New vs. Business-as-Usual Future
What, in a broad sense, does the future look like? We don’t know, and while many have historically made predictions, the track record for such predictions is less than impressive. I have noted that there appear to be two main types of view about the future—the “new future” and the “business-as-usual future.” In order to simplify this discussion, let’s restrict it only to the coming century—the period between 2013 and 2113.
The “new future” is, generally speaking, the idea that the coming century is going to be very different from the present; the “business-as-usual future” is, generally speaking, the idea that the coming century is going to be very similar to the present.
Here are some characteristics of the new future:
Some large-scale event occurs that alters human experience forever—an intelligence explosion leading to a technological singularity, existential risks leading to human suppression or extinction, global climate change on a massive scale, etc.
Society changes a lot, and in fundamental ways that are difficult to understand. Daily life is vastly altered.
If future history even exists after the dramatic change, it views the coming century as being a critical moment where everything became vastly different, on par with or exceeding the significance of the development of agriculture.
Here are some characteristics of the business-as-usual future:
The intelligence explosion doesn’t happen. AI continues to advance in much the same way that it has for the last several decades. More human-capable tasks become automated, but in slow and predictable ways. Intelligence amplification doesn’t happen or doesn’t yield generally useful results.
The world doesn’t end. Global warming ends up being just another doomsday scare. Perhaps a lot of people die in the Third World, but the rest of the world adapts and keeps going much like it has for the last ever. Yellowstone doesn’t explode. No asteroids hit the earth. There isn’t a nuclear war.
Society doesn’t change very much except in superficial ways. Daily life is more or less the same.
Wars might happen. Nations might collapse. But wars have been happening and nations have been collapsing for thousands of years. By and large, the coming century is viewed by future history as not particularly unlike those that came before.
Reference class forecasting seems to indicate that the business-as-usual future is quite likely. But as we know, this is far from a textbook case of reference class forecasting, and applying such techniques may not be helpful. What, then, is a good method of establishing what you think the future will look like?
Why did you mention the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, but not the Industrial Revolution that started a few centuries ago? The shfit from universal Malthusian poverty to high wealth/standard of living and the sustained fast growth rates that have been true for pretty much every decade since do seem to compose a new future relative to preindustrial life.
Not to mention the rise of democracy, huge increases in life expectancy, peace in the developed world and global peace by historical standards (in per capita rates of violent death, # of wars in Europe and globally, etc), nuclear weapons, electricity, computers, powered flight, incredible population growth, etc.
In a world with sustained growth, and one where growth has gotten faster over time, one has to choose to construct a “Business as Usual” future. For object-level conditions to remain the same, the pace of progress has to collapse, and the sequence of growth revolutions must have finished.
Just projecting economic growth forward would mean a world with over 30 times current total wealth by 2100. Robin Hanson’s approach is to extrapolate the past pattern of shifts to faster rates of growth and technological change and further predict a faster growth rate..
I think we have a very different concept of “object-level conditions—” I consider them more or less the same since the Roman Empire. Certainly by a great many metrics we can say that life on Earth has improved, but these metrics strike me as fundamentally lacking in the context of hedonic treadmill theory.
All in all, I think that the human experience has not fundamentally changed in thousands of years and is unlikely to fundamentally change in the near future.
It seems pretty unusual to say that the life of a Roman era subsistence farmer is only superficially different from modern life:
But if so, then what features make the agricultural revolution a ‘new future’ or big change but not the industrial revolution? Relative to the Roman Empire today:
World population is 20 times larger
Per capita GDP is around 20 times larger (around 100 times in rich countries), so world wealth is around 400 times bigger; the hours of work needed to buy the bread to survive has declined by a similar margin
Life expectancy is about 3 times as great
Humans today are dramatically taller than in Roman times, and have far lower rates of brain-impairing nutrient deficiencies
Education and literacy levels are tremendously higher
We consume an array of incredibly rewarding and tempting superstimulus entertainments, foods, and so forth (their attraction is shown in the behavior of those from isolated cultures exposed to them, among other things)
We can travel around the Mediterranean hundreds to thousands of times as rapidly and at the cost of a comparatively miniscule portion of our incomes
Communication is effectively instantaneous worldwide
Our wealth is reflected in lower levels of cortisol, an objective measure of stress
In most of the world we don’t need to fear death by plague or starvation as in Roman times
People in Roman times were overwhelmingly farmers working long hours raising crops for subsistence; we work mostly in occupations that were nonexistent or much less common, work far less, have the option of working less than we do without threat to survival, and otherwise spend our time quite differently
Our mix of leisure activities is far different in addition to our work
We are taller than the Romans, due to better nutrition, have our teeth, effective cosmetics, are clean, etc
Arithmetic computations are more than a trillion times cheaper than in abacus days
We have many awe-inspiring near-magical capabilities that would amaze the Romans (all the world’s libraries in tiny containers, travel to the Moon and the bottom of the ocean, GPS, video recording, instant language translation machines, bombs that destroy cities, self-driving fast horseless carriages, automata performing many household tasks...)
Why was agriculture a bigger deal? Farming did not increase average wealth or provide amazing capabilities in everyday life (it was often bad for height, life expectancy and other per capita physiological measures). It rooted people more tightly to the land (but transport changes have been enormous, as discussed above). It increased population and population density dramatically, as has happened since Rome. It changed typical government structures (as has happened recently) and activities. It increased construction (but modern cities and structures are better, bigger, more numerous).
I don’t see the distinguishing feature.
Historians already view the last two hundred years as drastically unlike the previous thousands of years.
Why would intelligence amplification or robust AI qualify as fundamental changes if the changes since Rome don’t? We have much larger, better fed, better educated populations for more geniuses to appear among and incredible tools to enhance their productivity and communication. We have also been changing genetically in response to the changed selective environment of agricultural civilization. Smarter humans would still have heads, use language, eat, have sex, and so on, so why would that be a fundamental change? They might have different jobs and leisure activities, but we differ from the Romans in that way. If increased wealth, life expectancy and technology didn’t count in the past then why would further gains from inventions of more intelligent people count?
By the same token, what changes from AI would count as fundamental?
Would super-anti-depressant drugs or gene therapies that made people have very positive affect for extended periods cheaply, and without serious side effects or effective legal restrictions, count as fundamental where all the post-Rome changes don’t?
I consider agriculture to be more of a convenient point to put forth as the start of “society as we know it” rather than a particularly meaningful one.
I’m told that historians always view the last while as particularly meaningful and important, and the present is no different. Perhaps this is not the case?
Certainly.
The massive objective changes on the metrics of economics, technology, peace, etc. You just can’t generate groups of metrics at the same level of generality with plausibility to naive audiences and make the 13th century A.D. or the 8th century B.C. the most important and dramatically changing in history. And the ancient historians didn’t claim that their century was the most important in that way (Golden Ages, etc).
OK. This doesn’t seem to cut nature at the joints. Why on Earth would the question of whether we’ve invented a really good happy-drug take such primacy over energy, population, travel, communication, computation, cumulative literature, mathematics, material strengths, height, literacy, life expectancy, etc? Collectively those just seem to pack a lot more relevant info, particularly for the purpose of predicting:
No nuclear war (although if this is by the end of do-or-die wars between great powers that is itself a substantial change)
The path of R&D in AI
That there will not be sustained use of existing genomics and behavioral genetics knowledge for enhancement, and that enabling technologies will shortly begin to stagnate after strong progress
None of the low probability mega-scale natural catastrophes will happen this century (which we already knew with high probability, but not for this reason)
When it comes to the question of whether or not human experience has meaningfully changed in thousands of years? Why on Earth wouldn’t it?
This honestly seems to me like one of those situations where we’re sitting here staring at each other and just not understanding one another’s perspective. I’m not sure whether this is a matter of inferential distance, reference class tennis, or what, but I feel like something is definitely missing from this discussion.
I’m saying that the concept you’re using for ‘meaningful change’ is a light shade of grue, looking unusual and gerrymandered to exclude huge past changes while including things like good mood-elevating drugs that are quite natural extrapolations of our expanding biological knowledge.
When we do model combination with the many alternative ways we can slice up the world for outside viewish extrapolation, with penalties for ad hoc complexity, I think the specific view that ignores all past gains in wealth, life expectancy, energy use, population, and technology but responds hugely to mood-elevating drugs carries relatively little weight in prediction for the topics you mentioned.
So I disagree with this:
I understand what you are saying, but I don’t understand why you consider those things interesting or relevant. To me, a concept of the human experience that includes computation or material strengths seems unusual and gerrymandered.
At this point it really does seem like we’re just playing reference class tennis, though.
Let’s leave it at that then.
No. Roman historians didn’t had a similar notion of historical progress that we have since Hegel.
How many of your immediate family members had died by the time you were 18? (Parents, siblings, children.)
How many people do you know personally who have starved to death? What is your estimated chance that you will starve to death in the next ten years?
How many hours a day do you spend outside?
How many hours a day do you spend on manual labor?
How many people have you met over the course of your life?
Now, I agree that human nature appears to only have shifted a small amount in the last thousands of years, and so most things look the same on the inside; worrying about how to pay for rent is probably not all that different psychologically from worrying about whether you’ll survive the winter. I also agree that relatively few parts of human experience look totally new- there were obese urban paper-pushers in the Roman Empire, for example. But it seems that if you invert the number of urban desk-jobbers and farmers, you get a fundamentally different society and ‘human experience’, and that seems to be a somewhat fair comparison of now and Rome.
I wonder whether some of the inferential distance here is around what is understood by ‘the human experience’.
Materially, the human experience has changed quite profoundly, along the lines Vaniver points out (dramatic improvements in life expectancy, food supply, mechanisation, transport and travel, and so on).
Subjectively, though, the human experience has not changed much at all: the experience of love, loss, fear, ambition, in/security, friendship, community, excitement and so on seems to have been pretty much the same for humans living now as it was for humans living as far back as we have written records, and almost certainly well before that. Certainly when I read historical accounts I’m often struck with how similar the people seem to me and people I know, even when they are living in very different circumstances. This, I’m guessing, is what katydee is getting at.
So the human subjective experience of, say, having an immediate family member die has not changed fundamentally, but the rate at which humans have that experience that has changed fundamentally.
(Reflecting on this makes me feel very, very glad indeed to live now rather than at any time in the past. For instance, Darwin seems to have been as besotted by his kids as I am by mine, and I expect I’d be just as upset as he was were one of my children to die of scarlet fever, but it’s extremely unlikely to happen to me—or indeed anyone I know—because it’s almost always very easy to treat now. This has knock-on effects too: I get nervous and worried whenever my kids get ill, but nothing like as nervous and worried as he did, because I know that the chances that they’ll die are so much lower.)
I suspect this latter change in the human experience is what is meant by most of the people saying that it has changed.
Kaj_Sotala has already discussed most of these, but I wanted to focus on friendship. Ancient friendships seem to have had as a major component mutual defense against violence. As violence decreases, that aspect of friendship decreases- I’ve never had a friend come to my aid in combat, because I’ve never been attacked, and never come to someone else’s aid, because I’ve never had the opportunity.
As well, modern friendships seem to be categorically different from most ancient friendships. Instant messaging with someone who is a close match to your personality and interests who lives across the globe feels rather different than physically interacting with the person who lives next door to you, who isn’t particularly close to your personality or interests. Modern childhood friendships are much more likely to be age-segregated than they were in the past, and so on.
My adrenaline system seems to work as well and in the same way as someone from a thousand years ago- but I’ve had far less cause to activate mine, and so while I’m mostly okay with calling the hardware ‘pretty much the same’ I have a hard time calling the experience ‘pretty much the same.’
In e.g. the Middle Ages, the average person might have spent their whole lives on the countryside in a small community where everyone knew everyone, people rarely heard any news from the outside world, there were relatively strict sexual morals and never very much to do on one’s limited spare time, and most people inherited the profession of their parents and basically knew their place in the world from birth.
Compare this to someone living in a large modern liberal city, whose daily commute might already involve traveling a longer distance than the middle age peasant would travel in their whole life and who also has the option of traveling around the world, who may be in daily contact with more people than the peasant knew in their whole life, who has never known for certain what he would do in her life and has already changed careers three times, who may sleep with different people every night, etc. etc.
I would claim that these people would have vastly different experiences, even in terms of love, loss, fear, friendship, community, and so on. Yes, there are some elements which are the same, but the overall experience is still different enough that the peasant would have been literally incapable of imagining the modern urbanite’s life.
I think the reverse is also true- modern Western societies are so individualistic that I imagine most moderns can’t imagine what it was like to be in some of the communities or hierarchies of the past.
Agreed.
What would you count as “fundamental” change?
Any two things will look the same if you look at them from far enough away.
Any two things will look different if you look at them from close enough in.
Where are you standing, from where all of recorded history seems an undifferentiated blob?
Would you be happy to live at any era of history between then and now? From your viewpoint, would you have more or less the same life at all these times?
If you are an immortal who has actually lived through them all, I can imagine it might eventually all seem like the same old same old. But that would be a fact about yourself, not the times. Some immortals wear their years more lightly.
Technological singularity, human extinction, etc.
Sure. I wouldn’t voluntarily transfer—I’m accustomed to modern norms—but I don’t think life now is much different from life anytime.
The same life? Certainly not. My profession would very likely be different, as would my beliefs. But a generally equivalent life? Certainly.
Could you expand on that ‘etc.’?
Those two items seem to me to completely fill their classes of comparables, so there is no ‘cetera’.
Sure—a full-scale nuclear war that collapsed civilization and technology but didn’t actually kill every living human would count.
In terms of less grandiose things, if the actual lived experience of being a human changed dramatically with the the invention of important and novel emotions or social structures, I would consider that a fundamental change. Some argue that this actually happened during the medieval period and that romantic love didn’t exist before then, but I’m highly skeptical of this claim for multiple reasons.
Why The West Rules is an argument by an archaeologist that the first projection, of huge change that makes the future almost unrecognizable, is ‘business-as-usual’ on the scale of history, which is very different from ‘business-as-usual’ on the scale of individuals.
As far as I can tell, the primary thing the second model has going for it is that it’s easy for people to comprehend. This isn’t compelling support.
I think I’ve read the following method from other people on Less Wrong, but I can’t place a specific source or name. if anyone else can help me with attribution or a link to more details, I would appreciate it.
Generate a list of each possibility whose consequences seem worth tracking(I.E, they would affect whether or not you felt future changes would be superficial) and then also track what you think are the probabilities of each step whose consequences seem worth tracking.
Example: Let’s say you think there is a 20% chance that technological growth will continue exponentially into a singularity and a 80% chance it will proceed at a slower pace. You can then say “Well, If technology proceeds at a slower pace, then I think that there is an 80% chance that enough jobs will be automated to substantially reshape society, and a 20% chance that the portion of jobs automated will be superficial. And If technology does proceed into a singularity, I think that there will be a 20% chance of it being a Friendly Singularity, and an 80% chance of it being an Unfriendly singularity.
That means the future you would expect to see would be technology proceeds at a slower pace, but there are enough jobs will be automated to substantially reshape society (64%) Unfriendly Singularity or superficial automation are about equally likely (16% each) but less to be expected, and then a friendly Singularity is the least likely but not impossible. (4%)
So you establish a rough pass of a net like that with a number of different nodes (as opposed to just 3 and only 2 deep).
Then there would then be three ways you might be wrong, and you want to try to update accordingly:
You’re convinced an existing node won’t matter. (Example: You read a paper that persuades you that whether or not people will have middle class jobs won’t matter in the long run) so you remove that node.
You’re convinced a new node will matter, that you hadn’t accounted for. (Example: You read a paper that persuades you that whether or not people robots and algorithms will be allowed to autonomously make kill decisions will matter in the long run)
You find out about something that updates your probability of one of your existing nodes. (MIRI publishes a paper which causes you to update the likelihood of a friendly singularity to a different percentage.)
This helps you separate out impact and likelihood, and also keeps in mind that certainty things have prerequisites, all of which is important for forecasting.
Thank you to whoever explained this initially and I apologize I can’t remember the concept name. Hopefully I did not express anything incorrectly.
(Note: the specific numbers above are mostly arbitrary and I mainly selected them for easy multiplication.)
As long as we’re speculating, my two cents: I do think that reference class forecasting is a valid way to predict the magnitude of change if not the direction, but I don’t think that using reference class forecasting necessarily implies “business as usual”.
1) In my view, the intelligence explosion already happened, with the invention of writing. It will continue to happen, faster and faster as exponential growth does. There’s no reason to posit that there will be a qualitative change in this trend. Any developments in AI, etc… can all be taken together as part of this explosive trend and not as a singular exceptional event.
2) Reference class forecasting says that the business-as-usual future is very unlikely. Hunter-gatherers would not consider our current lives to be “business as usual” at all...I can’t imagine they would have any idea why we do the things we do. Primitive agriculturalists with writing would find us slightly more familiar (our concepts of property, marriage, the notion of formal schooling, formal warfare, wages and labor, heirarchy, etc) but our more futuristic edges (the notion of science, the sheer scope of technology) are probably still pretty hard for them to understand. I think there are lots of qualitative divides between early-return hunter-gatherer, late-return hunter gatherer agricultural, industrial, and information age societies which make it hard for them to understand each other.
I’d say that reference class forecasting might also predict that the more privileged, tech savvy among us shouldn’t expect to be completely shocked within our natural life-spans. Historically, this is probably only true for a privileged subset of people. I imagine a lot of the more isolated hunter-gatherers and subsistence agriculturalist groups were, are, and continue to be rather abruptly shocked as they come into contact with modernity.
I agree strongly with 1), with the addition that another one happened in the modern era when engineering prowess, military strength, and highly versatile, effectively truth-seeking science and philosophy finally coincided in Europe and Asia.
I suspect that if neither the singularity nor a disaster occurs, there is likely to be a different huge shift, probably focused around a resurgence in the power-and-control super-science that defined Victorian through Space Age technological advancement, or alternatively in some form of social sphere.
I’d also add that barring either a singularity, or the adoptation of a massive amount of AI and automation in society, the rate which completely shocks the most privileged and tech-savvy members of society in one lifetime is probably the limiting factor in technological development rate. (My view of Kurzweil is that he ignores this, which leads to absurdities such as sub-AI tech developing faster than humans can integrate information and design new stuff)
Montaigne (from the Renaissance era) suggests that hunter-gatherers or early agriculturalists were indeed pretty shocked by even French Renaissance era society: they found the acceptance of social hierarchy unthinkable and also (this seems more like a specific cultural thing) were confused by fear of death.
How so?
Certainly 20th century looked nothing like the 19th century, and the 21st century is already very much unlike the 20th century. Assuming this is due to the accelerated rate of change (an optimist may call this change “progress”), it would probably be fair to compare smaller intervals than a whole century. 2001-2010 was already very much unlike 1991-2000. Maybe one decade is a more reasonable time frame to use for comparison.
I think we’re considering things on different scales. I consider the modern period more or less the same as the Roman Empire.
Just think of the amount of energy available to an average person in the Roman Empire, compared to contemporary average person.
The modern period is nothing like anything else in the past.
Why?
I used to believe this, but I found myself astonished and dismayed by the extent to which the writings of the ancients dealt with the same concepts that we consider relevant today. In point of fact it doesn’t seem to be the case that the human experience has meaningfully changed very much, despite modern access to energy, medicine, etc.
Certainly it is the case that the human experience is longer now, and less likely to end abruptly thanks to illness and the like, but it does not seem qualitatively different.
All so called “qualitative differences” are subjective. You are the one who draw the line and declare it to be the threshold for a qualitative change. The line tells us more about you than about the world.
Given that most ancients were illiterate, the ancients whose writings you’ve read aren’t an unbiased sample of all ancients.
I don’t think anyone made any claims about unbiased samples...
If I were to say “I don’t think the human experience has changed much because when I read Benjamin Franklin, I feel like I’m reading myself,” I’m implicitly assuming that Franklin and I have representative experiences for our times. My experience might be more typical now than Franklin’s was then; similarly, the Roman urbanite who reads very similarly to the American urbanite can mask the significant change in urbanization.
Well, kinda, but once you explicitly state this, the problems start to appear. Historical age is only one of many possible dimensions of differences between people. You start asking “representative of what?” Is your “human experience” closer to Ben Franklin’s or to a contemporary sheep herder’s in Mali?
Or consider a 2x2 table of four people: you, now; a Roman urbanite, say, around 0 A.D.; a sheep herder in West Africa now; and a sheep herder in West Africa around 0 A.D. How do similarities of experience play out?
Most people aren’t writers, period, so you’re never comparing the ancients to an unbiased sample of any population either.
Again, what are your metrics for sameness?
By this standard, how is raven any different from a writing desk?
What metrics are you using for this assertion?
Some things change, some things don’t. Using computers changed my everyday life completely, and yet in other parts of the world many people continue to die from hunger. Is this a new present, or a business-as-usual present? Is daily life more or less the same if people spend most of their time working and gossiping, but now they work for big corporations and gossip via Facebook?
I would say basically the same, though it sounds like many might disagree.
And quite often, those are the same people; there are people who decided to forgo running water (as opposed to carrying it miles in urns every day) to get a smartphone. Quite a lot of them if I remember correctly. It’s not even linear on a local scale.
All flesh is grass, and the future is a lawnmower.
I think a good measure of human civilization’s size is world GDP. Carl Shulman has already linked to Hanson. If we look at Brad DeLong’s trend of GDP produced by humanity, the future must be “new” in that this can’t continue super-exponential growth another few centuries. It seems physically impossible for humans to double their economy say every month. What happens when this trend stops? I don’t know, but maybe
A third, even faster optimization process starts after the first two of biological evolution and human coordination
This fails to clearly happen, but beings that are indeed “subjectively different” in deserving a higher moral status still develop
Comparatively slow human expansion into space
Long-term stasis
End of intelligent life
A different question is whether you can take effective, tailored actions like MIRI attempts in response to one of these possibilities, without any causal model of how it would arise. (In other words, with global warming we can model the climate system at least somewhat.) I currently doubt it because it seems that with such limited knowledge, any actions are likely to be either totally ineffective, or effective against bad outcomes but also good outcomes—so we could renounce fast computers to defend against AI but that might starkly limit humanity’s potential. We may be playing blackjack but don’t yet know if the maximum hand is 21 or 2100.