There is No Good Place to Be on a Warming Earth

As I have remarked time and again, a very large part of contemporary environmentalism--and certainly its more mainstream portion--has been founded on the darkest, most pessimistic Counter-Enlightenment thinking. Premised on postmodernism and Malthusianism; regarding the broad public as a "swinish multitude"; and denying any hope of positive social or political change; it screams about the danger--while being incapable of offering anything in the way of hope.

The result is that defeatism is all that is left to it, one expression of which is its haste to tell everyone that they are about to be dehoused. Live on a coastline? Sorry, you will just have to move. (They seem to especially love telling this to people in places like Miami and New Orleans--their "party town" image, perhaps, which proper Malthusians cannot possibly approve.) Live in an arid region? That's not going to be viable anymore. (The coastal folks have too much water, but they are going to have too little.) The tropics? Better find somewhere else to live. (Go north--to whatever isn't too coastal or too arid.) And this or that realization is followed up by images of latterday Volkerwanderung as millions, billions, relocate. However, anyone of even slight intelligence should be able to see that all of this quickly adds up to there being nowhere left to go--especially as unchecked global warming will mean that the situation will keep worsening, that the sea level will, for example, keep rising, so that areas that appeared safe at one point cease to be so not long after. And it cannot be any other way given that human reliance on freshwater supplies, productive farmland and water transport mean a continued collective dependence on areas particularly vulnerable to any worsening of the situation--while the losses of those areas will mean disruption going far beyond even the colossal human relocations. One would have more people living on far less of the Earth's surface, and getting along on far less of its resources, than they are now.

Meanwhile, how the world has dealt with its current refugee crisis, the worst since World War II but nothing next to the movements those speculating about such movements anticipate, does not inspire great confidence in the readiness of societies to accommodate the displaced on even a much smaller scale than they imagine.

All of this reveals this idea of vast relocations--especially in a world of hundreds of nation-states with all their borders--as the utmost silliness, though in fairness, I strongly suspect that were the troubles to run unchecked the frail international system, already bedeviled by what may be the greatest war danger in human history, would likely have long since escalated to the point of a devastating conflict before it comes to anything like forced mass relocation. (After all, problems like climate change, resource and economic stress, war, do not exist in separate compartments but are all complexly interlinked.)

All of this reminds us that if there is a solution to the problem it is exactly the one that misanthropic, technology- and progress-hating Malthusian-Luddite postmodernists completely reject, namely organization and technology to meet the crisis, with this not a matter of austerity-battered working people displaying great "convenient social virtue" in cheerfully deciding to individually live on less, but large-scale action to accelerate the "energy transition" and decarbonize transport and industry, hack the climate (they can whine all they like about cost and risk--the environmental movement's failures have left little choice but to bet on this route in some form), and minimize whatever damage is actually unavoidable (from slowing the melting of ice sheets to adapting coastal cities to higher sea levels, rather than some individual flight into an ever-shrinking and ever-poorer interior). Some of the technology we need to do all this is available; some exists in only the most nascent forms, and will have to be developed to a point of practical usefulness. Climate "inactivists" will look at acknowledgment of the latter fact and sneer at it as "unrealistic." (Sneering and calling things "unrealistic" are pretty much all that inactivists have in their intellectual arsenal of anti-democracy.) But in contrast with the fantasies of uprooting a planet's people and their life the idea that we can and should support the research and development of practical palliatives is the most pragmatic course--even when this means such exotica as cellular agriculture, or mega-engineering to slow the melting of glaciers.

Deindustrialization in France

In his writing on France's contemporary troubles (and the contemporary troubles of the advanced industrial world more as well) Emmanuel Todd has had a good deal to say about deindustrialization.

Taking an interest in the issue I looked over the United Nations' time series' on manufacturing "value added" (i.e. net output).

If when considering the matter we see Germany and Japan as at one end of the spectrum (less obviously dynamic than they used to be, but still colossal producers), and Britain and Canada at the other (with their manufacturing output sharply contracted in recent decades), it seems that France is very much in the latter situation--and Todd rightly understanding this as an important factor in the country's well-known discontents.

David Graeber's "The Bully's Pulpit": Some Reflections

Some years ago David Graeber published a remarkable essay in The Baffler, "The Bully's Pulpit," in which, as an anthropologist, he examined the matter of bullying. In doing so Graeber himself admits that "[t]his is difficult stuff," and tells us that he does not "claim to understand it completely." Still, one of the essay's virtues is a fairly clear conception of what bullying involves--what separates it from other sorts of conflict or aggression, which might be reduced to three interrelated aspects:

1. A significant disparity in power between the bully and their victim. (People who are, in the ways that matter, equals, and know it, cannot be said to bully each other.)

2. The complicity of Authority in the bully's behavior--whether by "looking the other way," or tacitly approving their conduct.

3. The inability of the victim to respond to the bully through means which are both societally approved and effective--and the victim indeed condemned no matter what they do. The victim is unable to flee; and cannot respond to the bully in kind because of the disparity in power; and so is reduced to either ignoring the bullying, resisting ineffectively, or "fighting unfairly." If they ignore the bully (apt to be a painful and humiliating course) the bully escalates their abuse to the point at which they cannot ignore it; if they resist ineffectively they demonstrate that they are weak, and are held in contempt for being weak; and if they resort to something unconventional they are held in contempt for that, too, and likely to be punished as everyone rallies around the bully.

Sanctimoniousness is thus a hallmark of such situations.

In Graeber's analysis the third aspect, the victim's reaction, and the sanctimoniousness toward it, is the point, "[b]ullying creat[ing] a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself." Putting it another way, central to bullying is propagandizing for the view that the oppressed deserve to be so. (Thus do they abuse someone past the limits of their endurance, and then when they lash out, say "Evil, evil, evil! That's why we have to keep their kind down.")

It is absolutely vile, and I might add, vile in a particular way. While Graeber remarked his having not read Veblen some time after this piece was published, it seems to me that such ritual is yet another reminder of the endurance of what Thorstein Veblen identified as barbarism into our times--with the pervasiveness and severity of such ritual, and the tolerance of it and justification of it, very telling of how much such barbarism lingers in a particular society.

Fifth Generation Computing: A Reappraisal

Back in April 2022 I published here a brief item about Japan's generally unremembered Fifth Generation Computer Systems Initiative from the standpoint of that initiative's fortieth anniversary (which fell on that very month).

Much hyped at the time, it was supposed to deliver the kind of artificial intelligence toward which we generally still felt ourselves to be straining at that time.

Writing that item my principal thought was for the overblown expectations people had of the program. However, in the wake of more recent work on Large Language Models, like OpenAI's GPT-4, it seems that something of what the fifth-generation computing program's proponents anticipated is at the least starting to become a reality.

It also seems notable that even if fourth-generation computing has not been replaced by fundamentally new hardware, or even shifted the material substrate of the same fourth-generation design from silicon to another material (like the long hoped-for carbon nanotube), we have seen a different chip concept--employed in a specialty capacity rather than as a replacement for fourth-generation computing--play a key role in progress in this field, "AI" (Artificial Intelligence) chips. Indeed, just as anticipated by those who had watched the fifth-generation computing program's development, parallel processing has been critical to the design of these chips for "pattern recognition," and the acceleration of the programs' training.

In the wake of all that, rather than regarding fifth-generation computing as a historical curiosity one may see grounds for it simply having been ahead of its time--and deserving of more respect than it has had to date. Indeed, it may well be that somewhere in the generally overlooked body of research produced in the course of its development there are insights that could power our continued progress in this field.

Of Left and Right Transhumanism, Again

About a decade ago I had occasion to remark that while transhumanist thought may be said to have been more evident on the left than the right a century ago the existence of left transhumanism scarcely seems a memory where the mainstream is concerned today. This is arguably because of how completely the left has been cut out of the conversation--the bounds of "civil" discourse set by the centrism predominant at mid-century locking it out, and nothing changing that ever since (the left, indeed, coming to be more thoroughly excluded as the "center," deeply conservative from the start, only shifted rightward). However, there also seems little sign of interest in the matter these days on the left.

Why is that?

It may be that in a period like the 1920s, when many on the left felt confident that the future belonged to them, there appeared room for such visions--such that Leon Trotsky, for example, could be seen waxing transhumanist in the seemingly unlikely place for such that is the closing pages of his book Literature and Revolution. By contrast, after decades of catastrophic, bitter political defeat and disappointment (without which the aforementioned marginalization of the left to the degree seen today would not have been possible), the feeling can only be very different--with other issues far more pressing, leaving little time or energy for such concerns. It may even be that, so long accused of being "visionary," with anti-Communist cliché endlessly sneering at the left's claims to rationality and mocking it as a quasi-religion, those on the left hesitate to give their enemies any more ammunition by taking up such concerns as transhumanism.

Of course, were the issue of transhumanism to become more pressing this would change. Some claim that it already has in the wake of recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence, with one team of Microsoft researchers, who strike this author as having been rigorous in their assessment and cautious in their analysis of the new GPT-4 (certainly by the standard of a discourse which seems to think "What sorcery is this?" an intelligent response) suggesting that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), in however "early" and "incomplete" a form, may already be a reality. Considering their assessment I am inclined to emphasize the "early" and "incomplete" in their judgment--and to suggest that the developments and additions to actually turn what may be early and incomplete AGI into an undeniably complete and mature system (like the system's being equipped with elaborate planning-oriented and self-critical "slow thinking" as well as the "fast thinking" faculties that have so impressed observers, and its being modified so as to learn continually and retain what it learns via a long-term memory facility) may be a long way off. All the same, the extent to which people of ideological tendencies which have not felt the need to address these matters find themselves having to do so may be telling with regard to just how much these new developments really matter.

Will AI Puncture the College Degree Bubble?

Some time ago I wrote about the possibility that college degrees had become the object of an asset bubble-like pursuit, with the price of the "asset" increasingly detached from the value of the good amid increasingly irrational buying--facilitated, as bubbles often are, by burgeoning credit (the more in as student loan generators securitize the debt, providing other money-making opportunities).

The bubble has "inflated" to far greater proportions than onlookers had imagined possible--but it seems that amid harder times and much disappointment, this may be coming to an end as young people become more reticent about the time and money college requires, encouraged to some extent by the changing tone of the press. Ever inclined to the promotion of aspirationalism rather than egalitarianism, its cry of "STEM! STEM! STEM!" has given way to its suggesting young people consider becoming electricians.

Just as much as was the case with the earlier counsel of "Go to college, young man" the "Go to trade school, young man" advice can reflect any number of agendas (like cover for financial austerity that would make college less accessible), but part of it may also be the increasing acknowledgment of the simple-mindedness of the "Send everyone to college" mentality--the more in as so many fear now that when the "AI" come for people's jobs it will be the knowledge workers who lose their jobs first, as, far from truckers having to learn to code, out-of-work coders start thinking about getting trucker's licenses.

"Are We Seeing the Beginning of the End of College as We Know It?": A Follow-Up

Some time ago I speculated about the "end of college as we know it."

What I had in mind was the way that pursuit of a degree--and especially adherence to the "Cult of the Good School"--had become crushing relative to the return to be hoped for from it (to the point that the use of the word "bubble" has some justification). This seems all the more the case for the evidences that young people have become more skeptical about the economic value of a college degree--in part because of the disappointing experience of their elders in an economy ever more remote from the post-war boom and its hazy notions of generalized "middle classness," premised on the piece of paper you get on graduation being a ticket exchangeable for the life of an "organization man" (and the encouragement of "everyone" to go to college by centrist "liberals" more comfortable with preaching individualistic aspirationalism to being something other than working class than doing things that actually help out the working class--as seen in the matter of who pays the bill).

In recent the months "the conversation" has seen two significant, interrelated alterations. One is that, while we have not seen progress in the performance of artificial intelligence in tasks involving "perception and manipulation" such as would suggest an imminent revolution in the automation of manual tasks, progress in "Large Language Models" has called into question the livelihoods of the "knowledge workers" that college trains people to become. (Indeed, one thoughtful study of GPT-4 by a team of Microsoft scientists contended that "general artificial intelligence," in however primitive and incomplete a form, may have already arrived.) The other is a bit of cooling off of the chatter about there not being enough STEM graduates as instead commentators wring their hands over a shortage of personnel in the "skilled trades"--as the chatbots put "the coders" out of work, but still leave us needing electricians.

One can only wonder if those assumptions will prove any more enduring than those which preceded them--if the sense of imminent massive job displacement among knowledge workers will not prove to be hype, if the claims of a skilled trade worker shortage will not prove as flimsy and self-serving as the eternal claims of a STEM worker shortage. (Employers always say there is a shortage of workers--which is to say they always think wages are too high--and the media being what it is faithfully and uncritically reports their views, and no others, while much of the commentary has a nasty streak of intergenerational warfare about it, with grouchy old farts snarling that young people are too lazy or afraid of getting their hands dirty for "real work.")

Nevertheless, if there is any truth to all this--and even if there is not, but people act as if there is--there will be consequences for how we educate, credential, hire and work. However, we should remember that, contrary to the rush of the advocates of the powerful to insist that "There Is No Alternative" as they inflict pain on the powerless, facing those consequences there will be social choices--necessitating a critical attitude from the public toward those claqueurs who instead simply applaud.