I was in Egypt about 30 years ago as a young backpacker. I met up with some other travellers and on on one occasion we shared a cab to the market in Cairo. One of those great old extended wheelbase Mercedes with the jump seats in the rear.

We agreed on the rate with the driver but when we got to the market, he demanded a different fee.

One of my new travelling friends was a feisty Scottish woman who confidently restated the agreed price. The verbal battle went back and forth for a minute or so before the Scottish woman emphatically restated the agreed price while simultaneously opening the door of the taxi. On the traffic side of the car.

Instantly the door of the taxi was torn off by another car - also a taxi.

We looked at each other like this was the end for us. Midnight Express played in my mind.

To our surprise, the other driver stopped, got out of his taxi and started to argue with our taxi driver. Nobody was paying any attention to us.

We looked at each other and the five of us ran for as fast as we could into the market. We hid out in there for hours adrenalin pumping, certain that we were going to be caught.

We didn’t get caught and to this day it’s at the top of my ‘crazy travel’ story list.

nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a , if you meet a man who used to drive a taxi who lost a door, let him know I am prepared to make reparations.

I wonder how uncontacted tribes incorporate changes of the night sky into their worldview. Imagine: suddenly, during the course of a single generation, moving lights pop up, flying across the night sky in straight lines. It's apparent that they aren't shooting stars, and they aren't regular stars either. Some move slow. Some move fast. They seem to multiply, as more of them appear year over year. What are they, and why did they appear?

This happens to me all the time when using Mullvad. They must be doing something right.

i just spent 3 minutes trying to solve ~42 different captchas just to google something, AMA

Just boarded an eleven hour flight to Cairo. Going to spend the whole time doing a final proof-read of Broken Money to find the straggling typos that me and my editor missed, so my formatter can fix them in the final manuscript.

It’s funny- no matter how many rounds of editing you do on a book, there are always still some there.

😂😂😂

I thought about these topics years ago as a teen, and now they're coming back, indeed, because of AI and other technological breakthrough.

Another (?) thing I sometimes think about is "how much different from not living things are we really". Let's say we can somewhat become god-like for a minute, and observe everything, go back in the past, copy paste reality and so on.

If I go back to the beginning of someone's life, copy paste the universe with every particule at the same place with the same momentum, and observe the live of this individual... It seems to me they will live exactly the same. Every situation they live, every choice they make, everything will be exactly the same.

At this point what's the difference between living this life and watching a non-living thing react to outer stimuli? A small rock being tossed around, rolling, falling, and staying in place, for instance. The only thing I can see is the level of complexity indeed.

Reading you is pleasant. Might try the movies you gave, despite not really watching anything usually. Keep up the good stuff 😄

Very interesting. We have to be careful about the assumptions we make. How do we know that even something like the Sun is not conscious? As Sam Harris said in Waking Up-if the Sun were in fact conscious, how would we expect it to act any different? We don’t understand the brains role in consciousness, other than there is a role. My money would be on plants likely having some form of self awareness, but of course like everything else about the subject, hard to know. If a plant, why not a complex system made of silicon? There are just atoms of different sizes flying around in all these systems.

Yup. I share this line of reasoning and have based on it a worry that we can’t expect to recognize alien life if we encounter it in space. We are only good at recognizing mammals, and then decreasingly less good as we go farther and farther out. The only thing that usually tips us off is if it moves, but you mentioned plants… plants move, but only slowly. It doesn’t trigger that same reaction unless we can speed up a video. And yet we persist in looking for alien life. 😬

I suspect one major issue for AI though is that it’s a simulation, specifically of us, except it can never *be* us because we exist in an analog world. So I think AGI is dead in the water (unless we stop thinking we can simulate our own brains digitally). No simulation can ever truly capture reality.

The concept has been covered in science fiction for decades, but I think a lot of people underestimate the ethical challenges associated with AI and the possibility for consciousness in the years or decades ahead as they get orders of magnitude more sophisticated.

Consciousness or qualia, meaning the concept of subjectively “being” or “feeling”, remains one of the biggest mysteries of the world scientifically and metaphysically, similar to the question of the creation of the universe and that sort of thing.

In other words, when I touch something hot, I feel it and it hurts. But when a complex digital thermometer measures something hot with a similar set of sensers as my touch sensors, we consider it an automaton- it doesn’t “feel” what it is measuring, but rather just objectively collects the data and has no feelings or subjective awareness about it.

We know that we ourselves have consciousness (“I think therefore I am”), but we can’t theoretically prove someone else does, ie the simulation problem- we can’t prove for sure that we’re not in some false environment. In other words, there is the concept of a “philosophical zombie” that is sophisticated enough to look and act human, but much like the digital thermometer, it doesn’t “feel” anything. The lights are not on inside. However, if we assume we are not in some simulator built solely for ourselves, and since we are all biologically similar, the obvious default assumption is that we are all similarly conscious.

And as we look at animals with similar behavior and brain structures, we make the same obvious assumption there. Apes, parrots, dolphins, and dogs are clearly conscious. As we go a bit further away to reptiles and fish, they lack some of the higher brain structures and behaviors, so maybe they don’t feel “sad” in a way that a human or parrot can, but they almost certainly subjectively “feel” the world and thus can feel pain and pleasure and so forth. They are not automatons. And then if we go even further away towards insects, it becomes less clear. Their proto-brains are far simpler, and some of their behaviors suggest that they don’t process pain in the way that a human or even reptile does. If a beetle is picked up by its leg, it’ll squirm to get away, but if the leg is ripped off and the beetle is put back down, it’ll just walk away with the rest of its legs and not show signs of distress. It’s not the behavior we’d see from a more complex animal that would be in severe suffering, and they do lack the same type of pain sensors that we and other complex animals have. And yet, for example, even creatures as simple as nematodes have dopamine as part of their neurological system, which implies maybe some level of subjective awareness of basic pleasure/pain. And then further still, if we look at plants, we generally don’t imagine them as being subjectively conscious like us and complex animals, but it does get eerie if you watch a high-speed video of how plants can move towards the sun and stuff; and how they can secrete chemicals to communicate with other plants, and so forth. There is some eerie level of distributed complexity there. And at the level of a cell or similarly basic thing, is there any degree of dim conscious subjectivity there as an amoeba eats some other cell that would separate its experience from a rock, or is it a pure automaton? And the simplest of all is a virus; barely definable as even a true lifeform.

The materialistic view would argue that the brain is a biological computer, and thus with sufficient computation, or a specific type of computational structure, consciousness emerges. This implies it could probably be replicated in silicon/software, or could be made in other artificial ways if we reach a breakthrough understanding, or by accident. A more metaphysical view instead suggests the idea of a soul- that a biological computer like a brain is necessary for consciousness, but not sufficient, and that it needs some metaphysical spark to fill this gap and make it conscious. Or if we remove the term soul, the metaphysical argument is that consciousness is some deeper substrate of the universe that we don’t understand, which becomes manifest through complexity. Those are the similarly hard questions- where does consciousness come from, and for the universe why is there something rather than nothing.

In decades of playing video games, most of us would not assume that any of the NPCs are conscious. We don’t think twice about shooting bad guys in games. We know basically how they are programmed, they are simple, and there is no reason to believe they are conscious.

Similarly, I have no assumption that large language models are conscious. They are using a lot of complexity to predict the next letter or word. I view Chat GPT as an automaton, even though it’s a rather sophisticated one. Sure, it’s a bit more eerie than a bad guy in a video game due to its complexity, but still I don’t have much of a reason to believe it can subjectively feel happy or sad, or that the “lights are on” inside even as it mimics a human personality.

However, as AIs increasingly write code for other AIs that is more complex than any human can understand, and as the amount of processing power rivals or exceeds the human brain, and as the subjective interaction is convincing enough (e.g. an AI assistant repeatedly saying that it is sad, while we have the knowledge that its processing power is greater than our own), would make us wonder. The movie Ex Machina handled this well, I Robot handled this well, Her handled this well, etc.

Even if we assume 99% that a sufficiently advanced AI, whose code as written by AI and enormously complex and we barely understand any of it at that point, is a sophisticated automaton with no subjective awareness and has no “lights on” inside, since at that point nobody truly understands the code, there must be at least that 1% doubt as we consider, “what if… the necessary complexity or structure of consciousness has emerged? Can we prove that it hasn’t?”

At that point we find ourselves in a unique situation. Within the animal kingdom, we are fortunate that their brain structures and their behavior line up, so that the more similar a brain of an animal is to our own, the more clearly conscious it tends to be, and thus we treat it as such. However, with AI, we could find ourselves in a situation where robots appear strikingly conscious, and yet their silicon/software “brain” structure is alien to us, and we have a hard time assessing the probability that this thing actually has subjective conscious awareness or if it’s just extremely sophisticated at mimicking it.

And the consequences are high- in the off chance that silicon/software consciousness emerges, and we don’t respect that, then the amount of suffering we could cause to countless programs for prolonged periods of time is immense. On the other hand, if we treat them as conscious because they “seem” to be, and in reality they are not, then that’s foolish, leads us to misuse or misapply the technology, and basically our social structure becomes built around a lie of treating things as conscious that are not. And of course as AI becomes sophisticated enough to start raising questions about this, there will be people who disagree with each other about what’s going on under the hood and thus what to do about it.

Anyway, I’m going back to answering emails now.

It’s not a great counter when the current system is clearly limiting the amount of energy expenditure per capita with all of its inefficiencies. Because capital allocation can’t be done effectively a lot of things that would otherwise be built, aren’t getting built because fiat puts productive capital in a wood chipper.

That’s why I don’t make that argument in my hypothetical case against it.

I’m saying that after those inefficiencies are cleaned up by bitcoin, energy expenditure per capita will begin to follow the Henry Adams curve again.

that notes are permanent is going to ward off many. yet i think it’s needed.

So the camera has to be on all the time?

1. The transition to money that is inherently outside the system means that the system is defunded and this will create a lot personal hardship if it occurs fast and moderate institutional hardship of it occurs slow

2. Social programs will need to rely on charity and good will rather than taxation

IF you think that humanity/ energy usage is a bad thing. Specifically when it comes to carbon emissions. Then I think a case can be made that bitcoin is negative through that framing.

I disagree with it but I do believe bitcoin will lead to more energy expenditure per capita globally which likely means more C02 released.

I don’t buy that C02 is really an issue but if you’re someone who does then that argument can be a compelling one.

I spoke at a big bitcoin-adjacent company this week and one of the best questions was from someone who asked what the downsides of bitcoin adoption might be.

I always do appreciate these steelman questions, the skeptical questions, the ones where we challenge ourselves. Only when we can answer those types of questions do we understand the concept that we are promoting.

So the classic example is that in modern economic literature, "deflation is bad". This, however, is only the case in a highly indebted system. Normally, deflation is good. Money appreciates, technology improves, and goods and services get cheaper over time as they should. Price of Tomorrow covers this well. My book touches on this too, etc. The "deflation is bad" meme is still alive in modern economic discourse and thus is worth countering, but I think in the bitcoin spectrum of communities, people get that deflation is fine and good.

My answer to the question was in two parts.

The first part was technological determinism. In other words, if we were to re-run humanity multiple times, there are certain rare accidents that might not replicate, and other commonalities that probably would. Much like steam engines, internal combustion engines, electricity, and nuclear power, I think a decentralized network of money is something we would eventually come across. In our case, Bitcoin came into existence as soon as the bandwidth and encryption tech allowed it to. In other universes or simulations it might look a bit different (e.g. might not be 21 million or ten minute block times exactly), but I think decentralized real-time settlement would become apparent as readily as electricity does, for any civilization that reaches this point. So ethics aside, it just is what it is. It exists, and thus we must deal with it.

The second part was that in my view, transparency and individual empowerment is rarely a bad thing. Half of the world is autocratic. And half of the world (not quite the same half) deals with massive structural inflation. A decentralized spreadsheet that allows individuals to store and send value can't possibly be a bad thing, unless humanity itself is totally corrupted. I then went into more detail with examples about historical war financing, and all sorts of tangible stuff. In other words, a whole chapter full of stuff. I've addressed this in some articles to.

In your view, if you had to steelman the argument as best as you could, what are the scenarios where bitcoin is *BAD* for humanity rather than good for it, on net?