo, that relates to science in particular, to the fact that at some point the church came against science. And this gentleman, Galileo, was wronged.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
We have even this famous sentence that he would have said after his condemnation to heresy. Even people think that he was condemned to heresy and he was killed, and that he would have said, “Eppur si muove”, which in Latin would mean, and still it moves.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
This is all related, obviously, to the theory of whether the Earth was the centre of what we now know to be our solar system or not. Obviously, now we know that it’s a solar system, so the sun was the centre.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
It relates to Copernicus, who had been one of the first guys to figure it out. I’ve now heard that actually there was someone before Copernicus who had put forward that theory. The interesting thing about all of this story is it’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit. He never said “Eppur si muove”, he wasn’t killed.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
He was actually sent to a farmland house that he had. Think of it as a domiciled prison thing. The reality is he wasn’t the guy who came up with it. Copernicus and many others before actually came up with it. Funnily enough, he was Catholic, and he was very close to the Curia at that point, to the Vatican at that point. He was very close to the Pope, effectively.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
The reason why he got condemned for heresy was he basically took up on the theory. This is a very funny story. You guys should look it up. He took up on the theory, and he took it upon himself to say it was his theory. Then he started doing analysis on it. Then he basically came and said, “I’ve come up with this logic that the sun is the centre. It’s not actually Earth. What’s happening on Earth is based actually on the movements of the moon and the waves, and there’s a relation in that.”
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Anyway, his theory was actually fundamentally totally wrong. He kept being asked by the church of the time, “Can you provide proof?” Because we’ve heard from… Copernicus, by the way, was religious as well. The guy who came before Copernicus as well was also religious. It was nothing against the church. The church at that point was willing to potentially believe that actually we were not the centre of the universe, as we assumed it at that point. But they were asking for proof. Could you prove it? It was a series of these political things and indrominations with the church that actually led Galileo to be, in the end, condemned by heresy.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
He actually did publish a document that was considered a reticle because he tried to go back to the Bible and prove there was something in this theory that was in the Bible as well, which is actually also BS.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Then he wasn’t condemned for heresy for that article that he wrote. He continued pushing it, and the church kept asking him for proof. Finally, that hearing, he could not provide any proof that was seen as scientifically accurate. Therefore, some parts of the church was at that point so pissed off at him. He managed to even piss off the Pope who happened to be on this side when this whole thing started as well. He did get condemned at the end for heresy. The funny thing is, apparently, some of his best scientific stuff actually came out of that exile in the farmland, where he finally did do some science hardcore.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Anyway, the psychotomy between church and religion, whatever, I just wanted to finalise on that point is actually inaccurate. There’s a really interesting book you guys should look at called Bearing False Witness, which shows this mythology that medieval times were the destruction of science.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Actually, that book promulgates that actually it is incorrect. That certainly the last century of medieval times was a tremendous advancement into science. They were building a lot of universities, and there were a lot of scientists that actually evolved science dramatically. The shocking thing is most of them were either Christian or Catholic. They’re either Protestant, Christian, or Catholic.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
A lot of the money that went into it, the creation of universities that we actually know for a fact, came from the church. Churches created universities. Actually, they were some of the first that created universities.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Anyway, the interesting thing all this story, this dichotomy between science and religion and this linked back to the philosophy of technology, et cetera, is fake news. It’s just, sadly, very old fake news promulgated by, as I said, people, in particular in the late 19th century, that had a vested interest in showing a secular attitude and an anti-religious attitude towards it. Again, not to defend that the church didn’t make many mistakes throughout the years, but that was not really one of them.
Bertrand Schmitt
Interesting, that’s the first time I’m hearing the fake news part around what happened to Galileo, Galilei. Obviously, I knew he was not killed, but just put under arrest. If I remember well, at the end of the day, it really started for him when he studied the moons of Jupiter.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Correct.
Bertrand Schmitt
After building one of the first… I forgot if he built himself, or he bought one of the first telescopes, and instead of pointing to the horizon, basically, to look for a ship, he might have been one of the first to look at the stars and look at the planet and discover the moon of Jupiter. From there, obviously, that raise a lot of questions. Then suddenly the Earth is clearly not the centre of something, given that these moons of Jupiter were around Jupiter.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
He apparently flip-flopped. This is the interesting thing, again. During the hearing itself, he flip-flopped, and went back to saying, actually, then the Earth is the centre of the universe, et cetera.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
This was edified as religion in the church standing behind. He took his actual theory of tides, as you were mentioning it, to a new Pope at that point, who I think was Urban VIII. Basically, I think it was even the Pope himself who said, “I don’t think that makes sense.”
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
It’s always this assumption that the Church, the popes, the clerical people at that point had no knowledge, when we know that is actually factual and correct. Monasteries developed a lot of knowledge.
Bertrand Schmitt
Yeah, of course.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
For a while, that was the problem, is they held the knowledge, and they were not sharing the knowledge with the rest of the world, that’s why universities were created, to open it up outside of clerical environments, monasteries, nunneries, et cetera.
Bertrand Schmitt
Yes. Some knowledge was obviously very important in terms of practical nature, understanding tides, understanding seasons. There was a lot of stuff that would be useful. I think the question was mostly… Ultimately, what people might remember from this was not that the church was not knowledgeable, but more is a church accepting some knowledge that might be against some official perspective or view.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
But even that was not true. I think that’s the point of… If you guys are up for it, read the book, read the Bearing False Witness. It was not true. There was significant resources put by the church behind these inventions, right?
Bertrand Schmitt
I certainly need to read the book. I have not read the book, so I cannot say. You could argue what’s interesting is, of course, even if it’s not clear what exactly happened, we have a lot of documents, materials, which is not typical in a lot situation when we’re talking about 500 years ago, so that makes things interesting.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
I will close there on this chapter of why there have been some misrepresentations. The guys and girls who are now listening to our podcast, to go and Google it. Who first came up with the Big Bang Theory? Bertrand. Do you know? Who first came up with a theory, if you Google it, literally Google it, was Georges Lemaître, who was a Catholic priest. He was a Catholic priest. He was made fun of. People were like, “That doesn’t make any sense.” It was just stupid. They made fun of him. Anyway, I’ll shut up now. We’ll go back to our regular technology discussion.
Bertrand Schmitt
One can argue the church of the 20th century is not the same as the 15, 16, 10th century.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Yeah, but I feel there’s been a lot of mess representation through the time, and some stuff there was just an idea behind it that at some point got promulgated, and then we go back in time and if we actually do the analysis, we realise it’s fake news. It was just fake news back then. It just got promulgated over the centuries because it made sense to promulgate.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Again, I’m not defending the church, Catholic or otherwise, from any wrongdoings. I’m just saying there are some wrongdoings that should not be attributed to the church.
Bertrand Schmitt
Going back, an interesting point in terms of historical development for me is probably the development of atomic weapons. Because for the first time, humanity has the ability to destroy itself. Even if originally it might not have been seen like this, but after one, two, three decades, it became obvious that, yes, you can officially destroy humanity with all the atomic weapons in existence if they were ever to be used. I think that has raised a new class of questions or put in front of us some possibilities that were too big to even consider in the past.
Bertrand Schmitt
Obviously Einstein, Oppenheimer, thought about this and maybe later changed their mind about what they have done or help introduce in terms of concept. That has also raised the stakes for a lot of scientists in terms of how they analyse their work, how they think about their work, how they think about the potential of destruction for their work.
Bertrand Schmitt
Not just destruction, but we are talking about the potential for total annulation of the human race. This is not anymore about killing some people, destroying a nation. It’s way beyond that. I guess, yes, it started in the ’50s, started in the US and expanded the more nations got weapons.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
I think it’s the notion that we could easily destroy ourselves. It’s when we start developing technology that started creating this notion, maybe we can actually easily destroy ourselves. Because to be honest, technology development was always linked to, at some point in time, also to military development. It was always about gaining terrain, going to a specific place, et cetera. To your point, this was a moment where we developed this technology that we weren’t even sure it wasn’t going to kill us all. Would we all die from the first nuclear bomb or atom bomb? I don’t know.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
I feel it’s that notion that we finally started creating technology that we couldn’t fundamentally fully grasp the implications of, which I think is a good maybe link to this discussion we’re having today in the present time around AI. It’s when we started understanding ethics at a different level.
Bertrand Schmitt
Maybe, if I may, it goes even a bit further. It’s for the first time in history, an individual can near directly send that signal to send thousands of atomic weapons in one go. My point is that, yes, there is a chain of command, yes, there are a few people involved in this, it’s not just pressing the button, but it’s very close to one individual leaving a button to press and being able to basically destroy the world as we know it. That’s also raising the stake. It’s not just you can destroy yourself, but one guy, one girl can really change the whole history of humankind very quickly.
Bertrand Schmitt
I think that’s something new, that part where you don’t need these people on the ground, you don’t need these tanks, you don’t need these planes. It’s remote, it’s through machines, it’s near instant. This is a command that can basically work its way in a matter of minutes and have an impact in a few more minutes. It has changed how you think about war in a way and humanity and its stability.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Indeed. Be it atomic bombs, be it hydrogen bombs, be it nuclear fission, be it nuclear fusion, whatever it is, obviously, these are weapons of mass destruction, and there’s a lot more. Now we have chemical weapons. I think part of the concern is now we have other types of weaponry, like cyberattacks, electronic warfare, et cetera. I think that’s when we start also having the added complexity and concern, because if then there’s AI on top of that, how do we control this? How do we step away and control this?
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Let me just go back a second just to close the chapter on the history, because we’ve gone through many, many epics of history very quickly, but there’s one that I did want to talk about, which is the so-called First Industrial Revolution.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
The First Industrial Revolution, obviously, we always link it to these machines, to the machines that led us to where we are today, the trains, the steam engine, and where we are today in terms of manufacturing, in some ways came from that.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
There were a lot of strong reactions back then as well. We can’t forget that. Late 19th century into early 20th century, there’s a lot of reactions. The term Luddite that we still use till this day, actually, I just realised, actually comes from that group of people, the group of people back then that didn’t want new technologies to be used in the field and wanted to destroy them.
Bertrand Schmitt
Actually, Luddite were early 19th century in England, and it was around weaving.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Even before the Industrial Revolution.
Bertrand Schmitt
Yeah. It was at the time of the automation of weaving and the first machines to help accelerate the weaving process. Yes, it was before the Industrial Revolution itself. You could argue it’s the very start of putting machine to work. And it was pretty violent. They killed people were owning some of these factories. Ultimately, the British government made an example and managed to, I think, ultimately kill 30 people or so that were demonstrated leaders. “After a due process,” but this was a pretty aggressive reaction to this movement.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
We always had this tension between advancements in technology and what’s right for society. Malthusianism, from Malthus, that was effectively defending that all of this stuff, we can’t have this population growth. Population growth is ultimately going to be exponential. Then obviously, the growth that we have in food supply and other resources is more linear, so we can’t possibly have so much population in the world. There’s still arguments around it today, actually, that we can’t keep growing population, that we need to control population in the world.
Bertrand Schmitt
Typically, it’s from people who told us we could never be 1 billion people on Earth, we could never be 2 billion, 3 billion, 5 billion. They will always find a new post that after that, it won’t work.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Yeah, but then there’s the people on the other side that say the technology will solve all of the problems, which we also know that’s not true. Technology will increase productivity, et cetera.
Bertrand Schmitt
It has been true so far. We have never had so many billions people on Earth, and we never had people living in such better conditions as well.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
It has solved a lot of problems, and it has allowed for there to be a dramatic population growth in the world. But we have other problems because of technology as well. We have things like pollution. Clearly, we have pollution. There are side effects to progress. At least that’s my perspective. I don’t know if Bertrand agrees with me or not. There’s clearly side effects to progression. I think weapons of mass destruction we have today and the things we can do and kill each other globally, this is not a good thing. But we have those weapons. We have that technology to do that. I don’t think all technology is good. I don’t think technology is intrinsically good. We’ll have that discussion maybe in a bit.
Bertrand Schmitt
Yeah, I think technology can be used for good, can be used for bad. That’s probably true since the history of mankind. Your first stone that you managed to cut so that you can use it as a tool has also become a weapon. The same for fire. So talking about dual-use technology, it has always been the case since the dawn of mankind. And for me, humanity has shown a great capacity so far to focus on the good side of technology and benefit and profit from it. But yeah, unchecked use of technology can go pretty bad.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
I think it’s been, from my perspective, net positive. We have evolved very quickly, in particular in the last few centuries.
Bertrand Schmitt
Oh, totally.
4. The Present
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
And it’s been net positive. I think throughout history, we’ve had to have this discussion around whether there need to be some more aggressive boundary conditions around its use. Maybe this is a good segue to talk about the present and the discussions that are happening on X today and on social media and different people, different things that are almost effectively the repatching of philosophies that have been around for many centuries. They’re not new.
Bertrand Schmitt
Yeah, that’s a good point. I think these days, there are three main categories of philosophy around technologies that have been formalised and have some level of following. The first one, e/acc, is very new. e/acc or EACC, depending on how you pronounce, it’s pretty new because it was maybe officially launched a year ago in 2023, but it managed to gather followers like Marc Andreessen, Garry Tan. I don’t think Yann LeCun is officially declared on this, but the way he talk and what he could talk about would make me think if he had to pick, he would be following this philosophy.
Bertrand Schmitt
Basically, it’s a philosophy that believes AI is mostly good in the development of technologies, therefore, accelerating technology is a good thing for everyone. We’ll share more of our views, but to be frank, that’s probably the philosophy I feel the closest aligned with.
Bertrand Schmitt
There is a second one called effective altruism, EA, that has been around for 10 plus years. This one has become controversial a bit thanks for a large sponsoring from Sam Bankman-Fried, SBF, who has made pretty controversial donations and also tried to align his philosophy of life with EA, at least officially. What happened with him has caused some issue for the philosophy at large.
Bertrand Schmitt
Here, it’s about thinking that you have to think about the long term and be careful about limiting risk to the long term because the long term is full of future human beings, and you have to wait any decision versus what could impact and how it could be impacted basically on descendants over not just centuries, but potentially thousands, if not millions of years. They try to compare everything to that, and their approach as a result can be quite special. It’s around decreasing risk, controlling risk.
Bertrand Schmitt
A third approach, I’m not sure it has officially a name, but you can call it anti-progress. Some call them degrowth and deceleration. Obviously, there have been multiple movements. You talk about Malthusianism. A more modern version was from Paul Ehrlich. It’s horrible, to be frank, to listen to him. You can see old interviews or newer interviews. There are people, you wonder how close they are to try to kill people, to reduce population on Earth. I’m myself very surprised that they have any publicity. Of course, all the recent fearmongering coming from the Green Movement is a version of this anti-technology.
Bertrand Schmitt
Obviously, another one has been all this movement connected to the Greens against nuclear technology, nuclear fission reactors that have been closed, unfortunately, all over the world, thanks to their fearmongering and lack of science and analysis. That’s basically the three movements, e/acc, EA, and degrowth.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
In a simplistic manner for those who are trying to understand what are the difference between e/acc, EA, and degrowth, and at the risk of getting totally flamed and attacked by people that say that what I’m about to say is incorrect. In my mind, e/acc is very much pro-technology. Technology will solve all the problems of the world. We have clear problems. We have clear problems with war, with poverty, with climate change, with a bunch of other things, but all problems will be solved by technology. There’s no other way to solve them, and therefore, we need to accelerate rather than put more and more binding conditions to technology.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
EA, effective altruism is… Some would defend it’s more moderate, others would say it’s not. In some ways, I think e/acc is a reaction to EA rather than a reaction to degrowth. But EA defends itself as relatively fact-based, evidence-based notion of, should we adopt these technologies or these systems of technologies for the advancement of men to make men, men and women, of course, but to make human beings better or not? Basically saying we should understand the impact of technology in the decisions we’re making and how it affects human beings. I think in principle, everything that we do, I think that’s what EA defence, should be for the betterment of human beings.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Then degrowth is saying, “No way in hell we can continue growing. No way in hell that this notion of capitalism and growth, economic growth in particular, we can continue it. We need at some point to stop and step back and reassess what are the right metrics for us. Is it GDP growth? Maybe not. It’s something else. What’s the level of things that we need to do?”
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
I wouldn’t say that degrowth movement is defining or defending that we need to go back to living in Hudson stuff, but it is saying we can’t continue just growing at the sake of growing. Maybe at some point we need to reassess what our primary notion is. In my mind, those are the three views that are presented here. If I were to be as neutral-positive as I can about each of the movements.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Now, what people will defend is the following. I mean, with EA, when has history been very good at analysing a new technology? Never, ever. Never, ever. That’s how we got the atom bomb. Never, ever. We don’t know. We just don’t know. Some theoretical physicist comes up with something, and we don’t know what’s going to come out of that. We start experimenting. It’s effectively how science and technology advances. It’s through experimentation. We experiment and we discover new applications. If we’re going to do like hardcore EA, can we actually do hardcore EA? Because we never know the side effects of a new technology or a new scientific breakthrough until we’ve experimented, right?
Bertrand Schmitt
Maybe to add on this, a good example for me of EA was this anecdote of there was this debate, a public debate from one of the leading prominent speaker about EA was presented a scenario. You can either save a child from a burning building or save a Picasso painting and sell and donate the proceeds to charity. The question was, “What should you do as an effective altruist?” The answer was, “Of course, you should sell the Picasso, because in the long run, I’m going to sell it, make money, and can invest this money to create more good that will impact a lot of people. Of course, I don’t care about this dying child.”
Bertrand Schmitt
For me, that’s so shocking as an answer. There is no word to it. That’s my worry we see here. It feels like totally disconnected from reality, and you can manipulate numbers in so many ways to end up to what some people really want. It feels something designed to be manipulated, basically. That’s what my worry is with effective altruism.
Bertrand Schmitt
Another good example, long-termism is connected to EA. Some people like Nick Bostrom, infamous from my perspective.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Infamous, right?
Bertrand Schmitt
Infamous, yes. From my perspective, at least. It’s basically connected to EA. Part of the long-termism view, again, look at our impact in thousands of years, which personally makes absolutely no sense because thousands of years, we have seen how 200 years of technology have changed the world as we know it. Good luck guessing the next thousands of years. It’s impossible.
Bertrand Schmitt
But he’s famous for this example about AI and the paper clip scare. Basically talking about one day in AI, we could ask it a question to, “Hey, I need a lot of paper clips.” The AI just keep making paper clips and ultimately consume all the Earth’s resource and destroy all of humanity in the process of making more paper clip because the AI was not grounded enough in common sense.
Bertrand Schmitt
That’s very worrisome for me because, from my perspective, a lot of stupid thinking around AI is coming actually from this type of fallacy. You are going to build a super smart machine, but it’s lacking so much common sense. It’s also awesome, powerful and controlling of everything that it cannot even understand what it’s doing is wrong and should not be done and no one is able to stop it.
Bertrand Schmitt
Basically, it makes no sense. But it does actually fuel a lot of the growth of EA, a lot of the issues, so-called issues, surrounding AI. That’s why I’m reacting to highlight some of the points behind EA because it’s one thing to talk about. Overall, the philosophy and from far, it looks okay, but when you go closer in the example they share, it starts to be worrisome from my perspective.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Maybe just to finish my… I’ll attack each of them without being too personal about it, but just state what people say about each of them. Just to close on EA, I think one of the issues with EA is, even if you’re an amazing strategist, and I’ve I’ve said this before, what I call the strategist blind spot or the strategist dilemma, which is strategists always overestimate the speed we get to a revolution. They always underestimate impact. The problem with something like EA is even if we have the best minds thinking through the impact of technology, et cetera, they likely will under-represent the impact. And they will overestimate the speed at which we get the revolution. In both cases, it’s not ideal because we’re missing two really important angles, timing and impact on a specific technology.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Again, leaving EA to the side, I’d say it attacks on degrowth. There are several visions of degrowth. There’s the notion that the working week should be basically reduced, that people should have less hours of work per day, potentially per week as well, that leads to more gender balancing by itself, et cetera. There’s a lot of elements of degrowth that are based on interesting facts that might actually apply.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
I don’t think, by the way, degrowth, EA and e/acc are all opposed to each other. They have moments of opposition and areas of opposition. I don’t think they are fundamentally all opposed on everything. Just to be clear, it is not a perfect distinction between these three movements.
Bertrand Schmitt
I will argue that there is very, very strong, deep opposition between e/acc and degrowth.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Yeah, but then you go into the details, and you have argumentation around, “Well, really, shouldn’t you still think about some level of regulatory implementation for technology, even on technology?” I’m sure a lot of the e/acc guys would still define, “Yes, there needs to be something.” I feel it’s now put as a religious fight. Actually, the funny thing is religious fights shouldn’t be religious fights because actually, even between religions, there’s a lot of commonality. What I’m saying is I think everyone just says it’s an actual opposite view of the world. I don’t think it is. I think there’s stuff in between.
Bertrand Schmitt
Maybe we have to agree to disagree. I feel that that might be true with EA, what you are saying, but I don’t think so with degrowth. I think degrowth as a mindset is fundamentally against growing humanity around growth, economic, technological, everything. Wants to go back, God knows where. Is it 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 200 years ago? I don’t know.
Bertrand Schmitt
If these people had any clue about what life was 200 years ago, I think they would probably not propose that. But I think it’s truly opposite. One is about being optimist about not just technology, but humanity, the future, building a better future and keep working like this. Another one is negative. I guess, to be quite frank, is probably being manipulated itself by, I’m not sure who, but ultimately, it’s going to bring us nowhere and brings only, from my perspective, a terrible, terrible world. Because at the end of the day, the world is working through growth. People want to be better than their parents, than their grandparents used to be. And if suddenly you inverse that equation, I think the world would be a very, very difficult place to live. I don’t see anything where e/acc or degrowth can agree to be franker.
Bertrand Schmitt
In term of EA, I think, yes, they might be the guys who propose regulations who are okay with technology but wanting control, manipulated, censored, managed by a central state. But I don’t think they are against per se technologies. They don’t want to take too much risk, existential risk, that’s for sure. But I don’t think the mindset is to grow negatively. I think the mindset might be more to decrease the risk. Yes, if it has an impact on growth rate, maybe. I don’t think it’s so opposite.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
You heard it from the horse’s mouth, someone who clearly has a strong view against degrowth, and he already shared it with all of us, so we don’t need to reshare it. I would add one thing to degrowth. There are some elements of this that resemble Marxism and resemble a lot of the notion of division of assets and all that stuff. One of the key issues with a methodology or with a system like this is what I call arbitrage. It’s because the likelihood that one player will play by these rules, but all the rest will not is 100%. It’s like game theory, right? It’s like, you guys do your degrowth thing, and we’ll continue growing, okay?
Bertrand Schmitt
Yes. That’s a great point because ultimately, that’s obviously the issue with all of this, is that you have to be pretty dumb to believe in some of this mindset. Degrowth is pretty obvious, but I would argue even yeah. Because at the end of the day, if only this country does EA, or if only Northern Europe does EA or whatever, then the rest of the world will not bother.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
Yeah, but the existential crisis part might prompt people to be a little bit more thoughtful about it, I guess. Even on a global basis, hopefully.
Bertrand Schmitt
Yeah. I would just say that humanity has learned to live and survive and manage a situation where, again, we have had for the past 70 years, whether we like it or not, whether we want to remember it or not, we have been living and are still living in the risk of total destruction of humanity through nuclear weapons. We don’t need a pathogen, we don’t need an AI, we don’t need anything. It’s very quick, unfortunately, one guy pressing a button, and it could be the end of humanity.
Bertrand Schmitt
I feel some of these fears are quite unreasonable versus something that has, unfortunately, much higher probability and risk and has absolutely no equivalent in term of violence.
Nuno Goncalves Pedro,
But I’ll throw something at you. I don’t know if you’ve been, but I’ve been to Bhutan, a country with 700,000 people. You’re going soon, right?
Bertrand Schmitt