What Camus Knew That Sam Bankman-Fried Didn't

Olen Shannon Maldonado, käsintehtyjä artesaanitua teitä myyvän jauji-lahjakaupan perustaja. Valit sinu Shopify-koska-alustoja testatessani totesin sen ehdottomasti yhdeksi helpokäyttöisimmistä alustoista. Minulla oli tärkeää pohtia kehittymistämme tulevaisuudessa. Kaikki myyntiin tarvittavat työkalut, kuten varaston suunnittelu ovat kätävästi dashboardissa. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu Shopify-piste komsi-vustolla. Kuten kuuluvat kokeiluusmistä, olen tärkeää kokeiluusmistä. Päiväisiin kokeiluusmistä, että pitää mulla on johonnistusmistä. Tämä on ollut juuri kokeiluusmistä, mutta johonnistusmistä on myös tärkeää. Tämä on kokeiluusmistä. Tämä on johonnistusmistä, johonnistusmistä, jotka ovat kokeiluusmistä. Kokeiluusmistä ongelmaisin kokeiluusmistä. Tämä on johonnistusmistä, jotka ovat kokeiluusmistä. Tämä on johonnistusmistä, että on johonnistusmistä, että on johonnistusmistä, että ongelmaisin kokeiluusmistä. Tämä on johonnistusmistä, että ongelmaisin kokeiluusmistä, että ongelmaisin kokeiluusmistä. Tämä on johonnistusmistä, johonnistusmistä, johonnistusmistä, että ongelmaisin kokeiluusmistä. Owasso Philadelphia Portland Prescott Richmond Sacramento Santa Cruz SIO Stores Toronto Wichita. So, if you're on team human in one of those places, I'm looking to find the others, go to mygroucho.club/teamhuman, use the code TeamHuman for half of the first month. And even if you're not looking for team human others, fill out the form and see who the curators find for you. Okay, this is a big one. Take it in pieces if you have to. But I think it'll only take maybe a bit longer than half an hour to get this out. So, Josh, let's do a real premiere for this one. So, we can do a live post-show salon with team human patrons. If you want to be one of those, go to patreon.com/teamhuman. So, the summer of blood is in full swing here in New York's East Village. It's a festival for people who are challenging the inevitability of a digital future on the terms of the tech oligarchs. And questioning many of the false promises as well as the necessary compromises along the way. It's inspiring. Next level. A leaderless movement or maybe leaderful. It's engaged without a full plan, trusting in the collective will as it unfolds. It's a different theory of change. And I've been thinking a lot about this lately. This idea that social change doesn't always need a big plan. Top down leadership or the mandate to reach scale. Sometimes, maybe all the time, the appropriateness of any given action can be sussed out in the moment. Negotiated in real time. A loud to emerge from the bottom up or the inside out. It can be intuited rather than rationalized or justified. I had the opportunity to have these sensibilities tested in a format premised on their very opposite. I was invited to do a debate with William McCaskill. He's the Oxford philosopher who wrote the book on effective altruism. And I couldn't justify the time and travel to do it. But I just thinking about it and conditioning myself for such a thing. It generated a lot of reflection. If you've skipped this particular discourse, effective altruism is a moral philosophy that says we should make decisions based on the rational analysis of their future impact. Rather than our ethics in the moment or some emotional sensibility. We can't see in the moment how saving one child from an oncoming bus could cause the bus to fly off a cliff or saving members of one community under quarantine could risk an epidemic escaping to the world. Its proponents argue that major philanthropic and policy decisions should be guided primarily by formal models and long term forecasts rather than by intuitive flawed judgment. The tech bros who've adopted effective altruism EA as their secular religion believe that if you just get the math right, this messy business of live human presence becomes obsolete. They want a moral framework that functions like a software update. Something you can code once, throw on a blockchain or embed it in an AI model and deploy it globally or even cosmically. And the pattern just repeats itself over the whole digital landscape. Effective altruism is really just utilitarianism reinvented by people who've never encountered philosophers like Bernard Williams who argued that we mustn't lose touch with the real concerns that animate our ordinary ethical experience. That we can't surrender those real felt concerns to the arid A historical second order debates about ethics in philosophy departments. These guys they don't know from Derek Parfitt who agonized over the implications of consequential reasoning and the way it sacrifices personal loyalties and emotional bonds for the cold logic of collectively beneficial outcomes. It's two centuries of philosophical literature explaining why naive expected value calculations they produce these monstrous outcomes when they're applied without any limiting principles they're ignoring at all. The EA movement walked itself straight into the Sam Bankman freed catastrophe because it adopted a moral framework without understanding those failure modes. Bankman freed he's the crypto wonder kid who became effective altruism's primary billionaire benefactor right he used the movements earn to give ethos to rationalize a multi billion dollar fraud called FTX. And in his hyper rationalized calculus treating customer's life savings as a casino bankroll was a statistically appropriate and acceptable risk because any wealthy generated would fund his grand long termist projects and geoengineering to save the species from extinction. The way it worked out the pyramid collapsed and real world lives were wrecked. That's what happens when you drop out of college to do a startup before you've even taken history economics or moral philosophy the billions they earn convinced them that they know something. So the rationalist community they rediscover Bayesian epistemology that's this degrees of confidence like oh you know the 20% chance of an AI wiping out humanity that's Bayesian epistemology and they treat it like it's a revelation unaware that the philosophy of science has been working through those kinds of questions since the 1920s. They treat their their blog post manifestos as foundational texts and these are people who've never read Thomas Cune or Lakatos or fire aband right they they construct an epistemology from first principles then they marvel at what they've built and proceed to use it as the intellectual building blocks for decisions that affect billions of people. They're trapped in what's called the Dunning Kruger effect it's a psychological phenomenon where people with a superficial understanding of a complex field mistake their minuscule experience for total mastery because they don't know enough to realize what they're missing their confidence is is inversely proportional to their depth. Effective altruism is done in Kruger at scale armed with venture capital super computers artificial intelligence total surveillance mind control technology and rocket ships what could go wrong. This intellectual hubris it peaks with long termism it's the philosophical engine of AI acceleration. The classical is not dumb or ill-willed but his thesis has made him the darling of Silicon Valley who are happy to fund a real professor from Oxford who helps them justify their escape plans. use effective altruoism. to support their belief that we must optimize our resource allocation today for the welfare of hypothetical future beings. Present-day costs are acceptable in service of that cosmic goal. The welfare of trillions of post-human life forms should take moral precedence over a couple a billion lower humans today. It's a framework that any competent ethicist can dismantle in an afternoon. It has no limiting principles. It can't distinguish between genuine moral urgency and the self-serving conclusion that whatever the billionaire tech executive was already doing is cosmically important. In practice, it's little more than a program for generating justifications for the concentration of power by people who have decided they are the ones best positioned to steward the future of the species, even if they're the only surviving representatives. This desire to outsource life's ethical challenges to accounting tables, it's not new, or even malevolent, some of the greatest social crusaders, some math, and engineering as ways of transcending our emotional prejudices and misperceptions. Behavioral economics prove we don't see things as they are and we make bad financial decisions because of our various fears and biases. So you take Karl Marx. He started out like a poet trying to help people remember and value the social fabric underlying our interactions. Only later on when he was looking for a way to rescue workers in society from industrial alienation, that's when he got more systematic. In capital, he used the example of Robinson Crusoe on his island, keeping charts, leisure and timetables of his activities as a model for how a rational society might distribute its labor. He thought if we just got the structural bookkeeping right, justice would follow. But a ledger is still a mechanical abstraction that treats human energy as an input. It may be mathematically fair, but at what social cost? It happened in religious history too. Think of the ancient Jewish traditions well-intentioned but ever more granular system of laws. There's just too many possible human interactions to write a law for everyone. And the more we depend on the labyrinth and network of rules, the more we distance ourselves from the impulse that supposedly is informing them. We argue our case instead of finding new levels of compassion and cooperation. The law proved incapable of engendering the very thing it was designed to protect. And we keep trying to build mechanical, external means of ensuring justice. And we keep failing because these systems, they're incapable of engendering genuine human compassion or good will, like a blockchain. They substitute for trust rather than inspiring it. And they invite the machinations of those who want to gain the system for their own benefit. That's why the great sage Haleil and later Jesus, they strove to break through this administrative layer, the executable code, to center something different that embodied real-time, radical love and presence. They realize that adding more lines to the legal code doesn't get to the core problem. If the heart isn't attuned in the moment, the rules just become a tool for bureaucracy, manipulation, or evasion. Jesus stepped in and said, "If you just feel it in here, the rest will follow." The law, however functional and well-intentioned, it's an abstraction. Cause and effect if this, then that, nothing in the moment. Computer code doesn't have the moment either. It only has steps, like they're not even continuous or a part of the same thing. This allows us to surrender anything or anyone on this step to that next step. Every next moment is like a revolution that leaves the last moment and any necessary victims behind. After all, you have to break a few eggs to make a cake, right? Wrong. There's a whole century of philosophy on this. It peaked in 1952 when Albert Camus broke Wijon-Paul Sartre and the whole French left actually over the same question I'm asking here. Can the people alive today be treated as acceptable casualties in the pursuit of a better future? Right, Sartre and the Marxists? They said yes. History has a direction. The revolution requires sacrifice. Camus, he said no. He said any system of thought that subordinates living people to a hypothetical future has already committed the foundational moral error. Camus understood the existential dilemma, how we're temporary flesh beings on a rock hurtling through cold and meaningless space, but he also knew we couldn't escape this terror by focusing on some theoretical future utopia. You can't utopia your way out of this. Marx and Sartre believed the revolution would require violence and sacrifice, but Camus, he despised bloody revolutions as waste of human life in an end justifies the means, travesty. Instead, he championed what he called the rebel. The rebel isn't a nihilist destroyer or an idealistic mathematician. The rebel is someone who says no to oppression in the present because they recognize the inherent dignity in themselves and in the person standing right next to them right now, rebellion defends the immediate messy reality of living people against the abstracted justifications for violence of an inhumane civilization. Once you accept the logic that future gain justifies present cruelty, there's no limiting principle. Any atrocity becomes permissible. Any amount of present suffering can be rationalized as necessary input to the glorious modeled output. A prerequisite for the Messiah, a necessary resource for AGI. Shouldn't one child be allowed to die of thirst today if the data center using her drinking water could save 10 children from thirst tomorrow or 10 million or 10 billion? That's the AGI acceleration argument made plain. The technology will eventually benefit or save humanity altogether, so present disruption must be tolerated, displaced workers, the death of democracy, the destruction of the environment, the concentration of power in a handful of private actors who've exempted themselves from the consequences of their own project. It's all regrettable, but necessary. Besides, if we don't do it, someone else will. Sam Altman, one deregulation of AGI, by arguing that China would beat us to the punch and take over the world. A startup, there's a startup called Mechanize, it was looking to enable the full automation of the economy, they said it really directly. The only real choice is whether to hasten this technological revolution ourselves or wait for others to initiate it in our absence. It's like the logic that says, "If it's inevitable, I'm not responsible." It's technological determinism as a kind of a moral absolution. The future lets me off the hook for the present. Not so fast. It's the same argument as the Marxists who redistributed peasants grain or sent dissidents to the Gulag. When Sartre and the French left defended the Soviet labor camps, they used this same sort of determinism. History is like a train heading to communism. It requires coal in the form of human sacrifices. If we try to stop the train, we're standing in the way of human evolution. Sound familiar? We're not murderers or apologists so much as the midwives of an inevitable tomorrow. What tech takeeth away, it can also give it back. Think about it. We've handed our social lives over to platforms designed to keep us clicking, not connecting, turned human relationships into follower counts and reaction metrics. Our new favorite sponsor, Groucho, is a corrective. Founded by artists who want to flip the script, instead of atomizing us like a social network, they connect people in real life. Human curators place you in a local club with people who complement your interests and your journey. Share evenings out with your club twice a month until real connections take hold. Then the people at Groucho place you into a new, hand-assembled club for the social fabric to grow. Groucho wasn't built by tech bros, but artists who wanted to recreate the serendipity of their own art residencies, where they found lifelong collaborators, friends, even life partners. So come on, team human. Let's find the others. Go to mygroucho.club/teamhuman for 50% off the first month. That's mygroucho.club/teamhuman. But Camu, he staked everything and lost his friends and everything on the claim that the person standing in front of you is not an input to a utility function. Their suffering is not redeemed by a future state of affairs they may never see. Their dignity is not negotiable against projected outcomes. The person who exists right now, the one who has a job they're about to lose, a family to support, a community that depends on a local economy, is the unit of account. There is no humanity in the abstract. Team human is actual humans, not an idea. That's not what Elon Musk means when he says, "I'm on Team Human." Hell, he's not even a Patreon subscriber. The entire AI acceleration project is premised on abandoning the present. It asks real people to bear costs for future benefits distributed to people or post people who do not yet exist, administered by a self-appointed class of demigods that has insulated itself from the consequences entirely. Right? Even if they're here on Earth, they're not living on the same planet. If we want to resist this top-down engineering, we have to dismantle the very categories that allow it to function. Right? The rationalists rely on lines of demarcation. Now versus then, subject versus object, us versus them. They convince us that we can separate the observer from the observed or that we can sacrifice the present now for a superior later and open if for an inevitable then. But this is an unnecessary and dangerous distinction. All we actually have is the now. The future is imaginary. The past is memory. Morality does not exist in a future state. It occurs exclusively in the immediate interstitial space between us. This is why I've so lately been so into 17th century Dutch philosopher, Brooks Bonoza. He's the guy who said, "Effix isn't about following rules or predicting consequences. It's about increasing our capacity to affect and be affected by others." For Spanoza, we're all expressions of a single continuous reality. When we engage in interactions that recognize and enhance the vitality of the other, we increase the collective power of the entire system as well as the freedom of all its members. That's the paradox that American libertarians they can't grasp. Once we're in a true living system together, we each get more independent power, not less. It's a somatic real-time feedback loop of mutual flourishing. Martin Boober, he's the one who took this further with the idea of eye-thou relationships. He argued that we spend most of our lives in the eye-it mode, treating the world, nature, and other people as objects to be used for our own ends, like in capitalism, sexual exploitation, affective altruism, or AI modeling. But the more human path, the sacred human path is the eye-thou encounter. When we have no agenda, we meet another human being in their total novel uniqueness. It can only happen between us in the moment, unarmored and face-to-face. And then Levenos came along. He anchored his entire philosophy of morality, right there in that epiphany of the human face. Levenos, he argued that ethics doesn't begin with an intellectual calculation or a social contract. It begins in the moment. I look into the face of another human being, the face of the other. It carries a divine demand that says, "You shall not abandon me. "You shall not destroy me." There's no subject object anymore. It's interstitial. I don't master the other person with Jedi mind games. I'm held hostage to their immediate humanity. This face-to-face encounter, it's the true source of morality. It can't be modeled. It can't be generalized. It can only be experienced. It's not about strategy or results so much as compartment, compartment, meaning that the way I am with you. Whatever we choose to go for, it may be less important than the way we go for it. The compassion and care, with which we regard ourselves and one another matters as much, or maybe more than the maps we're using to chart the path. And I get it. In a pyramidal society built on KPIs, it's no wonder that those of us trying to make the world a better place look to metrics and outputs, UN's sustainability goals. But what about those of us trying to forge a horizontal civilization based less on growth than our capacity for mutualism? It's also a failsafe. Let's play bad trip for a second. So let's say the macro structures fail us, and our political systems, our economic systems, degrade to the worst case scenario that Trump and his regime are working towards, where half of us are in prison camps, and the other half are employed as guards in the prison camps. How much could our comportment define even that experience? Could we make a heaven of even that world together, simply by the way we choose to look at each other through the containment fences? Could the basic human refusal to reduce the other to an object or a function disrupt the machinery of oppression? This is what Camus meant by rebel, where love and care become the weapons. And this flips the logic of the technocrats and apologist reformers on its head. The utilitarian mind-meled has convinced us that we must tolerate corrupted means, lies, exploitation, centralization of power, environmental destruction, as long as the projected destination is net positive. But that is a horror story told to us by people who want to control the future. It's the same reason authoritarians tell us there is blood in the streets. It's to justify violence. If the way we treat each other in the present moment is the true compass of a civilization, then the destination is more a map point than a North Star. The path is the place. For the rebel, every interaction becomes a potential act of liberation. For me, this is no longer some abstract academic exercises. Yeah, I'm a professor of something. But this is how I'm learning to navigate my most sacred encounters with other people. If you see consent as a limiting contract rather than a gateway to the ineffable, you're missing the point. It's a safe container to lose one's boundaries and become part of a living encounter to trust in the other and oneself as part of a living dynamic. but we can level that up i think we are all together have to learn to trust this moment and the power of our comportment as the source of our collective healing and our potential for universal justice. Capitalism and its messianic sun, artificial intelligence, is obsessed with results. Humanity is about process. When we prioritize the results of the model over the process of living, we stop engendering a civilization and instead create permission for brutality. And living a present based ethics, it doesn't mean we're abandoning the future either. What if, and I'm just what if in here, what if right action or proper comportment in the immediate moment? What if it doesn't just feel better? What if it leads to the most mutually beneficial long-term outcomes? Industrial age logic and ethics, it measures inputs and outputs, resources and yields as if they were separate things, sacrifices and triumphs. They're separated like causes and effects, winners and losers. But what if we're living in something closer to nature? An interdependent living system that operates more like a fractal. In a fractal system, the geometry of the smallest part mirrors the geometry of the whole. The macrocosm is a reflection of the microcosm. If that is true, then it is impossible to arrive at a beautiful just macro scale future by using ugly cruel micro scale means. What is right, compassionate and honorable in the immediate moment, is right for the entire system. And stepping into this realization, it requires a profound leap of faith. And faith is what the long-termists on both sides of the social justice equation are lacking. They don't trust the universe's emergent architecture. They don't trust human nature or the natural self-organizing property of love. Because they are terrified of the inherent uncertainty of life, they try to bypass the present, forcing reality through a computational bottleneck of their own design. If the universe is a fractal, then our moral education shouldn't be about learning how to calculate outcomes or optimize spreadsheets. It has to be about learning how to feel and sense others more deeply to affect and be affected by them. We need to learn how to tolerate more, how to metabolize more, and engage the world with an open heart. Becoming strategic is a psychological defense mechanism. It is a substitute for developing these deeper, somatic sensibilities, and it prevents us from doing the hard work of presence. Strategy allows us to look away from the suffering child in front of us, because we're focusing on a grand plan to save a million hypothetical children tomorrow. True moral maturity, it requires we surrender that narrow self-interest for a boundary-free, open-hearted, limitless understanding of our own place in the greater swirl of things. Pope Leo, this new Pope now, he explained it in his Encyclical an AI. I'm going to read this. He said, "If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable, or less worthy. In the name of progress, necessary sacrifices may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. It is one thing to integrate technology within a human-centered relational vision. It is quite another to be guided by an outlook that devalues human limits and promises a purely technical form of salvation." Right? The technocrats, the ones who want to optimize our flaws, our grief, and our vulnerability, they want an algorithmic salvation that eliminates friction. But as the Pope's trying to remind us, our limitations are not bugs to be patched. They're the very soil from which the soul grows. This is him again. Even when limitations are experienced as inner suffering, human wisdom teaches us not to deny or suppress it, but to integrate it. Doesn't he sound like a psilocybin facilitator? Right? To eliminate suffering entirely would mean in the end extinguishing love and desire as well. To renounce this adventure, both tragic and splendid in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits could mean many things, but it would no longer be human. Yeah, okay? He's like, right? He's on the same pages as any, right? Becoming human again. This is acetalkin, right? Becoming human again, it starts with the absolute refusal to treat the person in front of you as a casualty for a hypothetical tomorrow. And once that commitment to the present is abandoned, the door opens to every form of rationalized cruelty that the 20th century has spent a hundred million lives trying to teach us to reject. Which brings us all the way back to knocking on your neighbor's door and asking to borrow something, right? Bob, can I borrow your drill? Starts the whole process. Your body is local. You want to feel more connected to things, more influential? Who are the 10 closest bodies to your body when you go to sleep at night? Or 20? What are their names? How do you get along with them? Comportment, compassion, and empathy don't have to scale up. Just out. Those people are your immediate mission. The quality of a civilization is measured not by the size of its towers, but by the way, people treat one another. And whether they can recognize other people as faces, not functions. The ability to care for one another is the fundamental dimension of our humanity learned through lived experience. Reading stories to a child, offering company to an elderly person, or arranging a home so that it's welcoming to guests. Those are the essential gestures of community life. They teach us to value care at a societal level and train us to recognize others as persons worthy of attention. The revolution isn't something we get to enjoy after the cable news networks declare we've won. It's not something we get to. It's something we do in the here and now. That's the rebellion. If you're not doing it in the moment, you're not doing it. And if you are doing it in the moment, you've already won. Thanks for being on Team Human. Team Human is produced by Joshua Chaplin and edited by Luke Robert Mason. I'm Douglas Rushkopf. And you've been on Team Human, our last best hope for peeps.