2026-05-01
minor edit 2025-05-07
I am optimistic about technology and cynical about human nature
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- Possibly contains politically sensitive info
- I have intentionally not written a lot of rants this month. Want to restrict myself to less rants in general, thinking about your bad mood seems to make the mood worse in general, and I have hit diminishing returns on useful insights from said thinking. But I will excuse myself and make one rant this month too.
Main
- I had to walk out of VDNKh because it was so overwhelming disappointing. Just had so much grief.
- For political reasons, I can't afford to criticise any country in particular here. I think all my points below apply to both the US and to Russia and to UK and to any country that invests in technology.
- I am calm now so I am in less of a ranty mood.
- I think the original thing that triggered me was just, yet another realisation that:
- "That's it? This is the sum total of human progress, of a trillion years of blood, sweat and tears."
- It's like, imagine when the world ends and we the human race have to justify ourselves to some master being with root access to the universe, who creates parallel universes for fun. He will be like, "your species was given a trillion years from the time vault, what did you do with it?" And we will be like, "we built uranium centrifuges and gold-plated solar panels and coal-operated thermal engines and microscopes and telescopes and ...". And then he will be like, "that's it? That's all you achieved with a trillion years?" And he will laugh us out of the room.
- Most of the technology on display was literally invented in soviet / WW2 era. Just like most of the same technology in the US.
- It's like, only if you take a person and go kill their family and then say, "innovate otherwise you're next", that they will actually invest their money or attention in inventing new technology. This is why world war 2 and cold war fueled so much technological progress. Or even the wars fueling drone tech today. Otherwise "hilake so ja" is all that this species knows to do.
- Peter Thiel is right about progress happening in bits not atoms since WW2.
- Nick Bostrom is right about humans being the dumbest fucking species to be capable of building a technological civilisation.
- I actually now relate a little bit to the LW rationalists who want to colonise the universe and whatnot. I am still not fully onboard, but I can relate a bit.
- I actually feel a bit ashamed to be part of this species. I know that's a weird thing to claim, if I belonged to a different species I would not be me.
- Paul Graham is right about scientists and entrepreneurs doing their best work as lonely fucking people.
- There is a deep cynicism about human nature that has infected silicon valley, and quite frankly it has infected me too.
- Making (bad) attempts to influence politics of ASI risk has made me realise how truly stupid the average person is (and by stupid I am not talking about IQ, IQ is not actually the problem here).
- People only do long horizon tasks, if they would suffer if they didn't do them. Growth comes through suffering. This is also why every religion and political ideology out there shamelessly targets the most vulnerable people in society.
- When I think about targeting vulnerable people with anti-ASI propaganda, I atleast pause and think, wait is this really what I want to be telling them about? Is that a good idea, morally speaking? But most other ideologies out there are 100% shameless in targeting vulnerable people. I don't want to criticise any one ideology in particular here for reasons of my own safety.
- Side Note but lmao, is this why GPT-5 has short time horizon? Most human data is also about short time horizon tasks, very few people actually solve tasks with a decade or longer time horizon so the data is limited.
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