What does the future hold? Will AI save us or end us? How can anyone possibly know one way or the other?
This research call is a reprise of something I did with my local faculty a couple weeks ago. Slides and pre-readings are here: Development Day 2025 - Google Drive
The slide part will be brief. The point of those is just to get the conversation rolling! Start now, if you wish, by replying to this message below.
This Nate Hagens “Frankly” from today is a good follow-up to the research call earlier here.
In particular, some keyword highlights that relate to our discussion:
at the 10 min. mark, the need to “hardwire commons thinking”.
at the 14 min. mark, the problem of the price system not properly capturing true costs and benefits
at the 28 min. mark, the need for “grounded agency”.
My most direct personal research into alternative educational programs has lately gained the description “education for agency”, specifically to train agentic humans to manage agentic AI. What Hagens says fits that picture.
Rippling out a bit, my students and I are collaborating with @dvdjsph on his project that promises to make contributions toward hardwiring the commons, facilitating more holistic transactions, and managing agentic AI. That’s my current praxis drill down from the larger metatheoretical framework I largely share with Hagens. Of course, others might pursue quite different praxis under a very similar framework.
Here is a future prediction entirely different than that of Nate Hagens. On balance, I think Hagens is more plausible. Why? The “double singularity” video is correct in noting positive feedback loops like AI improving itself, wealth concentrating, concentrated wealth going back into more AI, etc. But what it ignores is all the physical inputs required to keep feeding this beast - water, power, silicon chip fabs, datacenters, power grid, etc. Also, what if there are negative feedbacks from nature (drought, heat waves, climate volatility, etc.) triggered by the resource race to feed the AI beast? Not to mention geopolitical conflicts in which great powers shoot drones and missiles at each other’s grids, or drive up the cost of everything with beggar thy neighbor tariff regimes.
The point I am making here is it easy to grab onto any given trend and project it to infinity and beyond. A more difficult art form is to game out trend vs counter trend in a world where trends collide.