Aesthetic Materialism

This blog is an experiment , a literary experiment, an extended “essay” - a word coined by Francis Bacon, in imitation of Montaigne, which means, literally, a “try,” an “attempt," even a kind of “stab,” in the sense of taking a stab at something.  I am attempting to draw out, in various ways, the consequences of a simple hypothesis, which is, as I’ve already said, the idea that materialism is not something that can be proven by any scientific experiment: materialism is an aesthetic.  It is a matter of taste.  Even, I am will to go so far as to say, an aesthetic choice - with all of the baggage that that word “choice” entails.  Even an incompatibilist does not deny that choice happens, or that choices exist - she merely insists that our choices are determined by forces beyond our control. By asserting that materialism is an aesthetic, I am attempting to restore agency to the materialist, though I can, of course, appreciate that a certain part of the aesthetics ...

The Coming Unemployment: The Rise of the Subproletarian Class In a previous article, I wrote broadly about the end of capitalism, brought about by artificial intelligence and similar technological advances.  In this article, I'd like to focus on one aspect of this larger issue - the huge rise in unemployment.   We all can imagine science fiction scenarios in which artificial general intelligence has wiped out 100% of jobs.  Kai-Fu Lee, the former executive at Google who helped them develop artificial intelligence, is more conservative : he's only estimating that 40% of jobs will be eliminated by AGI.  But let's be really, really optimistic.  Let's imagine, just for the sake of argument, that structural unemployment only goes up to 10% of the world population, so that 90% of jobs are safe.  Ten percent of the world population.  In today's numbers, that's 774 million people.  That's more than the population of the United States of America, Ca...

THE PRODUCTIVITY BOMB Sorry, Ray Kurzweil , there will be no singularity.  As much as Moore’s Law has become a cliche, it has also become a cliche to point out that exponential growth has no "knee" - that is to say, that an exponential growth curve has no inflection point.  It goes up faster and faster, so that not only is the value rising but the derivative of the value is also rising (that is, the rate of increase is itself increasing) yet at any given point it is still a gradual increase.  Growth that gets indefinitely huger as it approaches a specific point of time, a limit known as a singularity, is not exponential growth but rather hyperbolic growth .  There’s no evidence that technology is growing hyperbolically; it is “only” growing exponentially.  Gordon Moore himself has stated that he doesn't believe in the singularity, or even in the continuation of Moore's Law.   (And Moore's Law is starting to fail, anyway ... ) ...