Apocalypse No

Superintelligent AI is highly unlikely. Here's why.

There is no shortage of jeremiads about the apocalyptic possibilities of a so-called superintelligence: defined by the term's coiner as "an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills." Leaving aside the presumption implied in this definition ("smarter than...brains"?), I contend that AI is extremely unlikely to advance past the machine-learning based automation of language tasks. Focusing instead on the unique challenges of human-machine teaming would be far more fruitful than handwringing over naught.

In order for a superintelligence to come into existence, it would need to bootstrap off of a large portion of the combined knowledge of human civilization. In order to perform this bootstrapping, an intelligence or proto-intelligence would need a suitable hermeneutic model. No such hermeneutic model can exist.

Definitions

What we are really worried about is a dangerous superintelligence, which I define as an intelligence exhibiting:

• Agency: The intelligence must have an agency of its own
• Superiority: A dangerous intelligence must be more intellectually capable than any human could be.
• Effectivity: A dangerous intelligence must be able to intervene in our world in a malicious way

By "hermeneutic model" I mean a framework for understanding a given document, which we assume must at least somewhat overlap with the intent of the document's creator. This would include language, worldview, references, etc.

The need for a bootstrap

In order for a dangerous intelligence to surpass us at anything that we care about, it would have to stand on our shoulders. To use a characteristically morbid example, let's imagine that a dangerous intelligence wanted to build a nuclear weapon. It is almost taken for granted that the basis for the design, part selection and build would come from a repository of human knowledge.

You, a philosopher, may object: but why is that the case? Given the cycle speeds of a supercomputer and some magical evolutionary algorithms, could not an intelligence merely simulate all of human history, including the entire biosphere of the earth? Surely then it could, from principle, derive a nuclear weapon by itself.

Accepting this clearly absurd proposition that would take the lifetime of the universe to run, this would still not necessarily yield an intelligence that intersects with what we mean when we say intelligence. This assumes that intelligence evolved teleologically, with human-like intelligence the only possible outcome of evolution. The only other option would be to sprout every possible intelligence and cull those that aren't fit for our task. Doing so would require a reasonably parameterized model of intelligence (e.g. what we're trying to derive) so we've reached a dead end. 

So, we agree that a dangerous intelligence would need to bootstrap off of human knowledge, and all of it, if possible. In order to do so, however, the intelligence bootstrapping protocol needs to ingest all of this knowledge and convert it to a format that the superintelligence can learn

Nobody thinks of hermeneutics

We now have a translation problem: We need a way to translate every single document in human history into a format appropriate for training a learning algorithm. Unfortunately, the translation task that we have set before us is more fraught than translating a Chinese food menu into Bantu. This mechanism by which human documents are translated into machine documents will be the limiting factor to any development of intelligence. 

First: we can't make presumptions about the relative importance of documents, since if we knew which documents were important we'd be superintelligent ourselves. This means that we need to make an effort to translate as close to every document as possible.

Second: these documents must also be "interpreted" or rather, "normalized" for the training regime that we are using. Most of the machine translation tasks to which we are accustomed translate between languages and assume a shared hermeneutic model. Often, this is safe because the source and target messages both refer to a contemporary, hyper-globalized world. Translating from one hermeneutic model into another (interpretation) across time is a different story. It would require either the creation of a third hermeneutic model between source and target or for the target hermeneutic model to grow, pseudopod-like, towards the source. 

The only way to properly ingest these documents to begin training the algorithm would be to have a system that could match a given document with its proper hermeneutic model and then translate the document into a format that the learning algorithm can use. I submit that this is impossible without a foreknowledge of the subjective experience of human intellect, which is the unacknowledged baseline for hermeneutics: we assume that the creator of a text had an intellect that somewhat mirrors our own.

The best one can hope for in this respect is that the "smartest" person in the world can be tasked to personally convert every document from human history into a format that the AI understands. So first, we'll have to engineer an extremely long-living human who is also superintelligent. Wait, that almost sounds like...

Centaurs not SkyNet

I am not saying that the introduction of "Language Automation" software into the
economy will be a non-incident. Far from it.

Many of the economic repercussions that the press warns about do not need general purpose AI. All they need are application-specific, machine-learning based NLP, which I think is one of the real stories of the last couple decades. I am bullish on any company who understands this and is taking steps to either train or reinforcement learn algorithms in their application area. This is more economically important than trying to get an AI to win Jeopardy. Oh wait.

Ultimately, no business actually wants an agential super AI, they want an advanced question answering system. Their business rationale is that, if they can train a general purpose algorithm that can answer any question forever, they can fire everyone. I doubt very seriously that this is a possibility with just a machine. Human-machine teaming will be able to accomplish much of what has been sold as AI by the more egregious hype-mongers and do so without the statistical anomalies of machine learning, which are still unacceptable in most applications. I'd even wager that a well-run Centaur will be more cost-effective in the long run.

Cross-posted from my Urbit

The Future of Precision Agriculture is Decentralized

Software is eating the world.
--Marc Andreesen

TOGETHER WE CAN BE THE MONSANTO OF BITCOIN FARMING
--@a16z_intern

The John Deere Affaire

Many of those with a passing interest in agriculture or technology will have heard of The John Deere Affaire, where John Deere has sued its customers, claiming that they don't actually own the tractors that they've purchased, but rather hold "an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle." This is probably news to the farmer who bought it. 

Now, this is a particularly vulgar example of a dynamic that is happening across the various attempts to "techify" agriculture. Companies are attempting to replicate in farming what has been a successful model in the consumer internet, namely providing services in lieu of products. While the John Deere example is particularly egregious, many of the big players are trying to get farmers to pay them for the honor of collecting data on their behalf. Sound familiar?

Precision agriculture is vitally important, but I contend that trying to build the Facebook of Corn is ill-fated. Customers (farmers) want to be able to fix their tools and they want to own their data. What they really need is decentralized precision agriculture. 

What a Farmer Really Wants (I've Heard)

Many people from the "tech" world who design for farmers labor under the misapprehension that all people who work with their hands are like the Home Depot Mascot, but the reality is far more nuanced.

A colleague once told me, speaking of fish farmers, that when you give a farmer a new piece of equipment, they'll learn to play it like a musical instrument. I found this to be a very evocative analogy. It means that, instead of designing for ease by making things simple, you should design for autonomy. Design for playability.

Practically, this means that a farmer needs to understand what a tool does. And they need to be able to fix it, debug it, tinker with it, etc.

Property rights are also extremely important to farmers, as their land and the tools that they use to work it are viewed as safeguards to their autonomy. This means that no farmer in his right mind will agree to the kind of arrangements that we consumers regularly submit to, namely that we don't own the data that we generate. 

In concrete terms, this means that a farmer wants tools, not services and he wants to own his data. 

We have the technology

Most precision agriculture products actually do think about themselves as the Facebook of Corn. They want to collect data from the farm, hoover it into a centralized computer facility (9 times out of 10 it's AWS) and then sell the insights from their analysis back to farmers. Since the software doesn't run on the farm,  the farmer doesn't own it. It's very unclear if he even owns the data that his fields generate. It's like paying for a hammer every time you pound in a nail. 

If you think that interoperability is a problem on the consumer internet, let me tell you about the disaster that is the "smart tractor." The major tractor brands: Case, Deere, Kubota, etc. all have proprietary operating systems. Creating something as simple as a USB dongle that downloads your planting data requires a developer to design against several systems that are mutually incompatible. 

The barriers to both fixability and ownership are not simply "corporate malevolence," they are based on technical realities. In the following, I will talk about the technical roots of these problems and existing or near-existing technologies that can help us find our way around these problems.

Urbit

Urbit is a clean-slate operating system that is natively networked and runs without system calls, making it easily installable on any Unix-y platform. Perhaps most compelling is the ability for an instance of Urbit to spawn child Urbits which are automatically networked to the parent and which are functionally the same. An analogy might be if, every time you got a new phone, you could just clone your computer's OS and run it on the phone; each able to network with the other. 

In a precision agriculture application, this means that a farmer could have one Urbit instance running in his workshop. When he wants to add a new water sensor, he spawns a new Urbit to run the sensor. The sensor will be addressable from the parent Urbit and can easily be debugged with the same tools that the farmer uses on his home Urbit. We could do the same thing for a tractor, for an irrigation system, etc.

Since each of these devices is federated, but self-sufficient, it means that they are ideally suited to an imperfectly connected environment. If the farm's connection to farmcorp.com goes down, it won't matter, since the devices on the network are perfectly capable of chugging along on their own. The tractor can be lent to a friend for a week and come back, no worse for the wear. 

While John Deere suing its customers to prevent them from tinkering with their devices is a particularly gross example, it is not rooted 100% in corporate malevolence. These devices are indeed complex and, frankly, the software systems are not designed for self-service; it is exceedingly hard to make these fiddly 70's technologies like Unix and TCP do what we want them to do in the comfort of our air-conditioned offices, much less out in the sun and the dirt. 

Urbit is not simple, but we can imagine building agriculture-specific layer on top of Urbit that would, indeed, allow farmers to learn to play it like a musical instrument. I would also argue that, while Urbit may be complex, learning how to interact with it once would, in my above example, allow a farmer to debug and fix his sensors, his tractor and his irrigation system, instead of learning how to do all of these things independently. 

IPFS

The torrent of data produced by modern tractors and and sensors has to go somewhere, and very few farmers have data centers out on the field. Even if they got the urge, network infrastructure is not favorably sited outside of large cities, making the idea of uploading all of one's own data to the cloud infeasible. 

Enter IPFS or the InterPlanetary File System. IPFS can best be understood as a BitTorrent-esque file system that allows data to be broken apart and stored on several machines. Instead of one large data center, there would be data stuffed into every spare corner of the machines nearest you, allowing you to access the data without even connecting to the broader network. 

This would remove the technical hurdles to a farmer hosting his own data, and perhaps the data for nearby farmers. Local farmers co-ops, which already exist, could even host their own mini-data centers using IPFS. A farmer’s co-op with a drone and an IPFS-based data center could offer its members many of the benefits of overhead imaging-based precision ag techniques without waiting for high-connectivity networks in rural regions.

The Apocalyptic Part

The argument against monoculture in agriculture is quite clear: If you only farm one crop, you open yourself up to a single blight or drought leading to not only loss of money, but famine and death. In short, you make yourself very fragile. 

As it goes for crops, so it goes for technology. 

One of the visions of AgTech boils down to “farming as a service.” A future where there is a tractor as a service, seeds as a service, weather prediction as a service, etc. 

Can we honestly to believe that these services will somehow be more secure or long-lasting than those that have come before it? The recent spate of ransomware attacks on large corporations speaks to the contrary.

Can you imagine the carnage, both literal and figurative, that would arise if a service upon which a significant number of farmers rely goes out? It wouldn't even have to be hacked, it could just go down. It could simply be bought and shuttered by a competitor and throw an entire operation into disarray.

In order to make farming more efficient, we should embrace precision agriculture. 
In order to preserve the livelihood of farmers and build a robust food system, that precision agriculture needs to be decentralized. 
 

Transatomic Power

It is an exciting time for nuclear energy. While nuclear energy is the most productive zero-carbon energy source, development of new reactors has been rather stagnant over the past few decades. Now that carbon emissions are a looming concern, a whole new generation of companies and reactor designs are being proposed that will address many of the lingering (though overstated) concerns remaining about nuclear energy. These companies are one of our best shots at being able to provide cheap, clean abundant energy.

An interesting player in this new generation of nuclear companies is Transatomic Power. Transatomic is still working on a production scale reactor, but I think that their proposed design is exciting enough to merit a look.

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For the uninitiated, nuclear reactors may seem like space magic, but in fact they work (almost) every other generator of electricity: A medium (water) is heated up to boiling, it creates steam and turns a turbine, which generates electricity. In the case of gas generators, gas is used to heat the water. Coal generators, coal. Nuclear generators, nuclear material. What makes these methods of electricity generation different is the qualities of the heating method. Wind is intermittent, coal is pollutant (particulates and CO2), gas emits CO2 and so forth. Nuclear emits no airborne pollutants, but the fission process can irradiate things in the surroundings. Unconsumed nuclear material can also be quite dangerous.

So what makes the Transatomic Power design different?

The first difference is that the fuel is a liquid made by suspending the radioactive material in a salt. This salt is solid at room temperature, but will flow at high temperatures. This replaces the fuel rods that we all know and love so well from the Simpsons intro sequence. 

Liquid fuel has a number of benefits, not least of all being that it allows for the introduction of a passive safety feature called a freeze valve. As part of the primary loop of the reactor, there is a valve that is held shut with frozen fuel, which has to be electrically cooled. As long as electricity is being delivered to this valve, all is well. In the case of a failure, electricity would be cut to the valve and it would melt, emptying the fuel into a cooling pool. In short, the conditions that lead to a failure also initiate the safety procedure. This would have avoided the Fukushima situation where a secondary system was required (and failed) to enact the safety protocol.

Reactors have to be maintained in a certain state called “criticality.” This means, essentially, that there is a chain reaction occurring, allowing the reactor operate continuously. To achieve this, a moderator must be used, which slows the reaction enough so that it can be useful. Water is an effective moderator and is used for many reactor designs, including the Light Water Reactor. The problem, as one can guess, is that superheated, radioactive water can easily become superheated, radioactive steam and cause problems. Transatomic gets around this by using a zirconium hydride moderator, no water necessary. This means that the water that does exist in the Transatomic Reactor is quite separate from the radioactive process, eliminating the danger of radioactive steam escaping the system.

Light Water Reactors have to be operated at a very high pressure. This leads to all sorts of difficulties in fabrication and operation. The Transatomic Power design is operated at atmospheric pressure, drastically reducing the chance of failure and potentially reducing the cost of fabrication.

This reactor design is extremely exciting because it addresses many of the concerns that exist with nuclear energy, namely: safety, waste, proliferation and cost. The passive safety features of this reactor design will prevent a Fukushima-type “Beyond Design Basis” disaster. The enrichment of the reactor can be as low as 1.8% (as compared to a conventional 20%), meaning that Transatomic can actually burn existing nuclear waste, allowing us to use our stockpiles of nuclear waste as fuel! This low enrichment level also puts to rest fears of proliferation, since such low enrichment levels are not more weaponizable than, say, a truck full of gas. Finally, the lower pressure, the low enrichment levels and the modular design mean that a Transatomic Power reactor should be able to find cost efficiencies over Light Water Reactors.

Finally, there’s something cool about the fact that this initiative is mostly funded by Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, as opposed to a clunky government research program. This alone gives me hope that we might actually see some of these designs powering our Jetsons-style robot maids for years to come.

The Hype in the Machine

A recent article in Bloomberg shed light on the humans behind the recent rash of “chatbot” based business like GoButler and x.ai. For those of you blissfully unfamiliar with this term, it refers to a supposedly artificially intelligent computerized agent that you can converse with via a chat client (SMS, FB Messenger, etc.). In the future envisioned by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella these chatbots will form the backbone of crucial new services such as...ordering pizza. Well, it turns out that many of these services aren’t much more than a fancy call center wherein boring old humans sit around in a cubicle and wait for you to ask for pizza and then order it for you. The real innovation seems to have been in passing this off as artificial intelligence.

Now, the idea of interfacing with computers through conversation is a great idea. Whenever possible, interfaces should be invisible. We’ve spent the past four decades demanding that people think like computers, it’s about time that the tables. The problem, as anyone passingly familiar with the actual technology behind natural language processing (NLP) and (shudder) artificial intelligence will tell you, is that these things are extremely hard to do. While very narrow NLP tasks can reach an accuracy of (gasp!) 78%, these techniques are far from generalizable, regardless of what Wired might think.

The chatbot phenomenon is something banal passed off as something futuristic, which is really nothing remarkable in and of itself (cf the 21st century). Please don’t mistake this for judgment. Banal things are often useful and very often make good businesses. These chatbots represent the application of scheduling optimization to a service: How do you route highly variable inputs to workers in such a way as to maximize utilization? This is an operations problem as old as industrialization and a challenge worthy of addressing. The question is: Why can’t we just say that? Why does founder after founder have to paint their milquetoast contribution to operational efficiency as a mixture of the Manhattan Project, the Moon Landing and the March to Selma?

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"Technology” journalism is an odd beast, one that seems to bear very little relationship to engineering or the fundamentals of business. Like all journalism, narrative is king and all facts must conform to its implacable logic. One of the amazing constants of the narratives of the technology media is that the narrative is essentially the same “X is coming and X will revolutionize the world. Resistance is futile.” The only thing that changes is the value of X. Last year it was “Big Data,” this year it is “AI.” What unites these things is that they are so vague as to be meaningless. What also unites them is that they become catnip for VCs. Founders then use this terms to show the VCs that they are “with it.” Pando covers this round of funding to prove the reality of the narrative and so on until the buzzword has been stretched and warped to encompass all things and is then discarded in favor of a new buzzword.

So goes all marketing, one might say. The reason that this problem is particularly insidious for technology is that these buzzwords, at one point, meant something. They were once concepts, at least nascent concepts, that defined an active area of scientific and engineering inquiry. Big data used to be a term for data sets whose size made previously trivial things (opening it into RAM, for example) impossible. Now it is a term used for all data sets. No technocapitalist worth his salt will admit that he has boring old “medium data.” AI is merely the new big data. The nice thing about artificial intelligence is that there it was a squishy term to begin with. People whose job is producing jeremiads about AI can’t seem to even decide if intelligence is a subset of human mental activity or just another word for it.

In the present environment, basic research is increasingly outsourced to startups. That means that the goals of research are being defined by the startup funding system, which is in turn defined by BuzzFeed lists about the sexiest robots in movie history. We can see that this feedback loop between the media, the funders and the engineers is not only annoying, it is possibly fatal to actual technological development. How will we ever achieve useful advances in AI if the goalposts are constantly being moved for the purposes of hype? As Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”

To return to our chatbot businesses: x.ai is not AI and likely never will be, since that term doesn’t mean anything anymore. It may, however, be a useful service and a novel contribution to operations optimization. And that’s not such a bad thing. In fact, it’s the kind of thing real businesses are based on.

Green Orthodoxy

This post was inspired by a few statements by @ShellenbergerMD on the role of belief in environmentalism.

2. Conservatives often express confusion as to why liberals who claim to be atheist use "nature" like others use God. Isn't that religious?

— Mike Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) February 10, 2016

If environmentalism is a religion, it's a shoddy one. If we're going to solve the many pressing environmental problems that face us today, we're going to have to commit a little heresy and bring environmentalism crashing back to Earth. 

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What is a religion?

Many will take issue with my assertion that environmentalism is a religion. "Religion," they'll say, "is something only irrational people ascribe to. What could be more rational than believing that the highest good is preserving the very basis for human life?" To that, I would reply that rationality does not define a religion, structure defines religion. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...you get the idea. 

The fact that we all know the names of some religions obscures the fact that we don't really know what unites religious activity. There have certainly been attempts to define "religion" as a psychological phenomenon, as a philosophy and so on, but these often proceed from an assumption that we know which patterns of life constitute a religion. Our definition is circular. 

Put another way, if aliens visited our planet, would they put Islam, Hinduism and Christianity in the same bucket? If so, why? 

I propose the following minimal, structural definition of religion: religion consists of a metaphysical belief and a set of practices that follow from that belief. These practices, in turn, identify practitioners (co-religionaries) as part of the same in-group. I contend that all religions manifest this triple structure: metaphysical ground, individual practice and group identity. To give an example from Christianity, the basic assertion to be believed is that there is a God who is the basis for all existence and that He became man in the form of Jesus. The Christian religions and all of their disagreements stem from the question: What requirements does this place on my life? These different practices, in turn define the identity of the different sects. Catholics fast on Fridays, Mormons have their temples, Lutherans do whatever they do. But what makes it essentially a religion is this triple structure: God exists and became man (meaning that God cares about humanity) AND this demands that I act a certain way in my day to day life AND those acts define my identity. 

There are certainly many things that fulfill one aspect of this. Physics makes claims that it doesn't regard as metaphysical (because that's an "unscientific" sounding word), but functionally are. Statements about the nature of things that are impossible to verify or experience are functionally metaphysical, but no claim on the part of string theory dictates any course of human action.

There are also systems of life action that are not based in any metaphysical absolute. People are constantly going on diets, learning things, engaging in causes, joining political parties, joining and leaving social cliques ad infinitum, but this not moored in any particular metaphysical claim.  One just does it because it "feels right."

Similarly, there are various in-groups that we belong to that are not based on either metaphysics or personal practice. The most obvious of these are demographic in-groups, such as sex, race, age, but we can think of almost unlimited transient, trend-based in-groups. 

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Is environmentalism a religion?

If we look at conventional environmentalism, it is easy to discern a religious structure. The metaphysical claim is that nature is static and that it is morally superior to human activity. To this, many an environmentalist will claim that this is not a "belief," but rather a logical outcome stemming from the belief that a healthy planet is a premise for human survival. If the premise is degraded, then survival will be degraded. This is a complex question, but it seems that humanity can biologically survive on a much different, far less green planet. The logic of survival does not necessarily lead to conservation of the natural world.  The justification for conservation must be sought either in aesthetics, or in metaphysics. For the modern relativist, these categories conflate nicely, so we'll just say that the "Superiority of Nature" is a metaphysical belief. 

The next question is, does environmentalism hold that there are some practices that follow from this metaphysical belief? This is even more plainly true than the metaphysical claim, since the practices are what we actually associate with environmentalism. These practices include--support for recycling, "renewable" energy, emissions regulation, etc. I should point out that these practices are believed to follow from the metaphysical premise of the separateness and superiority of nature, the nature of this relationship between premise and conclusion is also an article of faith.

And finally we ask ourselves: does environmentalism create an in-group? I would argue that this one of the most important functions of environmentalism.  I remember moving from California to Texas and finding out that there was no support for recycling in my new hometown. I recall being physically unable to throw a Coke can in the garbage, such was my sense of (inherited) tribal loyalty.  It seems obvious that "being an environmentalist" offers a host of social benefits, including a cohesive dating pool.

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So what?

The natural question is: So what? If a bunch of Californians want to adhere to an environmentalist pseudo-religion, what makes this any worse than the Church of Scientology? In fact, given that the issue is so pressing, isn't it necessary to drum up enthusiasm however necessary? 

Well, if all we were talking about was different ways to while away one's life, I would say, "Not much difference." But ostensibly, we're trying to accomplish some pragmatic goal, that being keeping the planet hospitable for humanity.  My first problem with the idea of environmental orthodoxy is that the actions that environmentalism dictates are overly constrained. This means that the practical actions advocated for and undertaken by environmentalists cannot adapt to a dynamic situation--and a situation that is so entangled with economics and society cannot help but be dynamic. Imagine that the metaphysical, practical and social aspects of environmentalism form the sides of a triangle. If the metaphysical and social sides of environmentalism remain fixed, the practical side cannot change. 

This leads to the intransigence of people that consider themselves environmentalists and leads them to refuse to reassess the actions they support.  If an environmentalist embraces industrial agriculture because she realizes that organics cannot scale without more pollution and deforestation, what will happen to her social identity? If a Green advocates for nuclear energy, realizing that it is the highest-density low-carbon energy source, do they sin against Nature? Certainly, a Light Water Reactor can't be--natural? 

This intransigence is bad for the very thing that environmentalists claim to hold most dear: the planet. We won't get rid of coal without embracing natural gas from fracking. We won't prevent harmful climate change without nuclear power. We can't feed 9 billion people on organic carrots, no matter how many celebrities tweet about it. 

Finally, I find any religion that considers humanity to be an obstacle to be overcome to be suspect. Many environmentalists would guffaw at my suggestion that orthodox environmentalism is misanthropic, but what else can one think when environmentalists claim the right to raise the price of energy, thus restricting its access. One must be willfully blind that this "small price" will mean real human suffering. The 20th century was full of visionary leaders with little patience for the reality of the human condition; I'm loathe to repeat that mistake. 

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What is the alternative?

My solution is so simple as to appear dumb. I suggest breaking the triangle. Let metaphysics be metaphysics. Nature is neither good nor bad, it merely is. And maybe derive your social identity from something else, like spinning or actual charity work. This will allow us to loosen our constraints. Just as it is harder to juggle while walking a tightrope, it is harder to solve a technical problem (such as carbon emissions) while remaining a devout environmentalist. 

Will this mean a certain ennui among environmentalists? Almost certainly. The suggestion that their God is not only dead but probably never existed will hurt.  Probably more painful will be the loss of social identity. One can only imagine the look on my fellow yoga practitioners faces when I tell them that that I think the Earth needs more electricity, not less and that solar panels are a bad use of land and resources. I will certainly be thrown out of my charity to end GMO use in the inner city. But isn't a little liberal angst worth a healthy planet and a healthy economy?

Laudato Si and Industrial Agriculture

I am a Catholic and an ecomodernist. The former means that I like (in no particular order): the Pope, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, kids, the Holy Trinity, wine and Latin. The latter means that I believe that, in order to accommodate the continued flourishing of humans on our planet, we need to accelerate the many technological developments in energy, agriculture, urbanization and transportation that are already taking place. I believe that God and history have placed the keys to the spaceship in our hands. Refusing to drive is not an option.

Anyone who has read (or more likely, heard about on BuzzFeed) the Pope’s newest encyclical letter, Laudato Si’, will likely see a contradiction in these, my two most core beliefs. The purpose of this series of essays, written during Lent of 2016, is to examine various aspects of the tension between these two positions. The Holy Father mentions several times in his letter that the Church encourages debate on the best way to approach these problems, since She is not an expert on technology or economics. Consider these essays to be my contribution to this debate.

The first subject of examination is one close to my heart: agricultural intensification. The intensification of agriculture is, in many ways, the continuation of the Green Revolution, which saw the introduction of industrial fertilizers and mechanization into agriculture. Make no mistake, this Revolution helped save humanity from perennial catastrophist predictions of famine and is an excellent example of the application of human creativity to our most wicked problems. The agricultural intensification now occurring is the continuation of this Revolution by other means, first by genetic modification to make more robust crops and second, by using information technology to optimize agricultural processes.

The net result of agricultural intensification is that we can now grow more food, more consistently, on less land, using less water, wasting less fertilizer and emitting fewer greenhouse gases. Furthermore, no credible scientific evidence has appeared to support the claim that produce farmed in an intensified manner is less healthy than produce from traditional farms. 

All of these appear to be unmediated goods. Yet, Pope Francis specifically points out the dangers of agricultural intensification in his encyclical, taking aim in particular at GMOs. How can we resolve this apparent tension? 

The Holy Father’s first concern regarding intensive agriculture is the possibility of harm to the environment in the form of monoculture. As we know, the presence of a monoculture raises the risks to food security and the environment, since a single pathogen can negatively affect a larger portion of the food supply. Which is to say; if everyone grows the same kind of banana, a single banana flu (a term I just made up) can endanger the lives and livelihood of a great number of people.

That agriculture intensification can tend toward monoculture is, of course, a fact. We should not forget, though, that reduction of biodiversity is the whole point of agriculture. Make no mistake, there is nothing natural about picking one variety of plant, breeding it, irrigating it, protecting it against the elements and harvesting it for human consumption. If we did not intervene, nature would not magically yield unlimited kale. This is, after all, the point of the expulsion from Paradise. 

The risk of monoculture is very real, but it is present in all agricultural societies. This is something best accomplished through governance, both political and corporate, but the right application of technology can also help. The use of information technology, coupled with precision seeders and harvesters, for example, can allow for mutually beneficial crops to be grown together; bringing to scale farming insights that were employed as early as the Mayans.
Pope Francis also expresses concern that traditional agriculture employs many people, especially in the developing world and that eliminating these traditional methods in favor of a more industrial method would put many people out of work and threaten their traditions.
As Francis points out, the Catholic Church places a great importance on the social and spiritual function of work. For us, work is not merely an exchange of labor for money, but rather a way to deepen our understanding of Creation, encourage comradery, self-esteem and creativity. Work is fundamental to human dignity. 

Does this mean that we must argue for employment at all costs? This would lead us to the uncomfortable place of arguing against all efficiency that would threaten employment. This is transparently untenable.

A nuance that needs to be taken into account is the distinction between the Catholic view of work and the political-economical view of work. From the raw political economic point of view, we are led to believe that, if there were no economic need, there would be no work. But from the Catholic view, we can claim that eliminating need will in fact increase people’s freedom to engage in work that is primarily a means of self-improvement (spiritual or otherwise) and secondarily a response to a need. It is in this context that ora et lavora, or the monastic mixture of contemplation and work is meant to be understood. When you drink a Trappist beer, you are financing  a monk’s contemplation. 
I would thus posit that the moral thing here is to intensify agriculture and use the monetary and labor benefits to further efforts on retraining and education, so that farmers don’t jump from the frying pan of subsistence farming to the fire of destitution and despair. Freeing people from subsistence farming will allow them to contribute toward the further improvement of their own communities.

To put it anecdotally: My uncle has a small vineyard in Eastern San Diego county. While my family has ties to agriculture, my uncle has not always been a farmer; he worked for most of his life as a high-school Spanish teacher. The fact that my uncle does not need to farm for his own subsistence (since our modern food system provides for his immediate needs) allows him to farm his land as he sees fit and without undue anxiety. Farming is for him a chance to be with nature, to contemplate and to constantly learn. Would the spiritual benefits of farming be somehow realer if he was farming for his survival? I doubt it.

To be clear: given demographic trends, a failure to further intensify the world’s agricultural production will lead to hunger and ecological collapse. People will clear more forests to produce less food using more water and more fertilizer, all while emitting more greenhouse gases. Intensifying agriculture brings its own dangers, certainly, but they can be abated through governance and technology. While it is certainly facile to believe that “things will work themselves out” absent evidence, blindly asserting that all new technologies are evil risks falling into the trap of denying the poorest among us great improvements in living standards simply because we want to avoid being put to the moral question. This is certainly not what Il Papa would have of us.

The Third Revolution: Agriculture

In the last few decades, humanity has seen a dramatic increase in agricultural yields. This development is almost singlehandedly to thank for the fact that the human population looks to crest 7 billion and yet we have mostly managed to avoid a Mad Max-esque dystopia. But what is behind these dramatic yield increase? And can they be sustained?

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The first “Green Revolution” came about as a result of the pioneering work of Dr. Fritz Haber, who discovered a process to extract nitrogen out of free air. This was quite amazing, since nitrogen is absolutely essential for healthy plant growth, yet is relatively rare in soil. Nitrogenating soil requires crop rotation, since only a few kind of plants can fix their own nitrogen. This means that many fields must lie fallow and, while that might sound cute and old-timey, it’s actually not. Industrial nitrogen production means that we can apply nitrogen directly to the plant and thus drastically improve yields and not lose time in crop rotation. The downside of this, of course, is that the Haber process is energy-intensive and excessive nitrogen application deposits an unhealthy amount of nitrogen into the environment.

The second “Green Revolution” came about as a result of breeding, a tradition which continues with the genetic work being done at Monsanto and Pioneer-Dupont. Their work in creating hybrid seeds allows for the development of drastically higher yield plants that are also more robust to environmental variables like droughts, pests and humidity. Creating plants that will yield high and yield consistently is the holy grail of agriculture and has been, for the most part, realized. The downside here is that these hybrids can be too successful, increasing a tendency towards monoculture. Monoculture is not only an issue of squishy environmentalism, it also makes the food system more brittle, since a single disease can wipe out a huge portion of the planted crops.

So, the two successive green revolutions that have created the extraordinary abundance that we live with now were chemical and genetic, respectively. They both have downsides which need to be alleviated, as well.

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Future yield increases will be brought about by the extension of the ongoing data revolution to agriculture. We call this third agricultural revolution “Precision Agriculture.” 

Precision agriculture can best be thought of as the use of ubiquitous sensing, cloud computing and mobile connectivity to generalize best practices in cultivation. This stems from the observation that there exists a huge range of yields for even the same crop hybrid. The methods of cultivation¬—watering patterns, nitrogen application, harvest time—vary substantially between farmers in the same environmental circumstances and can have a huge effect on the yield.

While this insight has existed for some time, there were barriers to its ability to affect yields. The first is that there didn’t exist an easy way to quantify the agricultural process, analyze it and disseminate the results to farmers. These are all tasks that today’s IT infrastructure can address. The second barrier was the lack of equipment with sufficient precision to act on this information. For example, if an algorithm said that I should nitrogenate an elliptical area of my field differently than the rest, there didn’t exist equipment to do so on the scale necessary for contemporary agriculture. This is another area of active development and is sure to increase in the future, as autonomous farm equipment becomes the norm. 

If the best practices in these areas can be generalized, and supplemented by new insights that were previously impossible such as high-precision soil moisture, then yields in general can be increased without further changes to the chemistry or the genetics of the crops. This final revolution in agriculture could go a long way towards realizing greater yields while preserving crop diversity. It also offers the possibility of growing more food with less water and nitrogen, ultimately decreasing the overall ecological footprint of agriculture. All while feeding an ever-growing human family.

Austerity Ecology: A Review

Leigh Phillips’ new book Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts (Zer0 books) is a defense from the Left of growth, industry, progress and stuff. It is also a refreshing change from much of the hair-shirted misanthropy of what now passes for the environmental movement. Many of the articles of faith of the contemporary leftish environmental movement come in for a drubbing, as Phillips exhorts his comrades to remember their promethean origins.

Phillips’ point of departure is that the green Left’s tactics appear to be at odds with their goal of the upliftment of all people. A common object of derision are theories of so-called “degrowth” that contend that, in order to solve our various ecological crises, we need to suspend economic growth and learn to live within our “planetary carrying capacity.” Phillips lines up convincing arguments that the whole notion of carrying capacity may be bunk. Similarly ridiculed is the idea that each of us growing organic turnips and cobbling together a DIY solar panel array on our hutch will magically solve the problem of climate change. But most satisfyingly, Phillips exposes how the luxuriating melancholy of climate defeatists is more at home on the Right, where notions of “natural order” and the dire consequences of deviating from it have been the engine of a lot of Conservative hysterics.

All in all, this book is amazing. It is well-argued and funny. A book that is catholic in its inspirations and willing to question the orthodoxies of its own compatriots is rare in any field, much more so in something as blustery as environmentalism.

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If I have one critique it is that I find the pep talk to the Left to be a little askew. Phillips contends that we have a big problem and we need big solutions; the kind that planned economy (at some scale) can provide. The Left has traditionally been more amenable to planning, ergo we need socialism.

I agree with Phillips, vehemently, that the challenge before us will be best met not by various minute alterations to consumerism (buy this, not that), but through a return to Grand Projects; electrifying the world, nuclear power, space-based-solar, urbanization and high-yield agriculture. What I dispute is how best to get there.

The difference between societies that can accomplish great things on the scale that we need and those doomed to thrash around like a fish on the shore is not systemic, it is rather moral and aesthetic. Part of the reason that we were able to put a man on the moon was because we still had an aesthetic idea of glory (how old fashioned!); this made the sacrificing of personal gain palatable. This didn’t result directly from the political system, but rather the political system adapted to the morality and the aesthetic of the people. We can look around the world and see the gulf that exists between societies who still dream of a great future and those who find the future an inconvenience.

I sympathize with Leigh’s goal: we all want “The Answer.” We want an answer that will not only deliver us from evil, but also make evil impossible. That is often the appeal of political revolutions. But I increasingly think that this is not possible. The, quite scary, fact of the matter is that the world is constantly being remade. There is no system that we can install that will safeguard society for ever and ever. And this means that there is no difference between the Grand Projects that Phillips describes and the ongoing, thankless slog of a moral and aesthetic revolution. 

We Built this CITIE

CITIE, which confusingly stands for “City Initiatives for Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” is a (somewhat) recently released report that details how cities can become more amenable to, you guessed it, “Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.” Their newest report, available here, is a very useful and informative guide of best practices for cities looking to boost their profile as “tech hubs.” 

The CITIE framework is unique in that it focuses on the intersection of city governance and startups. The people at Nesta, Accenture and Future Cities Catapult identified three areas in which cities can be help to startups: Leadership, Infrastructure and Openness. Within these areas, they identify roles that the city can play. Thus, within “Openness,” a city can play the role of Regulator, Advocate and Customer, within “Infrastructure,” Host, Investor and Connector, within “Leadership,” Strategist, Digital Governor and Datavore.

The report proceeds to detail each of these roles and call out cities or organizations that are doing exceptional things in this area. I found this section especially interesting, since it brought to my attention initiatives from as far afield as Helsinki, Barcelona and Tel-Aviv. This represents, to me, the most exciting thing about urbanism right now: the free exchange of ideas between urban areas all over the world. I would highly recommend the report to anyone interested in civic entrepreneurship.

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If I have critiques of the CITIE framework, they are largely of the ideology that underpins it and not the execution of this report, which is superb. I take issue in particular with the creeping startupistic glorification of failure and the exaggeration of the value of “high-growth” companies (startups).

Throughout the report, the authors praise city policies which, like startups, “aren’t afraid to fail.” This glorification of failure is one of the more dire side effects of the media exposure of startups. What is lacking here is a firm explanation of the origin of this “fail fast” idea.

The insight that failure is tolerable came from the legitimate insight that, in the transition from installation-based software (remember the DVDs that came in a box) to web-based software (or SaaS), there was a much smaller marginal cost to fixing errors. If customers didn’t like a feature, it could be reworked, since software updates can be deployed almost continuously.

What this means is that the “fail fast” ideology comes a world where both marginal cost of errors and the marginal cost of fixing those errors is low. If twin.ly, my social network for twins, doesn’t work, who cares? And the cost to fix it is basically more Cheetos and beer for my programmers. “Fail fast” comes from a world of consumer, web-based software and should be extended to other domains with care.

The question is: What is the marginal cost of getting a city service wrong? What is the marginal cost of fixing it? Answer for both: A whole lot more than RateMyDog.com. Not only are you messing with potentially foundational systems, but they often involve physical assets (remember those?).

I would not at all dispute that governments should be more agile (as in the traditional adjective, before “agile" was turned into a pseudo-religion). But I would caution, very much, the blind adoption of Silicon Valley articles of faith like “fail fast.”

I also dispute the valorization of the “high-growth” business above all.

First of all, let’s examine the term “high-growth.” It’s delightfully puffy. What, exactly, is growing so highly? Is it revenue? With the way startups operate now, probably not. Is is staffing? Also: probably not. AirBnB for all its media froth only employs a few hundred people. Usually what is growing is “users,” and users of free services are worth exactly zilch.

My point is that I am yet to be convinced that the single-minded support for startups is in the long-term good of a given city. They employ very few people, drive property values up and are funded almost entirely at the whim of the global elite without a drop of revenue in site, which makes them fragile to those same whims. I’m not sure that driving the less-educated out of a city to fill it with programmers who make something that no one pays for is a great civic good.

To be fair, I work in technology and very much benefit from these global trade winds. And I would love if Los Angeles implemented a lot of suggestions in the CITIE report. But I do think that we do need to balance our startup mania with support for SMEs, apprenticeships in high-tech manufacturing and education for a variety of lifestyles. I like the internet as much as everyone else, but what makes cities vibrant is their openness to all types of people: high-growth, low-growth and everything in between. 

What is Ecomodernism?

How to discuss the environment in the media: Step one, call up two caricatures from central casting, one from the “market-good-regulation-bad-freedom-murica” department and one from the First Church of Impending Doom. Step two, let them yell past each other for a couple of minutes. This, we’re told, is “the conversation."

This is frustrating, since our relationship to the natural environment is one of the defining challenges of our time and it seems to be getting little to no serious discussion in the public sphere. One side seems bent on denying that there’s a problem (a time-tested means of problem solving) and the other seems bent on making sure that we’re all very, very sorry about what we’ve done. Both seem more keen on affirming their dogmas than offering a constructive way forward.

Enter Ecomodernism, a seeming “third way” to not only frame the discussion of the environment, but also to guide our thinking about the world that we’d like to build together. 

In a nutshell, Ecomodernism is a movement whose goal is to create a “good Anthropocene,” by accelerating the process of decoupling the economy and the environment. In their words: “Humans should seek to liberate the environment from the economy.” The way in which they propose to do this involves “intensifying” human activities such as agriculture, energy extraction, urbanization and forestry so that it uses less resources while delivering more outputs. Doing so will lessen the human footprint on the earth, allowing more nature to remain unused. 

Of course, intensifying these activities leads Ecomodernists to embrace technologies perceived as anathema to the “Old Green” agenda. Ecomodernists see nothing inherently wrong with industrial agriculture, GMOs, desalinization, nuclear energy or carbon capture. In fact, some of these things may be necessary to meet the legitimate demands of developing countries for electricity, a secure food supply and material comforts. 

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The Ecomodernist manifesto advances the following propositions.

• There has never been a better time to be alive; our lives are freer, longer, healthier and more comfortable than ever before in history. But the technologies that make human life awesome in this day and age come with dangerous side effects that need to be addressed. Addressing them means more technology and less finger wagging.
• In order to achieve economic growth (which is necessary to meet the demands of a still-growing population), we have to separate economic growth from environmental impact. This is known as decoupling. First we have to relatively decouple, as in emit fewer tons of CO2 per percentage of GDP growth. Then, we have to absolutely lower the consumption of primary environmental inputs. This process is already well on its way for other environmental inputs, such as water and wood for example.
• We need to move beyond the myth that early human societies lived more lightly on the land than we do. Previous societies lived “lightly” because they had drastically fewer people. Yet, even in absolute terms, “A population of no more than one or two million North Americans hunted most of the continent’s large mammals into extinction in the late Pleistocene, while burning and clearing forests across the continent in the process.” Per capita, even our wasteful, consumerist society is lighter than less technological societies. 
• Access to energy is key to a better life. We take it as given that we should extend access to energy to all of those who currently do not have it. Theres is debate on how to do it, but energy has to be “cheap, clean, dense and abundant.” A combination of incremental improvements to existing technologies and funding for novel breakthroughs should be pursued.
• In most cases, there is no single baseline prior to human modification to which nature might be returned. This is why all “conservation” efforts are essentially anthropogenic. There must still be a conservation politics and a wilderness movement to demand more wild nature for aesthetic and spiritual reasons, but we should not try to defend it in terms of utility.
• Ecomodernism does not conflate modernization with capitalism. The “modernism” in Ecomodernism is a "long-term evolution of social, economic, political and technological arrangements in human societies toward vastly improved material well-being, public health, resource productivity, economic integration, shared infrastructure and personal freedom.” We believe that a more abundant society can afford to subsidize important but non-economic facets of human society like art, culture, health and spirituality. 

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Ecomodernism appeals to me for two reasons. The first is that it is realistic and pragmatic. It does not deny basic facts of human existence: that we are a technological species and that we will continue to strive to make our (material) lot in life better. The second reason is that is a counter-narrative to Old Green mentalities which mixed too many non-productive elements together. Old Green was too focused on emotions of guilt and portents of doom. Old Green environmentalism also treats environmentalism as a trojan horse to sneak in all sorts of other critiques to which it is not naturally related, such as "Capitalism," "Western Values" and god knows what else.

Is it a panacea for all of the world’s problems? No. But, frankly, I’m sick of silver-bullets. They often as not blow up in your face.

Star Friendship

Star friendship.— We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see one another again,—perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us! That we have to become estranged is the law above us: by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other! And thus the memory of our former friendship should become more sacred! There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path,—let us rise up to this thought! But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility.— Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.