I thought today’s newsletter issue, “The Empire Always Falls”, was one of @joanwestenberg’s best, a powerful point made in a five minute read.
In the “AI inevitability thesis” every limitation gets explained away as a temporary obstacle on the path to AGI. Reasoning will improve, costs will fall etc and to be fair, they might. But the confidence with which these predictions are delivered should remind you of the confidence with which the British Empire’s administrators, circa 1900, reviewed the permanent nature of their civilizational project. They had the world’s largest navy and the world’s most extensive telegraph network, plus control of roughly a quarter of the earth’s land surface. Within fifty years, nearly all of it was gone. And that dissolution happened because the underlying conditions that made the empire possible changed in ways that no amount of naval power could address. [Emphasis added]
Fifty years. I’m always shocked by that. And it didn’t happen as a result of a cataclysm, just steady rot. Even the Brits took a long while to notice that they were no longer on top of the world, or even a peer of those who were.
(I made a historian friend laugh once when I mentioned something about mid-19th century American life and said it wasn’t all that long ago. Not about my attitude, she agreed with that, but that a non-historian felt that way. She taught college, and told me her students wouldn’t even say that about the early 2000s.)
What has bothered me about the AI inevitability proponents is that often they don’t even explain the limitations away, they simply dismiss them, if they acknowledge their existence at all. Will it continue to scale? First it was a giddy “YES!”, then a dismissive “Of course”, then a “Of course there will be plateaus and hiccups along the way”, and now in the face of growing evidence of stagnation the response is … well, there is no response, it’s like no one heard the question.
What actually happens, in empires // companies alike, is that progress hits unexpected walls and leaders make strategic blunders while some force that nobody took seriously finds an approach that makes the incumbent architecture look like Ptolemy’s epicycles: elaborate and technically sophisticated but pointed in entirely the wrong direction.
My only comfort is that this development is progressing so quickly that it shouldn’t be many years before hitting those walls and making those strategic blunders will approach 100% probability. Let’s hope the time is short enough that we haven’t squandered most of our resources to make it happen. Even then it won’t be disasterous, just very very regrettable.