At the beginning of spring, an unusual flower blooms in a meadow. The other flowers in the meadow have five petals; this has six. The other flowers are red, orange, or yellow; this is purple. The others smell sweet; this smells of spices.

“It’s beautiful!” says Challenger. They stoop to look closer. “I have never seen anything like it — a reinvention of what a flower can be!”

Keeper smiles at Challenger’s enthusiasm. “And yet,” says they, “it is still only a flower. A new incarnation, but a very old soul.”

“And what is the point of old souls, if not reincarnation?” asks Challenger, raising their eyebrows in mockery of their elder.

Keeper, wryly: “What is the point of reincarnation, if not to learn from old souls?”

Moving on from the meadow, the travelers encounter a creek running clear and cold over a bed of stones. Here they fill their waterskins and wash their faces.

“Soon,” says Keeper, “I will show you the place where all creeks begin.”

“Is that where we travel to?” asks Challenger.

“Indirectly. Our pilgrimage must first visit two other sites.”

And so Challenger and Keeper continue on for several days, across many more miles and streams. Finally, they arrive at the Edge of the world. Here there are no flowers nor meadows (as the climate is not especially temperate at the Edge of the world). Keeper instructs Challenger to peer over the Edge.

“Oh! It’s very bright and hot down there. It hurts my eyes!” says Challenger. “What is it?”

“It is parent Chaos. It is the source of all the energy in the world.”

Challenger beholds Chaos and feels comforted by its warmth, but terrified by its conflagration. Keeper beholds Chaos and is not shaken.

“Where does Chaos come from, Keeper?” asks Challenger.

“It hails from the beginning,” replies Keeper. “From Chaos sprang time, and change, and heat. Without it, neither you nor I could be.”

“I see,” says Challenger. Turning now to address the light beneath the world: “Well-met, parent Chaos. I will honor you as best I can.”

After observing a moment of silence, Challenger and Keeper depart the Edge of the world. Traversing across wide grasslands, the pair soon enter the foothills and begin climbing into the mountains.

On the first day of their ascent, they climb high enough that there are no longer any plants around them. On the second day, they climb high enough that they must look down to see the clouds. And on the third day, they climb higher still—higher even than the stars in the sky. At last, they reach the Top of the world.

“It’s awful dark here,” says Challenger, “and chilly, too.”

The summit is so quiet that they can hear their own heartbeat. An encompassing, inky void permeates forever in all directions. They hesitate a moment before asking:

“What is in the darkness?”

“It is parent Stillness,” says Keeper. “It is the death of all the energy in the world.”

Challenger gazes into Stillness, and feels comforted by its stability, but terrified by its suffocation. Keeper gazes into Stillness and feels a nagging pull.

“Where does Stillness come from, Keeper?” asks Challenger.

“It hails from the end,” replies Keeper. “From Stillness arose structure, and rules, and cold. Without it, neither you nor I could be.”

“I see,” says Challenger, “or at least, I think I see.” Then, addressing the dark above the world: “Well-met, parent Stillness. I will honor you as best I can.”

Now, having paid respect to this second parent, the shivering travelers trek back down the mountain. At the bottom, they chart their next steps.

“We have been to meet parent Chaos at the Edge of the world, and parent Stillness at the Top of the world. Where, young one, do you suppose we will go next?” asks Keeper.

“To the Center of the world?”

Keeper smiles. “Correct—you are keen! We will go to the Center of the world.”

At the Edge of the world and the Top of the world, the air is dry and the ground is rocky. Both are mostly desolate. The Center, however, is quite different! As the travelers approach it, they confront thicker and thicker vegetation. And the sound! Compared to the dull roar of the Edge or the silence of the Top, the Center of the world is symphonic. Insects buzz, whir, chirp; birdsong is constant. Water drips and splashes onto leaves and in streams, and breezes stir the branches of whispering ranks of trees. The air is damp and temperate, and shimmering mist hangs in the canopy.

Challenger searches the trees for brightly-plumed birds and comments cheerily with each one they find. Thus occupied, they are startled when they step out of the rainforest and into a clearing five miles across. The jungle ends abruptly here, as it would be irreverent for it to encroach any further, yet Challenger feels inexplicably welcome in this place. Now the ground turns from loam to shale rock clinking under their feet, like broken pottery. Before them: an irregular tessellation of foot-tall shelves of stone, with clumps of moss living in the nooks and crannies. Streams cascade from shelf to shelf, occasionally resting in shallow pools (but mostly tumbling down into the jungle). The travelers’ eyes trace the streams backwards, they tilt their heads upwards, and at last, they spy the source.

In the exact center of the clearing — the exact Center of the world, in fact — stands an unusually large tree.

The trunk: wide enough that its curvature is imperceptible to one standing beside it. The branches: twisted, knotted, striking into the sky like upside-down lightning bolts, each wide enough to build a village atop. The highest of these cannot even be seen, for they disappear into the clouds. The leaves: evergreen mainsails billowing in the wind.

It takes the travelers nearly another hour to reach the base of the tree. The closer they draw, the more impressed Challenger grows. Around one mile out, the shale-shelves begin to interweave with the roots of the colossus — great serpentine roots, thicker than Challenger is tall, humming with power. Challenger brushes against one; notices it is warm to the touch — warm from the inside.

The light from the sky grows dimmer with each step. Occasional sparkling patches of it still filter through the web of branches and clouds above, but such patches grow rare nearer to the trunk. The air cools, and before long, Challenger’s breath mists. Roots now cover the ground entirely, and the heat radiating from them keeps Challenger’s toes warm even as their ears go numb with cold.

At last, the travelers arrive at the base of the tree. The branches overhead block out all the light from the stars, but it is still possible to see. Faint, soft (yet undeniable), a warm golden light emanates from the crags of the trunk; reflects off the surface of countless shallow pools of water.

“Each pool is a spring,” notes Keeper. There is a hushed reverence in their voice, and Challenger mimics it when they respond.

“And they feed all the streams in the world?”

“Indeed.”

Challenger’s brow furrows. “Where does the water for the springs come from, Keeper?”

“From the tree.”

“The tree creates the water?”

“Yes.”

“How?"

Keeper draws a long breath. It is time Challenger learned the nature of things.

“First, there are the roots: diving far below the surface — below the oldest stones, into the realm of parent Chaos. These gather time, change, and heat, and carry them up into the world.”

“Then there are the branches: stretching far above — above the oldest stars, into the realm of parent Stillness. These gather structure, laws, and cold, and pull them down into the world.”

“Here — at the Center of the world — is where the gifts of our parents meet. Stillness from above, Chaos from below, brought together at the base of the tree, and the tree takes them and fashions them into all things. All that is, all that was, and all that will be exists at the boundary between the primordial forces.”

As they speak, Keeper removes two vials from their pack and unstoppers them. Out of one flows pitch-black ink; out of the other, glowing white ink. The masses of ink hang suspended in the air, held aloft by old magic. The black rises to nearly the level of Challenger’s head, while the white drifts down to about their waist.

“The dark,” says Keeper, “is like parent Stillness. The light is like parent Chaos. On its own, each is formless. Incapable of complexity. They are hard to look at, because they are pure — the eye searches for features to latch on to, but finds none.”

A tendril extends from each body of ink, reaching out across the empty space between them until they meet in the center. All of a sudden, there is turbulence, collision, edges, shapes. More tendrils arise and stretch into the center. The light form roots, the dark form branches—a tree!—and waves of creation radiate out from its trunk. Stars, seas, mountains, forests, clouds, streams, mammals, birds, insects, moss, animalcules — all emerging from the turbulence. Formed out of the turbulence.

Keeper continues their instruction: “I have told you all things exist at the boundary between the primordial forces. But that is… subtly inaccurate. Rather, all things are the boundary between the primordial forces. Chaos and Stillness are intangible and incorporeal. They do not… exist in the way that you, or I, or this tree does. Only the interactions between the forces exist.”

“Life, death, right, wrong, you, me, this whole world — all of it makes up the fractal manifold betwixt all-creating Chaos and all-consuming Stillness.”

Challenger holds this in their mind. They and Keeper continue to admire the spectacle for some time, but at length Keeper separates the inks and returns them to their vials. A long pause. Then:

“Why?” asks Challenger.

Keeper smiles.

“Why not?”

Once every year going forward, Challenger and Keeper visit their primordial parents and the tree. Each visit, Challenger’s questions grow more wise, and Keeper’s answers more lengthy. The two discuss whether it is their duty to tend to the tree. They discuss whether the tree knows of them. They discuss insects, hopes, dreams, and favorite foods. They speak of loneliness and howling winds. They joke about worn-out shoes.

One day, many years later, they talk about death—because as Challenger grows up and Keeper grows old, death looms ever-lower over their minds.

This year will be Keeper’s last.

“Are you afraid of dying, Keeper?”

“Of course! But it is a small fear.”

“Do you wish not to die?”

“No. All the most marvelous things I’ve encountered have frightened me at least a little.”

“I am very afraid of dying.”

“As was I, when I was you. You are at the height of conflict between Chaos and Stillness. You are in the middle of them, pulled every-which-way into life and purpose. But me? I am leaving the manifold soon.”

“Are we… meant to die, Keeper?”

“Are the streams meant to run?”

“I suppose.”

“Then I suppose we are meant to die.”

This year’s journey to visit the parents and tree is slow, as Keeper’s joints are stiff and Challenger is in no hurry. Greeting parent Chaos at the Edge of the world, Keeper closes their eyes and basks in the heat beaming up from below. For a moment, they appear younger to Challenger. Saluting parent Stillness at the Top of the world, Keeper remains resolutely attendant. Despite their thinness, they do not shiver in the cold. Challenger cannot bring themself to look up for too long. The void feels welcoming; it unnerves them.

This year, like all other years, the tree appears resplendent. There is no pomp nor ceremony when Keeper dies. The travelers simply rest at the base of the tree, warmed by the roots. Eyes and faces soften in the glow emanating from below. Keeper has their back against the trunk; they breathe slow and easy. Challenger’s breathing is hesitant, and hitches every now and again. They sit across from Keeper.

“Do you have regrets?” says Challenger.

“A few. I am grateful for them, though.” Keeper reaches into their pack and removes the two vials of ink, and hands them to Challenger. “Take these.”

“I’m scared to be alone,” says Challenger.

“Why?”

“Because I do not understand the world yet.”

“Neither do I. It’s splendid, really.”

A ripple of gold, refracted by one of the spring pools, plays across Keeper’s face,

“I don’t know what I will do after you are gone.”

“Well—” Keeper shifts their weight, sits a little more comfortably, “you’ll keep investigating, won’t you? Keep making your annual journey? Keep cultivating your experience?”

“I will try.”

“Well, then, there you have it. That is all there is to being a Keeper. You’ll make a fine Keeper.”

Challenger’s throat tightens. They nod, and move closer to their mentor.

“I will try.”

The travelers embrace. One begins to cry—gently, silently.

“I will miss you,” says Challenger.

“Yes, you will,” replies Keeper, kindly. “And you will continue on through the twists of the manifold all the same.”

A deep breath in.

“You will discover so much in your life, young one. Be kind.”

“I will.”

A long, slow breath out.

Silence. The trickling stream. The breeze playing through the branches of the tree of equilibrium. A Challenger become Keeper, a Keeper become Stillness. A moment stretched into a whole lifetime. A twisted root, about the size of a person. A lone traveler with their arms wrapped around it.

A memory of a dream the universe once had.

A year of solitude passes. Keeper strives to adhere to the advice of their late mentor. The solitude is oppressive, but at the same time it is liberating. True loneliness, Keeper finds, is both poison and cure.

They travel far and wide this year. They cross the desert, and when they reach the end of the desert they build a ship and cross the sea. They encounter marvels beyond their wildest imagination: a mountain who spews fire from their peak, a cavern full of little glowing worms, a forest which grows upside-down with roots in the clouds and branches reaching towards the ground.

When they return from these explorations, they build a hut next to a meadow. In the meadow are flowers of all kinds. Most have six purple petals and smell of spices, but in the middle of the field grows a single bloom with five orange petals. It smells sweet. Keeper smiles whenever they see it.

Eventually the year draws to a close, and Keeper embarks on their annual pilgrimage. The Edge of the world, the Top of the world, and at last, the Center of the world. Approaching the tree, Keeper worries. Can they continue on alone?

Now the sky is just barely visible between the branches. The air chills. The pulsing hum of Chaos flowing through the roots resonates in their chest.

They arrive at the trunk and set down their pack. Sit down. Their eyes wander across the gnarled roots, searching for where their mentor once sat. Nothing looks familiar. It occurs to them that they do not know if the roots even remain stationary — perhaps they move like the arms of a giant sea-creature, but so slowly that they appear still. Keeper rests, and contemplates, and feels uncertainty and fear begin to build inside them despite their best efforts. Tears begin to leak out and drip off their face.

“Why are you sad?”

The voice gives them such a fright that they slip and tumble into the pool beside them. Disoriented, they pull themself out, bewildered and sopping. They scan their surroundings—had they hallucinated the voice? They could swear they’d heard it, it had sounded so real, like—

A child stood a few meters away, curious. Watching intently. For a moment, Keeper is speechless. Finally, they compose themself enough to ask:

“Where did you come from?”

The child’s brow furrows. They’re very young. Their eyes pierce straight through Keeper. They don’t answer the question. Instead, they ask their own:

“Why are you sad?”

Keeper pauses.

“I… miss my friend. I lost my very good friend and I miss them dearly.”

“Oh.” A pause. “I’m sorry,” says the child. Keeper decides to try their original question again.

“Where did you come from? I thought I was alone here.”

The child’s brow furrows again, but this time, they seem to understand. They point to the tree. “There.”

“From the—tree? You come from the tree?”

A nod. Keeper glances up into the dark canopy above, puzzled. Something feels familiar about the child. Keeper knows for certain they have never met before—and yet…

“Do you have food?” the child inquires, stepping closer. It takes a second for Keeper to register the question, then they snap out of it and rummage in their pack. They find a basket of berries and hold it out to the child, who accepts it gleefully. “Berries!” they cry. Keeper smiles.

“I like berries, too! They’re my favorite, you know. You may have as many as you like.” Keeper’s mind races. They cannot shake the feeling that, somehow, they have experienced this conversation before. But each time they try to retrieve the memory, it slips just out of reach.

“How long have you been here?” asks Keeper. The child shrugs. Berry-juice stains the corners of their mouth. “What’s your name?” they ask.

“I am Keeper.” It feels oddly… unnatural to say, but they can’t imagine why. “What is yours?”

“Challenger!” they exclaim in a singsong voice.

Keeper blinks. That name—why do they feel they know it? They must have heard it before. But where?

“That’s a nice name,” says they, “it suits you.”

Challenger looks proud. “Will you be my friend?” they ask.

The memory is fading, fading, fading. Gone. They can’t even remember what it was they wanted to remember. Ah, well—perhaps it will come back to them in time.

Keeper laughs.

“Why not?”

The End.

Thank you for reading. I hope you have a nice day.

I am a researcher. Scientist. Programmer. Musician. Hiker. Artist. Runner. Filmmaker. Writer. Pizza-maker. Plushie collector. Odd sock enthusiast.

These are what I do, not who I am. They are my occupations.

I am a sibling. Friend. Child. Adult. Coworker. Employee. Neighbor. Fanatic. Introvert. Citizen. Man.

These are how I interact with others, not who I am. They are my social roles.

I am talkative. Inattentive. Optimistic. Forgetful. Compassionate. Egotistical. Messy. Kind. Naive. Strong. Forgetful. Fearful. Obsessive. 22. Anxious. Introverted. Lonely. Content. Needy. Lucky. Grateful. Queer. Restless. Selfish. Supportive. Alive.

These are categories I fit into, not who I am. They describe me, but they do not wholly define me.

I am a grilled-cheese sandwich.

…just kidding. I am not really a grilled-cheese sandwich. Nor am I a bird, a plane, or Superman. I am also not a ladybug, paperclip, sequoia, or Airbus A380 quad-engine high-capacity passenger airplane. Hopefully this clears up a few common misconceptions.

I am a mammal. I am a member of the primate species Homo sapiens. I am a large mass of cells which knows it is a large mass of cells. I am a group of atoms that can feel love. These all strike me as very cool categories to fit into.

I don’t know who I am. I can tell you a thousand words that describe different projections of me, but when I look for the source of those projections, I find nothing. Perhaps the shadows on the cave wall truly are the whole world! Perhaps my identity is like a quantum particle, and measuring it changes it. In this case, I ought to learn to be okay with uncertainty.

Not knowing my identity is scary. Sometimes I try to alleviate this anxiety by inventing a fake identity and convincing myself it is real. Usually I cobble these identities together from stolen pieces of others’ identities. I define myself based on externalities and allow myself to believe this is a viable long-term approach. Deep down, I know it is not.

I have a friend who has a remarkable sense of identity and purpose. They do not relate much to what I’ve written above. They have a clear internal sense of who they are and what they want out of life. They are happy and display remarkable resilience in the face of adversity. I’d like to become more like that. I think I am, but it is slow going.

Many people tell me what they believe my identity is. Most mean well, but I do not think they are any more capable of defining me than I am. Often, their assessments tell me more about them than they do about me. Their characterizations reveal what they pay attention to.

Some folks spend billions of dollars to learn what people pay attention to. I think that’s kind of a silly way to spend billions of dollars.

I have no purpose. Sometimes that feels scary. Other times it feels freeing.

Sometimes I assign myself the purpose of Being As Happy As I Can. This strikes me as the most “natural” purpose to have. To fulfill it, I must walk in-between hedonism and asceticism. Hedonism maximizes short term pleasure but sacrifices long-term pleasure. Asceticism minimizes short term pleasure and sacrifices long-term pleasure. I see these philosophies as two ends of a Pareto frontier. The optimal strategy is likely a compromise between them.

I understand that “I don’t know my identity” is a bit of a pedantic cop-out — like, obviously, it depends on what definition I use for “identity”. I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I’ve been increasingly feeling as though I am simply afloat on a great ocean current. I can swim a little distance in any direction, so I convince myself that means I can go anywhere — but in reality, the scale of the current dwarfs any agency I may have. Where I begin and end is already mostly predetermined.

There’s a famous thought experiment: imagine you were born to nationalist German parents in the 1910s. Would you have grown up to be a Nazi? Same genetics, same “soul”, but wildly different circumstances. And the answer is, obviously: yes, you would almost certainly have grown up to be a Nazi.

Wrestling with this makes me anxious. I have spent most of my life believing a certain narrative about myself: “My choices matter; I deserve my successes and failures; I am a Good Person™.”

But if I had been born in Nazi Germany, I would have become a Nazi instead of a Good Person™. The uncomfortable truth is that my Good Person™-hood is more a product of things outside my control than of things within it. It was pure random chance that I was born in the time, place, and family that I was born in.

I don’t have answers—I don’t really think the questions I am asking in this post are the sort that even have answers. But I felt like writing about them anyways.

Thank you for reading. I hope you have a nice day.

Last year I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 20, and prescribed daily Adderall. I was a bit unnerved by how easy it was to get the diagnosis. I walked in to the doctor’s office, smalltalked for a brief moment, and then:

ME: Hi, I’m not trying to self-diagnose or anything, but after giving it a lot of thought I think I might have ADHD. I have struggled with severe procrastination issues as long as I can remember, I talk too much and dominate conversations, and I obsessively collect and discard hobbies and skills.

DOCTOR: Well, I think you’re clearly smart enough that you know all the “right answers” to the DSM-5 diagnostic questions.1 So we’ll just skip that test.

ME: That… makes sense.

DOCTOR: I believe what you’ve told me. I have ADHD myself, and I think it’s pretty obvious you do as well. I’ll just give you a prescription for the lowest dose of Adderall, and I’ll call you in 2 weeks to ask how it’s working out for you.

That was it. I went from meeting this doctor (this was my first doctor’s visit since I moved to Los Angeles) to being diagnosed and prescribed within about 5 minutes.

I’ve been taking Adderall each workday for over a year now. I choose to take weekends and holidays off because I worry about becoming dependent. Even after a year of this, though, I still occasionally feel uneasy about the whole scenario.

It’s harder for most people to get Adderall than it was for me. There’s some evidence to suggest ADHD might overdiagnosed in men, and underdiagnosed in women. I’ve spent a lot of hours wondering if maybe I don’t really have ADHD, if maybe I’m really just lazy; looking for an excuse to hide behind.

It doesn’t help that ADHD is not a well-defined thing. It’s a label placed on a collection of symptoms, but we don’t really understand the actual physical causes of ADHD. You might hear people talk about neurotransmitter concentrations or thalamus morphology or whatever, but none of that actually describes an etiology.

The rate of ADHD diagnoses has skyrocketed in recent years.2 Historically, ADHD was considered to be mainly a childhood diagnosis. Now, more than 1 in 25 American adults are diagnosed with it. Nobody knows why the rate has gone up, though there are plenty of folks who think they do. My own unfounded speculation is that it’s more of a nurture thing than a nature thing. But it is largely heritable and there is a proven genetic factor to it, so who knows?

My grandpa tells me he believes it’s because of glyphosates in our food.3 For all I know, he could be right.

Since I’m already speculating—I suspect ADHD and autism are two sides of the same coin, manifesting in different ways. Around half of autistic people meet the criteria for ADHD, and around a third of ADHD people meet the criteria for autism.4

This doesn’t really tell us all that much though, because like ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder does not have an etiology—it’s just a label on a bucket of symptoms. My personal unfounded speculation: the underlying etiologies for both ADHD and autism are the same or closely related.

But I’m not too attached to that theory. It’s probably wrong.

Another thing ADHD and autism have in common is that they appear to be spectral rather than binary. You can have ADHD, but you can also have mild ADHD, severe ADHD, hyperactive-type or inattentive-type ADHD. You can also be anywhere from “mildly on the spectrum” to “high-functioning” to “requires constant care” when it comes to autism.

I have a friend who doesn’t believe in treating ADHD with stimulants. They’re strongly against it. They think Adderall is a crutch. To some degree, I’m inclined to agree—it does feel like a crutch for me sometimes.5 But crutches are great for people whose legs don’t work!

Now that it’s been a year, I sometimes wonder if I still need the crutch—if maybe I’ll always need the crutch—or if I’ve simply grown too accustomed to having it. As it stands, I think I still need it, especially so long as I continue to work my current job.6

The thought of taking Adderall for a very long time scares part of me. “What if you permanently damage your neural circuitry by strongly conditioning your brain to expect Adderall-dopamine?” it says. The other part of me says “Well, if it helps you, why not? Besides, you don’t have any real evidence that permanent damage is really a threat here.” Depending on my mood, those voices each take turns being the loud one. My uneasiness is compounded by the fact that there is very little research on the long-term effects of taking dextroamphetamine salts. I’m one of the guinea pigs—me and 4.4% of Americans, anyhow.

I’m not sure what the point of this blog post is. I guess I just have a lot of thoughts about ADHD, and I wanted to write them down and put them into the world somehow. Talking about having ADHD often makes me feel silly, because it’s become such a buzzword recently—it seems like everyone and their dog has it these days.

I’ll end with a few questions that I think about on a regular basis:

1. What is ADHD, really? What’s the etiology?

2. Similarly, what’s autism, really? How is ADHD linked to autism?

3. How much of my own personal failings should I allow myself to attribute to “the way my brain is?”. 100% seems absurd, but so does 0%. After all, everyone has some genetically determined strengths and weaknesses.

4. During Adderall shortages, is it moral for me to fill my own prescription despite the fact that doing so may deprive someone else of their meds who needs them more than I do?

5. If I keep taking Adderall responsibly for another 10 years, will I regret it? Should I regret it? Am I exposing myself to real risk? If I am, how does that risk weigh against the present-day advantages of continuing my prescription?

6. Is my self-talk about all this healthy? Am I too hard on myself? Too easy on myself? Am I overthinking everything?

7. Is it bad that I hoped my doctor would diagnose me with ADHD? Shouldn’t I have been more apprehensive? Is it possible I tricked myself into believing I was neurodivergent just so I could get attention?7

I don’t know the answers to any of these, and I expect nobody who reads this will know them either. Indeed, several of these questions are highly subjective and probably don’t even have “correct” answers. But they’re questions which constantly bounce around in my skull regardless.

Thanks for reading.

Arguing about whether AI can be sentient or not is missing the point:

1. It is impossible to verify whether the AI is sentient or not with present-day science.1

2. Therefore people subjectively assign “sentience” based on appearances, not any hard metric.

Right now, most folks don’t think AI is sentient. ChatGPT is configured to make it obvious it is a chatbot. Even if it wasn’t, its outputs are only text, and not high-quality enough to convince most people it is anything more than a chatbot.2

Imagine you are given a smartphone and two phone numbers you can contact with it. You are told that one of the numbers belongs to a human, and the other to an AI. You can send texts, images, and videos to both contacts. You can also start a voice or video call with both contacts. In my mind, this is a logical extension of the original Turing Test.

What happens when AI passes this version of the Turing Test? When believable text, images, and video can be synthesized in realtime? For now, this is a hypothetical — but I believe it is not too far off from becoming reality:

1. LLMs have gone from expensive curiosity to open-source commodity within the past 6 months. OpenAI’s moat is evaporating quickly as these community efforts catch up in quality to GPT-4. Ten thousand GPUs no longer guarantees you’ll win the competition.

2. The explosion in text-to-image progress sparked by Stable Diffusion shows no signs of stopping—in fact, it is speeding up. Cherry-picked AI-generated images are good enough now that they easily fool me at a glance — and I have experience training generative models!

3. Progress in text-to-video is only lagging behind text-to-image by about 18 months,3 so we can expect high quality video synthesis to have its own “Stable Diffusion moment” by the end of 2024.4

4. All of these quality improvements are happening in tandem with equally impressive gains in architecture and hardware efficiency. 4-bit quantization, GPU tensor cores, TPUs, low-rank adaptation, new optimizers, transformer context length extensions, etc.

I think we will have human-level, real-time generation of all modes of digital communication before 2030. Fake digital people that, through a screen, are indistinguishable from real people.

What happens to society and culture in this future? A few thoughts:

1. True anonymity on the Internet dies. Perfect human-imitators will flood the internet with an infinite stream of generated content and drown out real humans. The only solution I see is a system that involves physically showing up to an arbiter office to have your humanhood confirmed and a private key assigned to you, which you can then use to sign your online transactions. This will concentrate trust into 3rd-party trust brokers and governments.5

2. Some people become super-addicts. While many will have no interest in AI-generated content, some people will be hopelessly addicted to it. After all, it will be refined in real-time to be addicting to them. I genuinely expect there will be people who live “in the Oasis” 24/7. How this impacts culture is hard to predict.6

3. Conversely, some people become vehemently anti-digital. A significant movement encouraging living life offline emerges, like modern off-grid hipsters but more popular. The more overstimulating the net becomes, the bigger this faction grows—but they will never have a majority.78

4. The sentience debate will rage on. Some religions which believe humans have supernatural souls will be particularly perturbed by human-like digital minds. Society will largely agree to treat the robots like they are not sentient,9 but there will be a vocal minority who insist this is wrong. They will demand civil rights for robots.10

All of this points back to the title of this post: it does not matter if the robots are sentient or not. All that matters is that they will appear to be sentient on the outside, and that is enough to have grand, sweeping consequences. We should be anticipating and talking about these consequences now in hopes that we will not be entirely unprepared later, when we are forced to confront these issues head-on.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading.

This post is about AI. If you’re sick of hearing about AI, don’t read it.

Lots of people are making predictions right now. CEOs, researchers, politicians, every single Twitter user. Everyone’s got something to say about AI and how it will surely change the world. I’ve made many such breathless predictions myself. Speculation isn’t inherently harmful, but it can be taken too far.

The vast majority of long-term predictions are wrong, and the future consistently embarrasses those who claim to see it. The longer-term the prediction, the more likely it is to be wrong. This does not mean it is impossible to make good long-term predictions — but they are extremely rare. Moore’s Law, for example, lasted a long time before breaking.

Vague, near-term predictions are easier to make. For instance,

A neural network better than GPT-4 will be trained in the next 3 years

is a pretty sure bet. There are clear trends to back it up, and there are massive economic incentives behind it. Whether it’s OpenAI or someone else, a GPT-4 killer will arrive in the near future.

What’s harder is predicting the impact of such a network. We can’t even predict the impact of GPT-4 yet, and it’s been publicly available for over a month now! GPT-4 could end up being every bit as gamechanging as the LinkedInfluencers say it is, or it could hit a ceiling next week and remain a “cool demo” for the rest of its life. I think it’ll land in between those extremes. As for the impact of GPT-5+? Heck if I know. It’ll probably be a big deal, but what kind of big deal is impossible to predict.

Another thing I’m uncertain about is how the Internet will change with the introduction of AI generated content that’s indistinguishable for human-made content. The pope wearing a poofy coat is only the tip of the iceberg here. As image, video, and music generation models start passing the Turing test more and more often, what happens to online culture? Will someone figure out some ingenious and unbeatable verification tech that allows people to verify their content as human made? Or will it become legitimately impossible to tell if anything online is real or not? Will people even care if the content they consume is real or not? Could there potentially be a movement to spend less time online and more time IRL? I don’t know.

Nobody knows the answers to any of these questions. Not me, not Andrej Karpathy, not Joe Biden, nobody. Even Hank Green doesn’t know the answers, and he knows the answers to lots of questions!

If there is one thing we can learn from the retrofuturism of the 1950s, it’s that people have been confidently wrong about the future for generations. Sure, there will be folks heralded as prophets 30 years from now when their predictions from 2023 all come true, but it is impossible to know who those folks are here and now.

This post was short and aimless, but I felt I needed to express this sentiment. Enjoy living in the present. Knowing the future is impossible and it’s not worth losing your mind over.

Thanks for reading.

I was a devout Mormon growing up. It’s funny—I guess I expected the transition from “There’s an immortal benevolent god who created everything” to “Consciousness is just something dirt does”1 would be the biggest shift I’d experience going from Mormonism to atheism. But honestly? That transition was relatively tame. It was the second-order belief shifts that really impacted me.

In Mormonism, there’s a song they teach you as a kid which includes this verse:

Choose the right! Let no spirit of digression

Overcome you in the evil hour.

There’s the right and the wrong to ev’ry question;

Be safe thru inspiration’s pow’r.

That third line is my focus. There’s the right and the wrong to ev’ry question. A declaration that for every challenge you face, every trial you endure, every bad thing that happens, there’s a Correct™ way to handle it. There’s a Universal Authoritative Moral Code Of God™ you can use to arbitrate all conflicts and resolve all questions. I didn’t realize how big a deal this belief was until I left it behind.

The concept of objective morality backed by an omnipotent power is oddly appealing to my monkey brain. Irrationality can be a powerful coping mechanism in the face of unspeakable horrors. When I was Mormon, I’d see a natural disaster on the news and think “That’s awful, but it must be part of God’s plan for it to happen. Surely, he’s doing it for our benefit in the long run” and the disaster wouldn’t seem quite so horrible anymore. An awful tragedy made bearable because Pastor said God said it’s all gonna be okay.

I don’t believe in gods anymore, nor objective universal morality. Wrong and Right are things humans made up—like Money, and Status, and Gender—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful. I still use moral frameworks all the time, but I use them knowing they are subjective.

The purpose of my moral framework is to make me happier over the long term. This is a selfish goal, but as a typical member of a deeply social species, I’m programmed to derive happiness from making other people happy2. So Right and Wrong end up defined in terms of how I interact with other people—Right things give happiness to people I care about, while Wrong things take that happiness away.

Funnily enough, this realization lead me to having morals I suspect are actually closer to those of Yeshua of Nazareth then I had when I worshipped him. From my new perspective, I find it striking just how simple the dude’s teachings were, and just how drastically many modern Christian sects overcomplicate them.

13 And verily Jesus was all like “Yo, you gotta love everyone all the time unconditionally, man — except when they disagree with you, look different from you, live far away from you, or are female or queer or poor.”

I enjoy imagining how certain human behaviors may have evolved3. What environmental pressures lead to the birth of morality? Oftentimes, things considered immoral4 are harmful to the group and thus to you. So I suppose it makes sense that we developed these complex emotional responses to different kinds of actions—but it’s also fascinating how variable these responses are between cultures!

Perhaps natural selection is the wrong frame of reference here—maybe communal morality is simply an “unintended” side-effect of high intelligence? Evolutionary left-overs, per se? I don’t know.

All this is not to claim I’ve cracked the code or have it all figured out—quite the opposite! I’m only just beginning to realize how little I know and how nuanced the real world is. It’s certainly not easy to navigate ambiguity, and there are times I wish I could return to utter faith in simple made-up rules. But I still feel grateful to be on the path I’m on.

The world isn’t delineated purely into black and white. It’s got all kinds of grays and midtones and even colors that aren’t grayscale5. At times, overwhelming. But overall? Much more beautiful.

If you read this whole post, congrats—I hereby declare you’ve done a morally good thing :P

The authority that backs modern ownership of property is provided by a social contract dictating that everyone may possess property, and others may not steal it. Usually, a version of this social contract is embodied in a formal government which enforces a rule of law. If you violate others’ right to ownership, you lose your own.

Most physical property can be protected in two ways:

1. Doing stuff ahead of time to make it harder to steal; for instance:

   1. Gold ingots can be secured in a safe.

   2. Car keys can be kept in your front pocket so they are harder to pickpocket.

   3. Government facilities for studying aliens can be placed in the middle of Nevada surrounded by barbed-wire fences and armed guards.

2. Committing to do bad things to the violator after they have violated; for instance:

   1. Incarcerating people for a significant portion of their life over nonviolent crimes1

   2. Fining people who scam vulnerable people into giving them money

   3. Killing the violator after they have been contained2

Intellectual property (IP) is much harder to protect, so it’s also harder to own. Ownership is about control, and IP is very hard to control. IP is intangible. It consists of ideas, stories, characters, designs, images — but these are slippery. Most of the time, displaying a piece of IP publicly is all it takes to make countless “copies” of it in people’s minds.3

Walt Disney Corporation “owns” Mickey Mouse, according to the law. And yet, I can take pencil and paper right now and draw a copy of the character:

So how exactly does Disney “own” Mickey? In order to “own” intellectual property, you really only have two options:

1. Rely on post-hoc punishment.

2. Keep it secret.

If you are an entertainment company, only (1) is really viable. (2) doesn’t work because your entire business is built on sharing your IP with viewers, who will then internalize copies of it.

Historically, relying on (1) has worked fine for companies like Disney. They’ve had access to enough power and authority to crack down on anyone who egregiously violates their copyright. Small operations might slip through the cracks—getting rid of all bootleg products is infeasible—but generally, the only entity making lots of money off of Mickey Mouse has been Disney.

But Disney’s control has been slipping for a long time now. As technology progresses, it’s become easier to distribute copies of their IP. They’ve kept ahead of it by hiring more lawyers, suing more people, and bribing more legislators. But this won’t work forever.

Imagine it’s the year 1937, and you want to “steal” Disney’s intellectual property. That new Snow White movie of theirs is a huge hit4; you want to profit off it. What are your options?

Well, supposing you could steal a print of the film, you might make and sell illicit copies of it—but you’d need specialized skills and equipment to process that film, as well as buyers who actually want to buy it. Maybe you could just sell framed paintings of the seven dwarves instead—except now you need a way to print those paintings en masse. You could sell your own original Snow White fan-fiction, but that would take time and effort—both to create it and to distribute it.

The point is, creating and distributing bootleg Snow White content isn’t easy. It takes significant effort. And the moment you made any significant money with it, Disney would cease-and-desist you anyways.

Fast forward to 1999. A lot has changed. Digital media exists now, as does the Internet. You want to “steal” other people’s IP? Cool. You can use Napster to download MP3s of a hundred songs. Simple as that.

You’re one of millions of users, too—so there’s little chance that the record label will ever come after you, specifically. Heck, you might even get away with selling your illicit MP3s, as long as you can remain anonymous.

Digital piracy is a thing now, and it’s unstoppable. Before long, nearly all popular movies, books, images, and songs are pirate-able. And yet, intellectual property is still around, and more enforced than ever!

Turns out companies like Disney are doing great, because liberating the distribution of IP isn’t enough to overwhelm their control over their property. Most rich first-world people (the most lucrative type of people to sell things to) seem content to follow The Rules and only consume officially distributed copies of Disney movies. They pay for convenience, and the law is still powerful enough to ensure that Disney's official offerings are the most convenient mode of consumption! Sure, thar be pirates5, but the total revenue loss they represent is pitiful compared to the dragon’s hoard from official sales.

Bootleggers profiting off of unlicensed usage of Disney’s characters and stories are still a threat, though. However, the scale of Disney’s control is still enormous compared to the scale of these bootleggers’ operations, so they remain a mere nuisance for now. Disney is still the only one making billions off of Mickey Mouse.

Now, fast forward to the present day. 2023. Streaming services are popular. There’s a new billion-dollar blockbuster at least once a year. And a Brand New Thing is all the rage—Stable Diffusion6. A neural network that can turn a text into images, and do it well. And it’s free for anyone to use on their own computers.

This is where things get interesting. Up till now, Disney’s been able to maintain control because the amount of resistance they’ve faced has been manageable. At the end of the day, the most damage anyone can do is mass-distribute digital copies of the bytes that Disney “owns”. Other ventures— like bootleg merch and fanfictions—take time and effort to produce, which significantly rate-limits how many of these violations Disney must deal with. It’s easy to redistribute bytes, but it’s hard to make honest-to-god ripoffs7.

But now, we’re seeing the beginnings of a world where that’s no longer true. As generative AI becomes more and more capable, it will slowly do to creation what the Internet did to distribution—it will make it easy. Sure, Disney may be able to sue a thousand people a day for infringing on their copyrights, but what about 10,000? 100,000? What about a million? What about a billion?

What happens when a new Disney film comes out, and bootleggers can create and upload a thousand entirely unique variations of it within 24 hours? What happens when some of those variations are significantly better than what Disney put out, meaning that Disney is now in direct competition with a bootleg product? Normally, they’d just throw lawyers and bribes at the problem, but that doesn’t work anymore. For every bootlegger they catch, two more spring up in their place.

Okay, so if bootleggers can do this with generative AI, why can Disney? Well they can. But it won’t matter, because as the commodification of creativity continues, the monetary value of that creativity asymptotically approaches zero.

It’s about to be easy to make ripoffs of anything en masse, and it will not be feasible to deal with the sheer volume of high quality ripoffs that will exist.

Intellectual properties been dying for a while now8, and generative AI is the final nail in its coffin. Do I think Disney will go out of business because of this? Probably not, not anytime soon at least. But I do think they’re doomed in the long run—because you can’t own and idea and share it with a billion people. That’s just silly.

When anyone can create and distribute anything to anyone, the product of those creations becomes (monetarily) worthless.

Thanks for reading.

If you’d like to see other stuff I made with my brain, I released an EP a few weeks ago. It has a space shanty in it! If that sounds fun, feel free to give it a listen.

My car is gone. I’m standing in front of my parking spot inside the gated parking garage underneath my apartment building, and the spot is empty. I contact my landlord to confirm that it wasn’t towed without my knowledge. It wasn’t.

I sigh and head to the police department to report a missing vehicle. There’s some confusion because it’s my dad’s old car and still registered under his name, but eventually they file the report. Now I just have to wait.

I’ve accepted the possibility that it may be gone forever. I only have liability insurance, so losing it would suck, but hey, they either find it or they don’t. The world keeps on turning either way.

Surprisingly, I get a call the very next day:

We found your car. Can you come pick it up?

Yeah, I’ll be there in 20 minutes.

Also, did you have any… records in it? when it was stolen?

Records?

Yeah —

Like music records? Like, vinyls?

Just come pick it up, we’ll figure it out when you get here.

I hail an Uber and arrive at the scene 20 minutes later, praying that the car isn’t gutted. It isn’t. In fact, it appears to be in perfect running order aside from a busted lock and a badly damaged ignition. Also, it’s full of records.

Like, full, full. Multiple crates filled to the brim with old vinyls.

The officers tell me the thief was using the car to carry and sell the records. They ask for my ID and registration, they ask a few more questions about the incident, and then they grab a few of the thief’s personal items from the car as evidence.

Then one of them turns to me and says:

If you don’t want those records you can toss them. Or keep them, give them away — whatever.

I— you don’t need to take them or something?

No.

So I can just keep them.

Go ahead. They might be worth something if you want to sell them.

Oh, rad, really?! I guess… yeah. I guess I’ll keep them then. Okay.

So now I own 9 crates of presumably stolen vinyl records. I have no idea who they belonged to and no way of finding out.

I have no experience with vinyls, so I start researching. I read lots of r/vinyl threads and learn about the different kinds of gear and what to look out for when buying. Everyone seems to agree that buying secondhand is best, so I begin combing through Craigslist.

I find one person selling a Pioneer PL-250 at a good price near me, and another selling a cabinet, Onkyo TX-25 receiver, and big box speakers. Three hours of driving and $260 later, I have myself a setup:

The records have not been treated well, and most are super dusty and scratched, but I’m surprised by how good they still sound after light cleaning. They’re all vintage, too, ranging from late-70s to mid-80s tunes. So far I’ve found a Jackson 5 album, a few Earth Wind And Fire records, a Thriller, and a Purple Rain (which unfortunately turned out to be melted and warped past playability). I’ve also discovered it’s endlessly entertaining to take 33 RPM records and play them at 45 RPM, causing everyone to sound like chipmunks.

I was born in 2002, so I recognize very few of the names on the covers aside from the really famous ones like Jimi Hendrix, Neil Diamond, Nat King and Natalie Cole, Stevie Wonder, etc. I look forward to expanding my musical palette over the next few months as I work through this newfound collection!

Guess I’m a vinylhead now. Thanks for reading, and have a nice day.

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Kagi does not collect or store user search history, so in the interest of a fair fight, Google searches were done in an incognito window without being logged in. None of Kagi’s manual search personalization features are enabled for Kagi’s search, either — these are just stock results.

Google results on the left side, Kagi on the right:

“best mountain bike”

“was the 2020 election stolen”

“fix pytorch out of gpu memory error”

“i have lots of extra money that i want to spend on products, what purchases should i make”

“delicious chocolate cake recipe”

“fix fans spinning but computer not turning on”

“Simone Giertz”

“Tom Cruise jumping between two buildings” (image search)

“Sir Ian McKellen” (image search)

“hikers on top of a cliff” (image search)

Thoughts

In general, Kagi seems to perform better whenever Google has too much of an incentive to perform worse. Popular searches and searches where Google stands to make the most money from advertising also tend to yield the lowest quality results. In contrast, Kagi seems to do exceptionally well on these searches. On less lucrative searches, both engines have similar results.

Overall, I quite like Kagi and intend to keep using it for the time being. The experience isn’t quite lifechanging yet, but it is certainly a breath of fresh air. Its image search is admittedly still weak compared to Google’s, but it also has a number of nice features that Google doesn’t, though they are not demonstrated in this post. My favorite is probably the ability to rank specific sites as more or less favorable to personalize your results. For example, if you keep seeing one of those spammy StackOverflow mirror sites in your results, you can tell Kagi not to show results from that site anymore. Google does not allow this kind of customization.

It’s also reassuring to know that the incentives of my search engine are aligned with my needs — in fact, that’s the main reason I pay for it. Unlike Google, Kagi has a strong incentive to keep my data private and respect my time and energy — if they don’t, they won’t make money.

Anyways, not a lot of substance to this post, I just thought the comparisons would be interesting.

Until next time.

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AMD announced two new Radeon GPUs today. If their presentation slides are trustworthy, they handily defeat their Nvidia counterparts in videogame frames-per-second-per-dollar. They also have physically smaller cards which draw much less power than the competition…

…but Nvidia still gets markedly better performance in basically everything besides rasterized gaming.

AMD's refusal to compete with Nvidia outside of gaming frustrates me. It's clear they have the ability and expertise to at least attempt it. Radeon even already has some level of hardware acceleration for AI, video encoding, and ray tracing. But as I understand it, AMD's developer tooling for this hardware is feeble compared to Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem.1

I have some hope that Intel will compete with Team Green in the future. But it won't be for another few years at least. They’re too busy playing catch-up on the decades of extra driver dev experience Nvidia has.

An Intel Arc engineer recently told me that drivers are the bottleneck. Driving the available silicon to reach its full potential is difficult. They told me that 6 months ago, Arc was nearly 50 times slower than today due to driver inefficiencies. They also said there's still another 5-15% gainable through future driver updates. This would place the A770 roughly on par with an RTX 3070 (its price competitor) in several benchmarks.

Arc shows promise—the A770 and A750 are a solid first salvo. But promise alone does not a fast GPU make. Intel has a real opportunity to disrupt the market in the future. For now, though, it seems non-gamer GPU customers will again be Nvidia's hostages for the next 18 months.

As a machine learning engineer, I am rooting for Team Blue. I dream of true competition arising in the AI compute world. But until then, RTX 40-series prices are still sky-high—and those are consumer cards! A100 DGX server units go for $200,000, and there aren't even reliable price estimates yet for their upcoming H100-touting successors! Team Green has no real competition in AI, and consumers (and by extension scientific advancements in AI) are hurting for it.

Enjoy it while it lasts, Jensen.

It’s finally here.

A lot has changed since the last major release (v19.0, one year ago). Let’s quickly go over some of the most important updates:

Cosmetics

• +100% hair length

• +15% total mass

• -30% skin melanin content (reduced sunlight exposure, see behavioral changes below)

• New cosmetic object classes added: BlueJeans, WarmJacket, WarmHoodie, ShoesWithSocks

• “Looks like a child” bug has been mostly patched, still working on finalizing

Environment/APIs

• Added ProfessionalDataScience, Songwriter, and CartoonArtist APIs

• Added support for Los Angeles locale

• New environment classes added: StudioApartment, TraderJoes, OfficeDesk

• Patched “constantly broke” bug

Behavioral

• Discovered ADHD runtime was the source of several focus loop crashes, patched kernel with a pull request from my doctor who recommended I take a look into the Adderall debugging suite (thanks doc, very helpful!)

• Removed support for vanilla socialization features, replaced with FOIP (Friends Over Internet Protocol)

• Increased effect of noise modulation on the MentalHealth global parameter

• Increased likelihood of Idle.jam_out_to_music method call

• Increased likelihood of Art.draw_portrait method call

Miscellaneous

• New ponytail ability temporarily gives +10% hipness at the cost of -10% reputability

• Routine.sleep now has a default minimum of 1 AM

Known Issues

• Items with the sugary tag are known to cause issues with control flow during Routine.shopping

• self.attention_target still vulnerable to the InfiniteScroll injection attack

• Routine.do_job is still buggy as heck, improvements have been made but further troubleshooting is needed.

• Talking to girls is still unsupported and has been pushed back until the v21.0 release.

Thank you for being part of the Kai community, we honestly couldn’t do this without all your feedback, testing, and continued patronage. We look forward to introducing even more great features in the next major release.

Until then,

The Kai Dev Team

I know that most spiders are not a threat to me, but I still jump involuntarily and get a spike of adrenaline when I notice one crawling around my apartment. The fear is not rational. It is instinctual and very difficult for me to overcome, even though I consciously want to overcome it.

Hypothetically,1 our ancestors were not always afraid of spiders. At some point, a mutation occurred which caused a fear of all spiders, and individuals with this mutation survived to reproduce just a bit more often than those without it — so the mutation spread slowly through the population.

Natural selection doesn’t “care” about rationality, efficiency, or accuracy — it only “cares” about reproduction and survival rates.2 Being afraid of all spiders is irrational, but it works. It significantly lowers your chance of dying from a spider bite.

Evolution works extremely slowly, over thousands or millions of years. In contrast, technology progresses very fast, and is accelerating. This means our environment is changing faster than we can adapt to it — we are living in circumstances we were not “designed” for.

I think this contributes to many problems we face in day-to-day life. Take something like smartphone overuse — I and many others frequently find it difficult to stop doomscrolling. At work I place my phone in a closed cabinet (out of sight, out of reach, out of mind) to avoid distraction.

We have not evolved to handle smartphones responsibly. We haven’t evolved to handle any consistent, plentiful source of dopamine, really. Our hominid ancestors lived in a world where little boxes that give you pleasure on demand in an instant didn’t exist and the only streaming service was CampfireStories+.3

Why do I chronically eat so much sugar even though I consciously know that it’s bad for me and effectively low-grade poison? Well, our ancient ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago lived in a world where they constantly worked to obtain their next meal, so to them sugar was a good thing! Sugar has a high energy density and is easy to digest. Thus, their descendants (which include many species besides humans) evolved to find its taste pleasurable.

Fast-forward to the present day. Due to the technological progress Homo sapiens has made in agriculture, sugar is plentiful. But because we transitioned from non-plentiful sugar to plentiful sugar so quickly (on the order of hundreds of years), natural selection hasn’t had time to catch up,4 and we find ourselves in a sticky situation where people like me are addicted to eating large amounts of sugar. The reward mechanism in my brain for eating sugar persists even though it has changed from being useful to harmful!

While it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to explain everything this way,5 there are lots of problematic human behaviors that are worth examining through an evolutionary lens. I think sexism is a great example. Social inequality between males and females was how our evolution happened to pan out, and while it may have been a semi-optimal solution for our animal ancestors millions of years ago, it isn’t anymore. Modern humans live in a different world, and sexual dimorphism is way less important now. Technology and education are naturally equalizing forces.

What used to be normal masculinity—high aggression, violent tendencies, total social dominance — is now toxic masculinity, and for good reason — it’s actively harmful in the modern world for males to behave exactly like they did thousands of years ago. I don’t know if it was helpful to behave like that back then, but I do know it’s not helpful to behave that way now.

We live in a world we are not adapted to. If our DNA is like an old, unmaintained programming language, then our technological advancements are like a huge library full of extra features which use ridiculous workarounds to circumvent the jankiness of the language.

In the end, we are still just hairless apes, and we have lots of technical debt — but that doesn’t mean we can’t succeed! It just means we have to hotfix our own evolutionary history so we can achieve goals that natural selection could never have even dreamed of.

If you have thoughts, opinions, witticisms or criticisms to share, I’d love to hear them.

As a filmmaker, musician, portrait artist, and writer, this feels both intimidating and exciting to me. I love to make art.

I suspect we’re all experiencing a kind of “Goldilocks zone” right now, a calm before the storm of our eventual artistic obsolescence. AI is currently good enough to act as a fantastic tool for making art, but not yet good enough to replace the artist entirely.

When said replacement does eventually occur2, what will happen to human artists?

Well, some will continue on like nothing happened; these are people for whom art is not an income source and who derive most of their fulfillment from making art, not sharing it. Others will become destitute and may abandon art; these are people who make a living by sharing their art.

Either way, the demand for human-generated art will shrink drastically. I predict the job of “professional artist” will become extremely rare, and the industry of human-made art will be worth only a tiny percentage of what it is today.

AI is already rapidly learning to make several of the most popular kinds of art we make — namely music, images, videos, 3D sculpture, and writing — and is close to being capable of making those things better, faster and cheaper than us.

For those who scoff at this because the current state-of-the-art methods are “still not that good,” I invite you to look at how much better they are now compared to just a single decade ago. The trend, to me, appears very clear.3 AI will continue to get better at making art.

A common argument I hear is that “well, even if AI will create some art, it will never create masterpieces like the best human artists, so art is safe.” Even if we assume this is true, it still wouldn’t prevent AI from dominating the art industry!

I propose that the quality of art follows some Gaussian distribution. Some art is “bad”, some is “good”, but most lies in the realm of “eh, it’s a thing that exists”. Importantly, people pay for this “middle-tier” art — in fact most of the art people pay for is middle-tier.4 Thus AI doesn’t need to create masterpieces. It only needs to create middle-of-the-bell-curve art to displace the majority of the industry, because the majority of the industry is (by definition5) middle-of-the-bell-curve!

I think AI has already handily proven that it will be able to generate middle-of-the-bell-curve art. DALL•E 2 is already extremely close to meeting that criterion for clip-art.6

For what it’s worth, I also anticipate AI will create masterpieces, it’ll just take a little longer to get to that level. In the end, we stratify art based on how it evokes an emotional response in our minds, right? So human emotional response7 will simply become another term in the AI’s loss function, and eventually it will learn to play on our heartstrings like a fiddle.

We might like to think that we would somehow be immune to this kind of direct optimization against our own feelings, but the fact that we as humans can read and manipulate one another’s emotions so effectively makes me strongly suspect that AI will be able to as well.8 You might even argue that AI is already manipulating human emotions due to its role in social networks and recommendation algorithms!

This whole discussion — of AI and the death of the human-made art industry — is one where people often disagree based on emotion instead of reason. It is admittedly worrying to imagine a world where human art has lost almost all of its value — but just because something is scary doesn’t mean it is unlikely or impossible.

To the reader: do you believe the current trends in AI art will continue until we arrive in a future similar to what I’ve described here? Do you believe I’ve overlooked key ideas that prove me wrong? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading,

Kai

Then came the Butlerian Jihad— two generations of chaos. The god of machine-logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised: “Man may not be replaced.”

—Frank Herbert, Dune

Within one century, biological intelligence will be a tiny minority of all sentient life. It will be very rare to be human. It will be very rare to have cells and blood and a heart. Human beings will be outnumbered a thousand to one by conscious machine intelligences.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)1 is about to go from being science fiction to being part of everybody’s day-to-day life. It’s also going to happen in the blink of an eye — because once it gets loose, there is no stopping it from scaling itself incredibly rapidly. Whether we want it to or not, it will impact every human being’s life.

Some people believe the singularity won’t happen for a very long time, or at all. I’d like to discuss why I am nearly certain it will happen in the next 20 years. My overall prediction is based on 3 hypotheses:

1. Scale is not the solution.

2. AI will design AGI.

3. The ball is already rolling.

Keep in mind that this is just speculation and opinions. These predictions depict the future I personally feel is most likely.

Scale is not the solution.

Recently, an architecture called the Transformer has been taking over machine learning. It’s really good at sequence-to-sequence tasks like translation and text completion, and it’s also been successfully applied to other fields like computer vision.

Transformers2 also demonstrate an intriguing ability to scale their performance with their size better than other architectures. They seem less prone to the performance ceilings found in their competition.

This has lead to a new slogan popping up in the AGI-speculation community: “scale is all you need.” Some people believe that bigger networks, bigger compute clusters, and bigger datasets are all we need to get to AGI. I disagree.

I believe we are more bottlenecked by the architecture designs than anything else. While modern, standard feedforward neural networks are getting very good at Doing Stuff™, they aren’t AGI and I don’t think there’s a clear path forward for them to become AGI. I have no doubt OpenAI’s next mega-model, GPT-4 (and beyond), will be excellent, but I also think it will have exploitable flaws that make it fail a thorough Turing test.

In fact, I see the massive size of the present-day’s GPT-3 as a sign that scale isn’t the answer. 175 billion parameters, but still obviously not sentient? For comparison, the human brain has between 20 and 100 billion neurons and up to 1 quadrillion synapses.

You could argue that until our neural networks have hundreds of trillions of parameters, it’s not fair to compare them to the brain, but I think this argument relies too much on the assumption that a biological synapse and a weight in a network are equivalent in computational ability. This has not be proven. The intricacies of how the brain moves and processes signals are still not entirely understood3, but we know it seems to operate very differently from current neural networks.4

Looking at most of the most revolutionary papers in the history of AI, they are dominated not by “we made it bigger” but by “we made it smarter at the same size”. I see no reason not to expect that this pattern will continue.

If scale isn’t the answer, what is? I believe that the pièce de résistance is adaptability. Presently, the way you make an ML model is fairly rigid: you decide on a fancy new way to differentiably mix matrix multiplications together, you feed it a ton of data, and you use some simple calculus-based optimizer to train the weights in your network5. The way that the weights in your network are arranged doesn’t change after training.

I don’t believe this is adaptible enough, even at scale. In order for true intelligence to emerge, models must be able to reorganize their own inner workings. I don’t think you can have the level of flexibility required for sentience with a frozen architecture.6

I think sentient AI will be created by working smarter, not harder, with a focus on better architectural design and intelligent optimizers. This leads nicely into my next hypothesis:

AI will design AGI.

Human-designed networks have achieved great results, but they still suffer from the flaws of their creators. We are attracted to neatly organized network architectures which we can investigate and explain and attempt to understand.

But our brains, the gold standard of intelligence, are famously difficult to investigate, explain, or understand! I think this is because our brains weren’t “designed” by anyone — they evolved. They are the product of the universe’s greatest optimizer, natural selection.7

I think it’s reasonable to assume that the architecture that brings about AGI will not be hand-designed by humans, or even selected via some brute-force hyperparameter search — it will be designed by another AI. I predict there will be several recursive layers of AI design — perhaps a dumb network which constructs a decent network which constructs a smart network which constructs AGI.

I am bullish on the prospect of what I call “constructor networks” — models that construct other models (also known as hypernetworks). I think the moment we crack hyperlearning will be the moment progress will start moving faster than we can keep up, precisely because we will no longer be the ones making the progress — the algorithms themselves will.

In order to work smarter, not harder, we need to let go of our human biases and focus on making unconstrained architectures that can aggressively optimize every aspect of themselves. I fully expect these architectures will be frustratingly difficult to explain when they arrive — like huge mounds of digital neural spaghetti — but they will also outperform all competition. Every additional stable layer of AI abstraction we add between ourselves and the final model will make the final model harder to understand and better at its task.

The ideal model will be able to not only be constantly online-learning, but also constantly adding and removing its own parameters, allowing evolution and adaptation to new tasks.

You cannot have artificial general intelligence if your model cannot adapt in real time to an arbitrary task.

The ball is already rolling.

I believe that there is too much momentum to stop AGI now. With this much distributed attention fixed on the problem, AGI will be solved. Additionally, once it is solved it will be released to the public — whether it’s ethical to do so or not. I imagine that the first people to solve it will probably keep it behind closed doors, but it won’t stay secret forever. Someone on the team will leak everything, or someone else will independently make the same discoveries and release them. Eventually it will get out.

Consider the invention of the nuclear bomb — once we learned of the power hidden in radioactive materials, it was only a matter of time before someone pushed the research to its moral limits. AGI is like that, except it’s even more terrifying because uranium, plutonium, and the bombs made out of them can be strictly controlled, but people with powerful computers and an internet connection cannot, nor can the AGIs they create.

I recognize how cliché and alarmist this all sounds. Really, you’re genuinely worried about a robot apocalypse? You know Age of Ultron is just a stupid Marvel movie, right? Yeah, I know. But I’ve grown to believe that the concerns that fiction writers have been bringing up for decades are actually quite reasonable — because AGI cannot be stopped.

Once an intelligence is loose on the internet, it will be able to learn from all of humanity’s data, replicate and mutate itself infinitely many times, take over physical manufacturing lines remotely, and hack important infrastructure. Obviously, it’s impossible to say for sure that this is what the first free AGI will do, but it’s inevitable that some malevolent AGI will exist and will do these things. We can only hope that we’ll have sufficiently powerful benevolent AGI to fight back.

Final Thoughts

I subtitled this post “Why we're all in denial about the robot apocalypse”. I say that because I believe that society at large is completely, utterly, and woefully unprepared for the advent of sentient, living artificial general intelligence. I think the singularity is coming much sooner than most people expect, and I think it’s going to cause a great deal of upset when it arrives — for better and for worse.

Take for instance the common religious belief that people possess some unmeasurable, undefinable soul, and that this soul is what separates us from inanimate objects and non-sentient animals. Furthermore, some people believe that these souls come from deity. I have spoken with friends who believe that AGI is impossible because “robots can’t have souls, humans aren’t God”. For these people, like Caleb says in Ex Machina (paraphrasing), removing the line between man and machine also removes the line between god and man.

Now, this isn’t to say that AGI will destroy religion or anything — it may even be used to strengthen some sects (as taken to the extreme in HBO’s Raised By Wolves). No, religion has been around for millennia and I’m sure it will continue to be around for many more millennia. I’m simply predicting that a subset of religious people are going to experience lots of cognitive dissonance when the first AGI arrives.

More generally, arguments about AGI sentience and ethical issues will go from being topics only geeks talk about to topics that Facebook moms make political grandstands over.

Finally, I want to address those who may feel this post is pessimistic: I assure you, I am hopeful about AGI. I work in the field of ML because I am hopeful. I hope to personally contribute to the development of AGI in my lifetime. I think AGI has the capacity to make the world an infinitely better place. We are not prepared for AGI, but that doesn’t mean AGI has to be the end of humanity.

I don’t know what life will look like in the age of living machines, but I am confident that, as Jeff Goldblum puts it:

Life, uh, finds a way.

—Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

Thanks for reading,

Kai

PS — I’m making a series of short films about AGI right now! You should totally go watch the first episode, which is out now on my YouTube channel and my TikTok account.

Also, while you’re at it, why not follow me on Twitter?

This post was inspired by Casey Handmer’s Starship is Still Not Understood, which I highly recommend reading if you’d like to hear a better version of most of what I’m about to say. I felt like sharing my own thoughts on the topic, even if many of my thoughts were directly inspired by Casey’s post.

SpaceX’s Starship is on track to completely revolutionize all of space travel. Not only will it be the most powerful rocket ever built once it’s out of the prototype stage, it will also be ridiculously cheap to launch. The cost of launches will be more based on the cost of fuel than anything else, which, if not already impressive enough, becomes even more impressive when you consider that Raptor engines run on methalox! Over the next 5-10 years, launching things into space is going to get much, much easier than it ever has been before.

I am very, very excited about some of the potential missions Starship will make possible.

First and foremost is human spaceflight. Musk aims to reduce the cost of any person going to Mars to below $100,000:

That’s low enough that a large portion of the world’s population could afford it if they took out a 30-year “Mars mortgage”. Space won’t (initially) be accessible to everyone, but it’s about to become 10 million times more accessible than it has ever been before. Personally, I estimate a 95% chance that I’ll have the opportunity to visit Mars in my lifetime.

Another area where I feel Starship is going to make a monumental impact is telescopes. The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful telescope ever built. It’s roughly as big as a tennis court. Having such a large aperture allows it to gather enough light with its 18 gold-plated beryllium mirrors to see extremely dim stars billions of lightyears away. However, fitting such a massive telescope into a single payload for a modern rocket was not easy, and required more than a decade of extensive engineering to pull off.

Starship changes things. If you want to build a big telescope, you could build it in multiple pieces and launch each piece separately, without needing to take anywhere near as much regard for shaving off every last kilogram from your ideal observatory design. Starship will not only allow for rapid launching of these pieces one after the other, but also cheap launches. I think future telescopes more powerful than JWST will be built modularly, assembled in orbit over the course of a dozen or more Starship launches. I additionally anticipate these telescopes will manage to be significantly cheaper than JWST even with all the extra launches, and take much less time to engineer. Removing the need to make everything as light and compact as possible makes things a lot simpler.

The final area I see Starship making an impact in is asteroid mining. As excellently explained by CodyDon Reeder, asteroids often contain large amounts of concentrated ores for some rare materials, including platinum and gold. Platinum is useful as a catalyst among other things, but is scarce in Earth’s crust.

Starship enables long-term colonies on other celestial bodies including Mars and Luna to exist, which would make asteroid mining much easier, as we wouldn’t have to direct the whole operation from Earth—we could use Mars and Luna bases as hubs for mining operations taking place in the asteroid belt. Mars is closer to the belt than Earth, and Luna has the advantage of being relatively close to Earth while avoiding being deep in its gravity well.

There are other ways Starship will be revolutionary, too, but the three I’ve mentioned above are the ones I’m most excited for. Sure, the ultra-rich will enjoy their 30-minute flights from New York to Beijing, but that doesn’t particularly excite me. I do think huge satellite constellations eventually driving the price of internet for the average person down to almost nothing will be nifty, but I don’t have much to say on that topic.

In summary: Starship is a big deal.

Thanks for reading,

Kai

Virtual reality is a field that I think receives far too much doubt, particularly the term “metaverse”. I suspect this is probably mostly just fueled by negative sentiments associated with Facebook and its ilk. People understandably find the idea of Zuck having a total monopoly on human attention in his digital world a bit uncomfortable. What I see a lot, though, is this discomfort being used to rationalize why the concept of the metaverse itself is not feasible. I don’t think this is the right take.

I’m going to use “the metaverse” to refer to the Ready Player One kind of metaverse — a centralized blob of datacenters that hosts a massive, immersive open world game server which anyone can create a free account in and join at any time from anywhere in the world, so long as they have their VR gear. And yeah, I suspect it’s going to end up belonging to a corporation because capitalism is the only source of incentive strong enough to make something this huge happen, and capitalism doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon.

What would be the requirements for this future to happen? I think they can be grouped into three categories: market requirements, software requirements, and hardware requirements. The first two categories are trivial, the third is more involved.

First, market requirements. I think a Ready Player One metaverse would catch on because every separate part of it already has. Social networks are insanely widespread and addictive. Billions of people use them. Real time MMO games being used as social networks have also been proven to be wildly popular, see: Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, etc.

Concepts like avatars and digital identities don’t need to “catch on” because they already have caught on. The metaverse would be a more immersive variant of the Internet culture we already have. People already make friends, make enemies, fall in love, and do business online all the time. Heck, VTubers are even a thing, and growing quicker than ever too!

The metaverse will simply be the next level of online escapism. Humans are addicted to escapist fantasies. The metaverse will cater those fantasies directly to our monkey brains. I expect a lot of people will spend most of their waking hours with a headset on. I think that’s bad, but I think it’s going to happen anyways.

Second, software requirements. I think these succumb to similar arguments: all the core ideas already exist, just at a smaller scale or without having been integrated with all the other pieces before. To be clear, I am not implying that it would be simple or easy to create and maintain the software that runs The Oasis — it would be massively difficult and require huge teams of people much smarter than me. But it’s doable. We’ve made live multiplayer on large scales work before. We’re making massive progress in real-time motion capture and retargeting of that capture to 3D characters (especially recently, thanks to ML). Managing absolutely colossal amounts of personal data is nothing new to the tech giants. Real time ray-tracing I’d argue is more of a hardware problem than a software one.

All the pieces exist, they just need a lot of refinement before they’re Oasis-tier.

A quick note about the business side of things here: The potential profit for the entity that first puts all the right pieces together in the right way is effectively unbounded. If done correctly, I think this would be the most influential software ever made. It would effectively harvest a significant fraction of all human attention worldwide to be directed towards whatever targets the entity desires — even more than traditional social networks harvest today. Manipulating people’s monkey brains is very, very lucrative. Lots of ad revenue.

Third, tech requirements. As a ballpark estimate, let’s say that the perfect VR headset needs an 8K HDR display in each eye with a combined full 180° field of view, running at 150Hz with sub-10ms latency controller and eye tracking, as well as real-time raytracing for rendering scenes in a physically-based manner. In addition, let’s assume it’s standard for everyone to own force-feedback haptic gloves and a full-body haptic suit, as well as an omnidirectional treadmill that can be sprinted on. I feel these specs are a fair baseline to work off of.

When you write that list out, it becomes more apparent just how close this all really is. The chip needed to power such a headset is only 4 or 5 doublings away from the comparatively puny Qualcomm chip that currently powers the Quest 2, the most popular consumer VR headset. Looking at the past few decades of computer trends, as well as the speed with which these things are currently improving, and 4 or 5 doublings is only maybe… 20 years away? And that’s starting with the Quest 2’s chip—if we’re starting from something like the M1, it’s even faster.

There are already omnidirectional treadmills and haptics suits and force-feedback gloves available to the public. At the moment they are expensive and sub-par in terms of performance, but they’re miles ahead of where they were 20 years ago.

20 years from now is 2042. Ernest Cline set his book Ready Player One in 2045. I predict that VR tech will not only be as powerful, but also as widespread as it is in that novel well before 2045. In fact, I’ll move my prediction even further back — I think it will be here before 2037, just 15 years from now.

I’m only 20 years old. Even the slowest computer I’ve used in my life would still probably be fast enough to have powered the entire Apollo program. But I do have some memories of computers freezing and taking a while to do simple things like photo and rich text editing. My little sister, who is 11, doesn’t have those memories (to the best of my knowledge). In the sub-decade gap between when I was born and when my sister was, the entire technological landscape had transformed to the point of unrecognizability.

I am young, yet just within my lifespan I have seen concepts go from being commonly called infeasible to being part of almost everyone’s day-to-day life (see: the smartphone, professional gaming, extremely deep neural networks).

When you look at it that way, worldwide VR adoption isn’t even that crazy, all things considered. In fact, it’s already almost within our reach. At this point, the metaverse isn’t a matter of if, but when. I’ll be honest, I’m a little scared — but I guess the whole point of this post is that being scared of something doesn’t mean you should be in denial about it.

The metaverse is coming, one way or another. I don’t know exactly what to expect and I’m terrified that it’s going to do horrible things to society. But I’m also hopeful that it could increase human empathy and connection, and who knows—maybe it will end up being a massive net positive? No one can know for sure. All we can do is prepare ourselves for it.

It’s kind of like the inevitable advent of AGI and the robot uprising, but that’s a personal crisis of mine that I’ll share some other time.

Thanks for reading,

Kai