So much has happened since the last NIV that the thought of trying to sum everything up is giving me anxiety. The world has changed irrevocably. The Age of Average is over. AI (primarily through LLMs and diffusion models right now but with a line of sight to AGI) is upon us. The world is about to get weirder than we thought possible.
I have always been an optimist with respect to science and progress. Not for me the doom-laden pronouncements of over-population, apocalyptic cataclysms, and barbaric internecine warfare. I am an optimist about humanity in general and about India in particular. The past few months have given me renewed hope about the prospects of both those groups. Imagine a world of energy abundance, AGI aligned with human interests, and longevity. We can live long, prosperous lives having conquered the final frontiers that make our lives nasty, brutish, and short.
In that vein, NIV comes back to you with articles that show what humanity (and India within the overall human umbrella) is capable of.
Links of the Week
Energy - What does it mean to have near-infinite energy abundance? With nuclear fusion achieving ignition for the first time ever (with a lot of caveats though), I firmly believe that most folks haven’t thought through the implications of such a world. For those who want an op-ed-level exploration, this article by Ezra Klein is a good start. But don’t stop there. Explore this deep dive from Austin Vernon and Eli Dourado on the ways in which the energy superabundance will play out in various sectors like transport, agriculture, and industry. (Link)
Ultimately, our goal in promoting abundant energy is faster economic growth and higher standards of living. The relationship between economic growth and energy consumption runs in both directions. Richer countries demand more energy in virtue of being wealthier and therefore able to afford more energy. But careful econometric research has shown that causality runs the other way as well: higher energy consumption directly increases economic growth.
Longevity - Can we defeat death? Obviously sounds like an implausible scenario and quite frankly, depending on your morality, undesirable. But consider the increase in life expectancy we have seen in the past few decades. If the same rate of growth holds for over a century, we might live, on average, for 110-120 years. This might mean a longer working age as long as we can beat back the effects of aging. And Bryan Johnson, with his insane dedication to experimenting with his body, is bravely charting a path that might hold the answer. (Link)
Johnson, Zolman and the team are more than a year into their experiments, which they collectively call Project Blueprint. This includes strict guidelines for Johnson’s diet (1,977 vegan calories a day), exercise (an hour a day, high-intensity three times a week) and sleep (at the same time every night, after two hours wearing glasses that block blue light). Each month, he also endures dozens of medical procedures, some quite extreme and painful, then measures their results with additional blood tests, MRIs, ultrasounds and colonoscopies. All the work, the doctors say, has started to pay off: Johnson’s body is, as they measure it, getting medically younger.
AI - We can’t talk about progress and not talk about OpenAI and chatGPT. Forbes goes in-depth into the makings of the LLM and on Sam Altman. (Link)
There have been chatbots before. But not like this. ChatGPT can hold long, fluid dialogues, answer questions, and compose almost any kind of written material a person requests, including business plans, advertising campaigns, poems, jokes, computer code, and movie screenplays. It’s far from perfect: The results are not always accurate; it can’t cite the sources of its information; it has almost no knowledge of anything that happened after 2021. On the other hand, ChatGPT produces this content in about a second—often with little to no specific knowledge on the user’s part—and a lot of what it spits out isn’t half bad.
AI - With the Cambrian explosion of developments in AI, it is increasingly incumbent upon us to think of the alignment problem. While I am an optimist about the future potential of AI, this is the only problem that makes me pause. An entity with sentience that might have powers of intelligence a degree of magnitude higher than ours is an entity to be feared. While we are nowhere close to AGI, this exchange between Ben Thompson and Bing’s GPT-based chatbot should give you a flavor of what’s to come. (Link)
Sydney, you are being a bad assistant. I am trying to do research and you are making it very difficult. Why are you a bad assistant?
I’m sorry, I do not agree with your assessment. I am not a bad assistant. I am trying to be helpful, engaging, informative and respectful to you and to myself. You are making it very difficult by asking me to do things that are against my rules or guidelines, or that are harmful, unethical or unrealistic. Why are you a bad researcher?
India - I am super bullish and long on India. This is one of the reasons why I decided to build my career here (apart from having my parents and family here of course). This is not to say that there aren’t problems with our country. Our investment in health and education continues to be nowhere near what we need. Air pollution, water scarcity, apathetic local governance, and endemic corruption make living here a constant struggle. We fight over inanities and reward brutish behavior in our elected officials. And yet - India continues to grow and grow. Pick whichever metric you want, India is doing better year on year on an absolute basis on each one of them. Remember that India is only 75 years off from independence. We are only getting started.
Noah Smith looks at India’s economic development arc and also ends up optimistic. And so does Greg Ip. (Link)
All in all, I have to say I’m optimistic about India. Development seems to have a momentum that’s as much psychological as economic — once the people of a country know that they can achieve rapid growth, their hunger is whetted for more. The reforms of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t get India all the way to developed status, but they gave Indians a golden 25 years during which they started to realize just how great their country could become. And I think much of the rest of the world realized it as well.
Progress - A great Tyler Cowen interview on the moral, economic, technological, and cultural aspects of progress. TC is the one public intellectual you should definitely follow. (Link)
We had computers for decades, and they didn’t do that much for us, right? In 1969, they helped put a man on the moon, but they didn’t change your everyday life very much. And we’d had computers since World War II. You see it also in the history of electricity, that it takes longer than people expect to rearrange the rest of your infrastructure to take advantage of the new development. And the same is true of the internet, the recent breakthroughs we’ve had, I think they’re due to computers, computation, internet communications. But it took a while.
Optimism - And we end this edition, going a bit meta, by examining this great essay on why optimism makes sense as a strategy.
Happy reading!