Omnipedia #40: Harvard Business Review does degrowth, Artificial Superintelligence is imminent/immanent, eco-libs & anti-nukes rule, & more
Including: the future of rock criticism is a coop - though collective stupidity looms
HELLO all! Sometimes difficult to cast the trends-net wide enough, when the spirits are low—but this has at least silted up… If you enjoy/find useful/are inspired, then please do consider Upgrading to Paid, from the button below. Love and rockets, see you at the end, PK x
THE Harvard Business Review has an article on degrowth??
By prioritizing social and ecological well-being over profits, degrowth does pose an intrinsic challenge to the current capitalist model, because it implies a societal move from excessive consumption and over-production to reduction, redistribution, and the values of care.
These ideas run in contrast to traditional market-first ideologies, so business leaders bristle at the concept. But touting selective and misleading statistics about sustainability efforts that better fit unrealistic worldviews won’t work either.
We must rethink our ingrained assumptions and prioritize the avoidance of harms over the promotion of efficiency, look to circular models as opposed to green innovations, and demand companies drive consumer transitions rather than energy transitions. This is not a call for stagnation but a plea for responsible, sustainable growth that considers the well-being of our planet and future generations.
The bulkheads are breached…abandon the c-suite!
FASCINATED to know what an “eco-libertarian” is? TLDR: they’re strongly into local resilience, they’re very anti-vax/anti-surveillance, they push back on the state as the instrument of our environmental salvation. For the sake of ideo-diversity, have a listen to Jem Bendell.
I liked this zinger from the ex-Corbyn economist, James Meadway: “People need to stop thinking in terms of climate change as apocalypse in the future, and start thinking about it as things being somewhat more shitty today.”
Also, Bill McKibbin on Trump’s re-election as an environmental disaster (upon disaster): “The climate crisis—unlike most of our political woes—is a timed test; past a certain point, we can’t repair the damage. Once you melt the Arctic, no one knows how to freeze it back up again. And that “certain point” is approaching: Climate scientists have made it clear that emissions need to fall by half by 2030; Trump’s term would end in January of 2029, giving his successor…11 months. Good luck.”
OLD colleague Geoff Mulgan lucid and useful, as he mostly is, talking about not collective intelligence, but collective stupidity. Spot the Brexit reference:
Some collective stupidity results from obvious sources: ignorance, poor reasoning, bad memory and uncontrolled impulse. But in this paper I argue that collective stupidity often results from the combination of two less obvious factors: cognitive energy conservation and positive social feedback maximisation: the human desire to be lazy and liked.
Their interaction helps to explain why the very dynamics that help groups cohere – loyalty, shared identity and commitment – can also fuel some of the common phenomena of collective stupidity, from bandwagons and bubbles to collective self-harm on the part of whole nations.
THE “will-you-press-the-button-Starmer” exterminist nihilism of this UK General Election sends me howling into the woods, laughing/shrieking at the idea of our glittering modernity on a trigger wire to oblivion for 80 years. How absurd our everyday “normality” is.
I am faintly encouraged to see the rise in anti-nuclear op-ed, and not just around my beloved Scots indy movement’s opposition to Trident on our country’s territory. Here’s one on “the extreme nature of nuclear deterrence”, a book by the great Elaine Scarry titled “Thermonuclear Monarchy”, and one more from the US magazine Current Affairs, titled “Taking World War Three Seriously”.
I recently dug up a campaign video my partner Indra Adnan and I pulled together in 2017, trying to amass opposition to the recommission of Trident. We failed, but this - from animator Fraser Croall, with music from Young Fathers - is still beautiful:
IT’S the bleakness of reactive mammals in charge of apocalyptic weapons that keeps me turning to AI, for some glimmer of a networked consciousness that fuses tech capability with ecological ethics. Truly, in sci-fi I trust.
Meantime, the Singularity is a’-closin’ in. Here’s a calendar prediction for AGI (or ASI, artificial superintelligence) in 2027. This well-bruited “situational awareness” paper is pretty funny - it also predicts ASI soon, but is also deeply worried that the Chinese Communist Party gets it before ‘Murrica. (Does anyone think the CCP wants its authoritarian rule usurped by a superintelligent computer?)
However it does have this brain-melting video clip, of an AI winning a Minecraft game in 20 seconds. The point being made is that this breathless blur of gameplay choices is how we humans may well regard the exponential performances of ASI’s. As if we were new-born babies, peering through the blur at our inexplicable parents.
Meantime, Ray Kurzweil is prepping for his new book The Singularity Is Nearer (with many confirmed predictions from decades ago). I saw the documentary on him in Seattle once, titled Transcendant Man, and will never forget his puzzlement at his own tears over his father, who he wants to bring back as a simulated intelligence.
The tea did snort through my olfacto-tubes when the grizzled tech reporter Steven Levy describes him thusly: “He showed up wearing bright suspenders and a remarkably full head of hair—kind of a Geppetto look, appropriate for someone trying to promote artificial beings to human status.”
But here’s Kurzweil (or his amanuensis) very clearly laying out what AI will do to the physical world, in the Economist. Make batteries that can store our endless solar bounty; make medicines specific to our bodies—and much more. If only we get through Enrico’s gate, we might land in M. Banks’ lap…
And just as a side-angle, check out the video presentations of Micheal Levin, who finds consciousness and cognition all the way down, and up.
FINALLY, to set the butterfly upon the wheel:
An inspired LRB commission of Owen Hatherley (a place where Jarvis Cocker meets Henri Lefebvre) to review a book on Theodor Adorno’s aesthetics. They’re all just showing off here:
In 1935, Adorno pronounced anathema not on Hollywood cinema or atonal music, but on whatever might try to combine the two and thereby dilute the force and extremism of both.
Just before he died, cinemas in Frankfurt will have been screening Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Lygeti’s Atmosphères plays against a black screen at the film’s opening, before the cosmic monolith appears to a group of hominids at the ‘Dawn of Man’.
Kubrick uses the recording as a short cut to express the ineffable, the impossible to understand, the mystical, the eternal. In its middlebrow pomposity, its massively expensive technological flash, and its aspirations to profundity, Kubrick’s film represented everything Adorno most hated.
And to conclude, the future of music criticism would seem to be in worker-owned cooperatives.
It’s a rich starting point for rethinking the incentives around how culture is valued—and who will be at the forefront of creating that value.
To go a step further, a worker-owned publication devoted to patient, long-form [music] criticism could build solidarity between music workers who have otherwise never regarded themselves as part of the same underclass—a kind of aesthetic mutualism, or in other words, a new culture that prioritizes depth and analysis above hype and momentary engagement.
Good criticism, as with good music, should be lasting. We can build the conditions for that kind of longevity ourselves.
That’ll do. Again, if you like all this, please consider an Upgrade To Paid at the button below. Best, as ever, PK x
Kurzweil (2010): I am going to take 200 vitamins to live forever.
Kurzweil (2022): Maybe I’ll just get a toupee.