The long-awaited Marko Jukic episode. We all expect AGI to colonize the stars because it’s the obvious thing any healthy expanding system does naturally. So why aren’t we? Marko explains the elaborate cope keeping us on Earth.
Transcript
Intro (00:00)
Wolf: Welcome back to “The Students.” I’m joined by my colleague, Marko Jukic. He’s a very talented analyst over at Bismarck Analysis. He wrote an article for us at Palladium called “The Only Reason to Explore Space.” This was a few years ago.
I understand you’ve been developing this thesis since then.
Marko: I have been developing this thesis since then. I have been thinking a lot about humanity, humanity’s destiny, the physical limits of the universe, and why we are so far away from them with our current level of technology and industry and social organization, which obviously kind of all go together. And yeah.
Wolf: Yeah. So the big idea that you’ve been pushing, which I’ve become somewhat more persuaded by over the years, is that we should just be directly targeting space expansion as the big picture. So this comes down to what’s the big picture that we’re pursuing as a society? So currently, I think the big picture is something like coddling humanity, world peace, kumbaya, UN world order, blah, blah, blah.
Marko: It’s a little unclear.
Wolf: It’s a little bit unclear.
Marko: It’s a little bit unclear.
Wolf: But at various times in history, we’ve had somewhat different ideas about what the big picture is. We’re waiting for—Christ to come and take us away. We’re trying to convert the world to Christianity or democracy or whatever latest idea we cooked up last Thursday. But you’re proposing that there is a natural answer to this question. Which is, let’s just look at the world.
It’s really, really big, full of matter and energy. Lots of space. We should just go out there and colonize it, explore it, develop it. Okay. So—
Marko: In short
What distinguishes humanity? (02:09)
Wolf: In short. So why?
Marko: So why?
And we’re getting right into the heavy-duty theory, but that’s why we’re here.
Wolf: That’s great. That’s why we’re here.
Marko: Let’s just go with it. So basically, you have to ask, on some level, what is a human being? And what does a human being do in nature, in sort of the universe, among the reality that we exist in? And then you have to ask, what do human beings do kind of collectively? Because we are a social animal, and everything we do is basically intermediated through social technology and institutions.
We’re not an individualist species. We’re actually—
Wolf: Yeah, we’re not bears
Marko: we’re not bears. In fact, we’re almost as far in the opposite direction as you could go, almost.
Wolf: We’re not quite ants, but—
Marko: We’re not quite ants, but honestly, we’re not far off. And maybe, I don’t know, maybe we’re more similar than we think.
Wolf: Maybe so.
Marko: So we have the human being, which is kind of a unique creature in the universe. As far as we know, obviously we’re related to all other forms of life on planet Earth, but we are clearly some kind of apex predator, and in some very important way, we are much more powerful, and we kind of stand alone among all the species of the Earth, right? And it’s an interesting question why we stand alone among all the species of the Earth. You can try to come up with all kinds of different answers.
Wolf: I think the Confucian answer is we have superior standards of righteousness.
Marko: Yes. Which also ties into this.
Wolf: Interesting trivia.
Marko: It also ties into this. So I take a, let’s say, a functionalist and a strictly materialist approach to this question, okay? And I would say some people, maybe a common answer, especially here in San Francisco, would be that the reason humanity is so unique is because we’re the most intelligent. We’re the most intelligent. Okay.
We don’t have to define intelligence, per se, right now, but I would go a little bit further and say it’s not just that we’re intelligent, it’s that we’re social is what makes us unique. It’s that combination. And I would add a third thing, which is that we specifically express our intelligence through creating tools. Creating tools out of the natural environment, which is inert and inanimate—not sentient or living. And also more interestingly, through creating tools out of other people through social technologies and institutions.
Wolf: Yeah, other beings in general.
Marko: What’s that?
Wolf: Other beings in general. Farms and—
Marko: Other beings in general. Sure. I guess animals are somewhere in between inorganic matter and us, but they’re maybe in many ways much closer to inorganic matter than to us, in fact. I would even say.
Wolf: I don’t know about that, but go on.
The power of artificial stupidity (05:40)
Marko: That’s a whole other can of worms. Doesn’t matter. So basically, what distinguishes humanity and the human being is not just our intelligence, but also our sociality and our ability to create tools out of both stuff and out of other people through institutions and social technology. And so basically, the reason I’m drawing an equivalence, I’m sort of putting those two things together is because I think basically the way we augment the power of our own kind of intelligent agency is by creating artificial stupidity, if you will, as opposed to artificial intelligence. And so when you look at technology or when you look at institutions, these are both forms of artificial stupidity in the sense that what we’re doing is we’re taking maybe whatever fascinating, interesting, wild and free forms that existed in the universe and in nature before our intervention, and we’re turning them into this predictable, reliable, intelligible process that the advantage of it is that it’s less complex, actually.
And because it’s less complex—
Wolf: It’s more manageable
Marko: it’s more manageable for a single intelligence, right? And there’s always ultimately a single intelligence that is behind this process, if you’re thinking about institutions, social technology, or if you’re thinking about physical technology. And I would even go further and say physical and social technology are very closely linked because all the technology that we have, it’s never some kind of process that a single person—it’s not some kind of recipe that a single person follows—a million steps.
Wolf: It’s always taught to other people.
Marko: It’s always taught to other people.
Wolf: Through an institution.
Marko: We have social differentiation.
Wolf: Adopted socially. Et cetera. Yeah.
Marko: There’s specialized knowledge. It’s not like one person goes and builds an ASML photolithography machine all by themselves.
Wolf: And then—
Marko: That’s not what happens
Wolf: builds computers for themselves.
Marko: Yeah. Or builds compu—
Wolf: Has an internet—where they send messages to themselves.
Marko: Yeah. Exactly. None of that stuff is the case. So, the social aspect and the fact that we are capable of treating each other as these inert cogs in a machine and creating machines out of other people to achieve goals is—what gives us our power, okay? Compared to all the other living beings that we know of so far.
Although, of course, it also looks like we might be the only living beings in the universe, right? Who knows what’s going on there? That’s a whole other can of worms.
Wolf: Yeah. The Fermi paradox.
Marko: The Fermi paradox. But if we are or if we aren’t, that’s what the human being does, okay? And basically, this process, I was actually talking to Samo earlier today, and we coined a wonderful sort of a catchphrase that I will definitely be using in the future, which is that what the human being is, is the stem cell of industry. And of course, industry, since we’re kind of defining terms, I would say industry is the implementation at scale of technology, and technology is, of course, based on the principles of science. So, I would say these three things are very closely linked.
I’ll just say that right off the bat. And where was I?
Wolf: What’s all this got to do with space? It’s like you’ve—
Marko: We’re getting there
Wolf: laid a great groundwork of what is man in relation to industry—society, but why space the natural—telos of all this?
Marko: We do not live in some kind of arbitrary universe. Our universe has a very particular character. There are particular physical laws. There’s a particular distribution of matter and energy in the universe that we find ourselves living in. And because we are these toolmakers who continually augment our capabilities—or, sorry, hold on.
Let me just take a step back first to finish what I was saying about the stem cell of industry.
Every time that you automate some process to achieve some kind of capability, the first time you attempt to automate this process is going to be the most manual and the least automated version of that process. And the first time you ever do it, it’s going to use the maximum amount of intentional human effort, okay, and intentional human labor.
Wolf: Yeah. Insight and—
Marko: Insight—
Wolf: all these things, yeah
Marko: and you’re going to have to do the—
Wolf: Creativity
Marko: you’re going to, yeah, creativity, and I would even say just raw labor because as you go through more and more iterations of automating any kind of process, if it’s physical technology or social technology, you’re going to find more and more ways to make it more automated and reduce the amount of human labor—that is necessary to achieve the same goal, right?
Wolf: Even if you’re not even using any tools, you’re getting better at it. You’re learning. Learning how to—
Earth and the firmament (10:51)
Marko: You’re learning how to do things. Yeah. Obviously, this is very closely tied to the idea of knowledge production. So, the point is you never actually fully eliminate the need for human labor, no matter how automated the process becomes, because in our universe, we have entropy—and things are constantly falling apart because of that. Nature and the universe, the conditions in which we find ourselves are constantly trying to kill us and fight the structures that we put together.
And so no matter how much you automate a process, it never becomes a sort of perpetual motion machine, right? You will always need some human effort, some human review of the process to ensure that everything is running smoothly, that nothing has broken down. And so basically, the flywheel that you have is that the more you automate any kind of process, your capabilities increase because you’ve created more and more of this artificial stupidity that is more and more powerful the more that you create.
Wolf: More tools, yeah.
Marko: With the same amount of human labor, you basically gain more capabilities, right? And This process, I’ve been speaking kind of abstractly so far, but this process does not actually happen in an abstract vacuum. It happens in physical reality.
Wolf: In an atmosphere even.
Marko: It happens in an atmosphere. So far, it’s mostly happened on planet Earth, which is a very particular place in the universe. And because we have all kinds of physical constraints and the constraints of our starting conditions, we discover that there are particular ways that all these processes have to unfold. Right? The development of technology, and industry, and science, and the reason I keep repeating that is because it’s like the scientific principles always inform what kind of technology is possible and, on the industrial side, it’s like the logistical possibilities also inform what kind of technology is practical at any given time.
Right? Even if we know that some things are scientifically possible, that doesn’t mean that they’re immediately going to be technologically feasible—let alone industrially efficient and viable given the human labor that we have available—to carry out, if that makes sense. Right? But all three things are important and they very closely feed into each other. So, this process does not occur in a vacuum.
It occurs in physical reality, and the more that we follow this process, the more capabilities we get, and inevitably, the more and more we follow this process, we are going to find ourselves running into the limits of matter and energy on planet Earth. And that could be a problem, except it’s not a problem because planet Earth is one infinitesimal speck of matter and energy in the wider universe. And we have this psychological barrier that we have, I don’t know, I guess it comes from wider culture or whatever, it doesn’t really matter. But we have this psychological barrier that, and I think it’s kind of insane, that the wider universe, outer space, whatever, that it doesn’t really matter to the important questions of human nature and the human condition—and what we should do with our society.
Wolf: So that’s just the firmament. It’s just up there.
Marko: Yeah, exactly. Actually, we have a very medieval... Even today, even though we have put men on the moon, we have lots of satellites in low Earth orbit, which is okay, to be fair, still pretty close to planet Earth, pretty close to the atmosphere. It’s not that far away in the grand scheme of things. But we actually still have a very medieval attitude towards outer space.
In the sense that we do just see it as this—
Wolf: This dome
Marko: far away. Yeah, it’s just this dome. It’s this far away. It’s irrelevant to us. It’s irrelevant to us, we are irrelevant to it, when I think this is almost the complete opposite of the attitude that we should have towards outer space.
Because actually, outer space is where we are going to inevitably have to end up if we continue following this flywheel of automating processes to increase our capabilities.
Wolf: If we continue to carry out our nature—
Marko: If we continue
Wolf: we’ll be continuing to develop—new capabilities—new needs—new demands. And breaking open new frontiers—then the final frontier, as some say, I don’t think it’s necessarily the final frontier, but this one big obvious frontier that we must eventually conquer—is that of outer space. All the other—
Marko: It is—
Wolf: all the other matter and energy in the universe—
Marko: It is physically inevitable. It is physically inevitable. I would even go so far as to say that, if you follow this logic, excuse me, there’s really only two options, which is that eventually we expand throughout the entire universe physically, or we—
Wolf: At least the reachable parts with the light cone and what not.
Marko: The reachable parts. The reachable parts are extremely vast. The observable universe is much bigger, but the reachable universe is also pretty big. It’s also pretty big. I think it’s, I forget if it’s a billion or a trillion galaxies.
I forget off the top of my head which it is. But that’s quite a lot of galaxies. There’s 100 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and we’re only orbiting one of those stars. And we haven’t even ventured—
Wolf: We haven’t even started to—
Marko: We haven’t even started
Wolf: capture its energy.
Marko: We’re not even close. In fact, we haven’t even ventured to any other planets, and we are not even close to harnessing all of the potential of our own planet, in fact, despite what you might hear from environmentalists to activists. We’re actually not even close to exhausting the resources of this planet. So, we are so tiny and small in comparison to the vastness of the universe, and we treat it in this medieval way that we, like I said, there’s this feeling of mutual irrelevance that is actually totally unwarranted because our survival as a species actually depends on things that are happening in space. You might have noticed that there’s a bright, shining ball of flame in the sky.
That is in outer space. It’s not here on Earth, that’s the sun. And the moon comes out at night. That’s also pretty important for life on this planet. And sometimes—
Wolf: But those are so reliable. We don’t have to think—
Marko: They’re so reliable
Wolf: we don’t even have to think about it.
Marko: We don’t even have to think about them. And occasionally, a big rock will crash into our planet and kill a lot of people, or I guess people weren’t around back then.
Wolf: Or whatever is around.
Marko: Or whatever is crawling around the swamps. But who cares? That’s very rare, all things considered. It hasn’t happened to us yet. It’s happened on a small scale, perhaps, but Anyway.
But jokes aside
We know the AI is going to space (18:26)
Wolf: So you said there’s two paths. One path is obviously we—continue to grow, eat the universe, so to speak. What’s the other path?
Marko: The other path is that we just eventually die out on planet Earth.
Wolf: Somehow the Fermi paradox gets us. The great filter—
Marko: The Fermi paradox gets us
Wolf: the great filter gets us.
Marko: Well, I wouldn’t even say it’s the Fermi paradox. There’s a lot of potential solutions to the Fermi paradox, whatever, a lot of explanations. But what I’m talking about is in a way even simpler, which is that it’s actually not really a realistic outcome that we don’t expand across the universe. To some level. It’s actually—
Wolf: It’s hard to imagine how we could end up stuck.
Marko: Yeah. Because it is in our nature to automate processes to create greater capabilities—using the natural world and other people, right? And if we don’t do it, if our civilization chooses not to do it for whatever reason—
Wolf: Yeah. If we nuke ourselves back into the Stone Age—
Marko: If we nuke ourselves back into the Stone Age—
Wolf: Wipe out Homo sapiens entirely
Marko: yeah. Whatever we wipe out, we still have a billion or 2 billion years here on planet Earth for that to kind of come back.
Wolf: I think it’s just 1 billion, but yeah
Marko: Maybe 1 billion. Yeah. Whatever it is, it’s still plenty of time. We could sterilize the entire biosphere, I guess. It’s possible, but it doesn’t have to be the default outcome.
Wolf: Let’s not do that.
Marko: Let’s not do that. I think most likely, AI kind of doom scenarios notwithstanding, most likely our civilization just kind of decays and then another civilization will have to take up the mantle. But I think actually maybe relatively soon. Maybe not in 1,000 years, maybe much sooner than that. But anyway.
So I don’t really even think that’s a very realistic option. I think the only realistic outcome is that we do expand into outer space sooner or later.
Wolf: Yeah. It’s just a question of sooner or later.
Marko: It’s just a question of sooner or later, and now—
Wolf: Consciously or accidentally.
Marko: Consciously or accidentally. We could do it intentionally.
Wolf: And do it well or badly.
Marko: Perhaps. Yeah. I would imagine it would have to happen very consciously and intentionally. That’s why I’m doing this talk and—talking about this and trying to convince people that it’s something we should pursue intentionally, or at least be aware that we’re pursuing it intentionally. And what I would say, since we’re talking about AI, what I’m talking about is one-to-one what people expect a super intelligent artificial intelligence to pursue, right?
Wolf: Yeah. That’s always interesting. It’s like, what do we expect the AI to do? It’s like, what’s the big horror scenario with AI? It’s going to create paperclips.
Well, how many paperclips? Well, it’s going to turn the entire observable universe into paperclips. Right? It’s like—of course that’s what you do, right? Or like—
Marko: You’re not going to stay on Earth. You’re not going to stay on Earth, right?
Wolf: You’re going to shoot off into the stars, you’re going to make Dyson spheres, you’re going to take stars apart—you’re going to turn planets into cities.
Marko: Because it’s there.
Wolf: Jupiter brains.
Marko: Because it’s there.
Wolf: All this stuff. And yeah, this is the part that I find very interesting. It’s like it seems so obvious to us when we’re not thinking about—humanity, but we’re thinking about what should a hypothetical super intelligence do. Obviously it’s going to do space.
Marko: Obviously it’s going to do this. Then it’s the most intuitive thing in the world. We don’t even question it, right? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone argue that the AI is going to just stay on Earth and watch TikTok or whatever.
And so basically, then you have the question of, well, Marko, the AI is obviously going to be superior to us in every way, so why does humanity have to go to space? Humanity just has to create the AI, and then the AI will go to space. And so we’re going to fulfill what we sort of concluded is this inevitable eventuality. It’s going to be manifested not through the human race per se, but through the AI. And we’re going to live through it.
Wolf: Yeah. Vicariously.
Marko: Kind of vicariously. But if that’s how it’s going to be, in a way it’s not even vicarious, right? Maybe we’re just the bootloader for AI, right? Like this is—
Wolf: Sure. This is what Elon says
Marko: Yeah. This is not news to anyone who is probably watching this video or this recording right now. And so basically what I would say to that is, first of all, if it is possible that we’re going to replace the human being as the stem cell of industry with AI, then maybe it’s inevitable and we’re screwed, and that’s maybe very unfortunate, but if it happens, then it’ll happen. Maybe we can stop it, maybe we should. Some people have that view.
I think you mentioned in another conversation, maybe everything we’re saying about going to space is going to be very relevant to the AI as well. The AI is also going to have to be convinced that it shouldn’t stay on Earth. Maybe it also needs some convincing. If we need some convincing—
Wolf: Yeah. I mean, if—
Marko: maybe it also needs some convincing. So
Wolf: this is my sort of xenohumanist hypothesis. It’s like, well, you’re calling it the stem cell of industry. I’ve got various ways of defining it, but let’s take that niche and you wipe out humanity or replace it with AI in that niche. Well, whoever’s in that niche is still going to have all these same problems. There’s still going to be this question of maybe parasitism holding you back or—social organization, or how to actually achieve this problem of—organizing the means of production towards—higher ends.
Marko: Because—
Wolf: What are the ends? What should we be doing? All these questions remain. They don’t go away just because you got rid of humanity. These are not questions—even so specifically to humanity, there are questions about what the universe wants in some sense.
Marko: Well, these are questions that arise out of the contingent features of the universe that we inhabit, is what I would say. They arise out of the physical laws that we kind of cannot circumvent, like the speed of light. They arise out of, I mean, I would—
Wolf: Yeah. Laws of thermodynamics, finiteness of energy—
Marko: Thermodynamics
Wolf: and all this stuff.
Marko: I would imagine there are many laws that we have not even discovered. I don’t think there’s particular reason to think that we’ve discovered everything about nature or science.
Wolf: No, we know there’s quite a lot within biology—solid state physics, all this stuff. There’s all kinds of stuff that’s still—
Marko: We’re still making new discoveries. I don’t think anybody would really debate that, right? And so, yeah, I agree. Given the constraints of reality and the intelligence itself, which has to exist within reality, there is this niche of this living being or this agent that goes around the universe and creates—
Wolf: Builds stuff out of the—
Marko: Builds stuff. Creates automated processes to augment capabilities. To satisfy—
Wolf: I guess the question—
Marko: its desires or its wills, right?
Wolf: Yeah. So the question here, to really dig into the psychology of—
Marko: And if I could just—
Wolf: Go for it
Marko: interject.
Wolf: Finish your thought.
Marko: And just to finish my view on AI, I don’t have super strong opinions on this or that, that I can maybe convincingly argue, but what I’m interested in is the possibility that whatever kind of AI technology we develop, I think if it falls even slightly short of the capabilities of the human being as this stem cell of industry, and it’s not just in terms of intelligence, but it could also be in terms of robustness, and other features we could imagine that are necessary to—
Wolf: Yeah. There’s this really obvious—
Marko: survival long-term
Wolf: one which is, you and I can sexually reproduce with very little limited input, right? You can grab five acres and maintain a human population—through subsistence agriculture and so on.
Marko: You don’t need this globe-spanning—
Wolf: And that’s at the minimum, right?
Marko: You don’t need this globe-spanning network of—
Wolf: You don’t need globe-spanning supply chains—
Marko: factories and supply chains
Wolf: to keep the human going. Whereas—TSMC, ASML, chip fabs, all this stuff, they’re—
Marko: They are much more fragile
Wolf: it’s global capitalism, right? You need this enormous thing. And so maybe there’s some edge there even. But there’s a bunch of things like this.
Marko: Yeah. And so basically—
Wolf: But you’re saying that’s hypothetical. If—if the AI does not sort of reach our level on every dimension—
Marko: As long as it falls short of our level on every dimension, because, may I remind you—
Wolf: Well, on some dimension, yeah
Marko: on any dimension, I would say. Basically, because, may I remind you, the current globe-spanning capitalist industrial system has been built out of human beings. It is human beings who are the basic unit. The basic unit of capitalism and development and industry and everything—is the human laborer. It is like human capital, actually, right?
That is actually the basic unit. No matter how much inhuman capital, that’s a cool phrase. No matter how much—
Wolf: Machinic capital—as Land puts it, yeah.
Marko: Machinic capital. No matter how much inhuman capital we’ve developed, we still need the human capital to maintain it and to continually grow it, right? And so, I think as long as whatever kind of AI technology we develop falls short of the capabilities of human capital and the human being, then there will still be a niche for the human being to maintain industrial technology and—which is the sum of all of these processes that we’ve set in motion, right? And even if it falls slightly short, even if it comes within like 99.999, however you would measure that. Let’s say it’s like 99.999% as good as human intelligence, the human being kind of in this very grand kind of way.
It’s not that you’re going to have competition for human labor, which is how people tend to think of automation, right? It’s that the capabilities of the human labor that we have will be multiplied by that differential, right? In the same sense that... So, I’ll segue just a little bit into how I see automation. Normally, these days, we think of automation exclusively as a replacement for human labor, right?
Wolf: Right. Because we imagine this kind of fixed pie. Maybe this is another species of the medieval kind of, there’s only just this world—
Marko: You know
Wolf: this static social order—static technological order.
Marko: Actually, honestly, it kind of is. Yeah. It honestly kind of is. We imagine the only possible use of automation is to maintain the same capabilities with less human capital, right? With less human labor, less people.
But the problem is, that does not follow logically in any way. That’s just how we see it because we’re in this situation where we are not interested in growing the capabilities, the total capabilities that we have, right? Because the more automation you have, really, that just frees up human labor to turn its attention to more less automated processes. Which is kind of the stem cell idea I’ve been describing, right? Once we’ve automated everything that gives us the capabilities we’re interested in right now, then we don’t really just kick back and drink cocktails for—
Wolf: Fully automated luxury communism.
Marko: Yeah, fully automated luxury communism. Well, first of all, fully automated luxury communism cannot actually be fully automated because you’re still going to need people to maintain the machines that make it possible, to maintain the processes. And secondly, once we have that—is fully automated luxury communism going to encompass the entire universe? And if not, why not? And I’ll agree with fully automated luxury communism when space has expanded.
The expansion of space has made it impossible for us to even leave the orbit of a star. And then maybe we’ll be truly screwed at the end of the universe, right? But right now, it is possible to travel to other stars, kind of go past this solar system and across the galaxy and maybe—even other galaxies with enough time.
Sorry, I lost my train of thought here a little bit. What was I saying?
Wolf: Well, we could go back. I’ve got a question.
Marko: The point is automation is a force multiplier—or a magnifier of the human capital that we have. It is not a replacement necessarily. You can treat it that way, but it doesn’t have to be. Right? And no matter how much you can magnify human capital or multiply what it’s capable of doing, we are still nowhere close to the limits of the sort of total capabilities that we can deploy in the universe that we exist in, right?
So there is basically no reason to treat automation that way.
Why not do it ourselves? (32:07)
Wolf: So the part that I’m interested in here is this ideological component around why should we do this versus build an AI to do this for us? This sort of seems like this big question that everyone’s kind of implicitly thinking about right now. And if I can just offer some thoughts on that.
There’s this sort of death drive inherent to the AI version of that question, right? It’s like we don’t want to do it ourselves. We can’t do it ourselves, or we don’t think we’re good enough to do it ourselves. And so we sort of put it off. We say, “Oh, we’re going to build the tool. The tool is going to do it for us. We’re going to build the AI. The AI is going to kill us and replace us, and then do the space-ism for us, right? Take over the universe, turn it into things.”
And we worry about, did we get it right? Are we building the right AI versus the wrong AI? Are we building AI fast enough? These sorts of things. But I just find it very interesting.
We are in fact also doing the other path, which is just do it directly. Yeah, using whatever automation technologies we have. But this is like SpaceX, right? Elon actually is out there—
Marko: He is
Wolf: building the infrastructure—of going to space. We can just go do this. This could be just what we do. And I find that ideological component very interesting. Note that it’s just one guy, right?
Without Elon—without Elon being a—
Marko: It’s always just one guy
Wolf: without Elon being a disciple. Yeah, it’s always just one guy.
Marko: It’s always just one guy. There’s a lot of one guys working together.
Wolf: Yeah. But without Elon being a sort of devoted disciple of von Braun—we wouldn’t have this. We would just be sitting here—
Marko: We wouldn’t, we wouldn’t
Wolf: in Yudkowsky universe, right? And there would just be one guy, and it’s Yudkowsky and/or Dario or whoever building the machines to replace us. And we’d have an even more medieval idea of the world. It’s like—we’re trapped in this little egg in the Earth, and all we can do is kind of build this machine to replace us because it’s more intelligent. And it’s like, isn’t that so interesting?
It comes down to this ideological question for one guy. And maybe—if Yudkowsky hadn’t read Vernor Vinge in the early ‘90s, we wouldn’t be on the AI track at all. We’d be talking only about—space. Or we’d be talking about genetic technology or—
Marko: Or we’d be like China
Wolf: or whatever.
Marko: Or we’d be like China, and we just wouldn’t see AI as such an existential threat necessarily—
Wolf: Yeah. We wouldn’t see it
Marko: but more of a useful—labor-saving technology just like any other, right?
Wolf: That’s the aspect that I find interesting. And this is where your theory or where your kind of ideology, for lack of a better term, is slotting in. You’re basically proposing all that other stuff is secondary. It’s means to an end. And the main story is this expansion.
This consciousness and/or humanity and/or—technology and industry—expanding throughout the cosmos. That’s the big story. That’s what we should be thinking about directly, and everything else is just means to that end. And then, yeah, the part about, in particular, there’s this big difference between doing it directly, as Elon does, versus—
Marko: Doing it vicariously through the AI
Wolf: vicariously where it’s like—we don’t want to do that, or we don’t believe we can do that, or we don’t believe—we’re allowed to do that or whatever. And therefore, we’re going to build the AI, and the AI’s going to, of course, go do that. Right? I find that very interesting, this—psychological license—question.
Marko: Yeah. I have some thoughts on that. So I think the reason that we have that kind of cycle... Okay, so it’s kind of interesting to think about the way that people imagine the AI. The AI, but that’s basically how people think about it.
It’s like this—it’s just—
Wolf: Yeah, it’s just one thing. It’s—
Marko: Yeah, it’s just like this one thing.
Wolf: Or people even reify it even further. They say the AI God or the—
Marko: Yeah. The AI God
Wolf: we’re creating God.
Marko: Whatever. But it kind of is just—it kind of is just this indistinct, like this kind of—
Wolf: The thing
Marko: the thing. This like indistinct—
Wolf: The AI. Yeah
Marko: this indistinct, powerful force that we can just, it’s just like this big bucket that we can throw all kinds of—
Wolf: That we can project our ambitions onto
Marko: we can project. Yeah. We can just project whatever we want onto it. But that is kind of what the concept is, so let’s go with it. I think it’s kind of interesting the way that people imagine the AI would kind of fulfill these ambitions that we were discussing that we feel like we cannot fulfill for whatever reason.
And it’s sort of like I guess the biggest obstacle for the AI would be persuading the NIMBYs to allow it to build factories or—
Wolf: Well, it could just recycle the NIMBYs.
In some of the scenarios.
Marko: Yeah. So you’re sort of proposing this thing where it’s like, well, okay, well, if that’s true, then you’re sort of saying the AI will actually not be able to help us achieve these grand material technological goals until it’s literally capable of just going full Skynet Terminator mode, right? It’s like—
Wolf: We could imagine one that can help us short of that. But in the most ambitious scenario—some of the ambitions that people project onto it are also genocidal ambitions.
Consumerist enervation (38:07)
Marko: Sure. But I think it’s interesting that we have to go to that kind of extreme to imagine growing our level of industrial technology further. Right?
Wolf: It’s easier to imagine the end of humanity than the end—of NIMBYism.
Marko: Exactly. The end of NIMBYism or the end of a massive wealth redistribution and transfers, or the end of this untrammeled consumerism that everybody feels they have a right to participate in forever, kind of—
Wolf: Or not even a right, it’s an obligation.
Marko: An obligation.
Wolf: It’s like this—
Marko: An obligation
Wolf: religious obligation—
Marko: A religious obligation
Wolf: to be financially selfish, right?
Marko: Yes. Well, it’s not just financially selfish, but kind of to be the opposite of what I’ve been describing. The human stem cell is kind of a worker, like a worker bee. This is a being that has an inherent drive to work, and to think, and to impose its will on the universe around it. Right?
Whereas there’s this alternative conception of what the human being is, which is not like a source of things happening—
Wolf: But a sink
Marko: but just this gaping maw that can consume infinite amounts of resources and still never be satisfied.
Wolf: And should, in fact. Yeah.
Marko: And should, in fact.
Wolf: And this is the last man, right? It’s like man—man has the walking stomach. Man is—
Marko: This is like the last man. Now, actually, the problem with that is that our capacity to consume is actually not infinite, because if we consume too much, we kind of end up exhausting our own potential, and then we just die. We don’t even reproduce and raise kids, which is actually also a lot of work. It’s actually also a lot of work. Right?
Wolf: Yeah. That’s an interesting point.
Marko: It’s work.
Wolf: This is a connection I hadn’t quite made.
Marko: Reproduction is work, itself.
Wolf: Reproduction is work.
Marko: It’s work.
Wolf: And you have to have that worker conception to the world—to—reproduce.
Marko: Yes. Otherwise, why bother?
Wolf: If you don’t have a creative drive to—put forth new things into the world, why have kids?
Marko: Yeah. Why? There’s really no reason. If you can just be a sort of lazy consumer who you just don’t have to do anything ever—
Wolf: You just get your AGI bucks.
Marko: Well, you basically wirehead. You could take it even further. We are actually probably pretty close to building wireheading. For listeners who don’t know, this concept of kind of a brain implant that instead of taking drugs to feel pleasure or doing things in the world to feel pleasure, you just install this brain implant that electrically stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain, and then you can kind of just sit there and—
Wolf: You feel super fulfilled and profound
Marko: yeah, you can just feel awesome forever until you expire, right? Why not do that at that point? Why shouldn’t we do that, right? This is kind of the... Why shouldn’t we do that, right?
Well, there’s actually kind of a very forget all the philosophy, forget all the kind of moral philosophy, morality, whatever. I don’t even care about that stuff. It’s just an irrelevant question because anybody who does do that is just going to disappear, and then they’re going to be irrelevant to the questions of whoever is left in this universe that we live in, right? So it’s kind of a total dead end that doesn’t even need to be addressed. And so, okay, to step back and go to the question of why we psychologically feel like we have to vicariously route our ambitions through AI, I had a bit of a viral thread on Twitter addressing this question, and I think I hit on some good insights, which I’ll sort of repeat here.
Displacing our ambitions onto AI (41:28)
Marko: I think the reason is kind of that we do intuit that we are not actually capable of circumventing, or reforming, or destroying these systems, these automated processes in the form of these powerful global, national, continental, transnational institutions in the forms of governments or big companies, which are some of the most powerful institutions that have ever existed in human history.
Wolf: Right. We feel a little bit powerless with respect to the system, and—
Marko: We feel powerless against the might of the US government, or the United Nations, or the International Monetary Fund—
Wolf: Yeah. We see that these things aren’t—
Marko: or ExxonMobil
Wolf: by default going to go to space.
Marko: They’re not by default going to—
Wolf: And so we think—”Okay, well, what if we had more intelligence? What if we had-” “What if we could copy ourselves in silicon or...”
Marko: Exactly. We actually naturally intuit that we live in this world of these gargantuan, powerful... And it’s not just governments, to be clear, right? It’s corporations, maybe nonprofit foundations even. Maybe religions.
Maybe the Catholic Church even is this gargantuan kind of slothful, old, decaying institution that has kind of—a grip on some large portion of the population’s morality or whatever, their sort of moral conceptions of the world. All of these big bureaucratic organizations, basically, that make up the world that we live in and which are so big—and so powerful because of the capabilities that were brought forth earlier in the 19th century and the early 20th century—
Wolf: By some guy
Marko: by some guy, by many some guys who basically caused the Industrial Revolution and gave us all modern—
Wolf: And built all these things
Marko: and built all these things, right? None of our modern institutions—okay, maybe the Catholic Church is an exception, of course, but most of our modern institutions do not make sense in their current forms in any way if we don’t have industrial material technology, right? The assumptions of these, and again, these institutions are like automated processes that were set in motion by someone in the past, right? By live players, right? By live players.
They built these institutions to achieve certain goals, and at the time many of them were built or reformed, we were no longer in the technological world of agricultural societies where you had many fewer options for just the technology that you would use to organize people. You had a lot more options once you had gunpowder, railroads, flight, modern chemistry. This gave you many more capabilities to build more powerful organizations, right? And I would go further and say that these organizations kind of conquered the world during World War II and during the Cold War, right? You kind of ended up for the first time in the middle—well, first of all, you ended up with a lot of consolidation of power.
Over the course of the 19th century, European empires kind of took over the world, right? Or whatever was left that they didn’t conquer already. Sort of on the basis of the superior technology that they had, and then shortly after that, you had an even greater consolidation of power until you ended up with the situation in the middle of the 20th century where you kind of had truly globe-spanning empires who then quickly developed intercontinental ballistic missiles, which were capable of hitting any targets on the planet and detonating nuclear explosions way more destructive than any kind of weapon that was built before, right? So you end up in this place where now you have organizations that are genuinely capable of exerting hegemony over the entire world in a way that had just never been possible before, right? And so basically, this is like people maybe don’t like to think about that dynamic too much, but I think it’s actually one of the most important pieces of the puzzle because what happens when an automated process that you set in motion, an automated process of great power, no longer has its creator or an equivalent human being, an equivalent stem cell who is capable of holistically evaluating this thing and knows how to control it because they built it.
When that person is no longer around, conditions continue to change, but the process continues doing what it was doing before.
Wolf: And it has nuclear weapons.
Marko: And it has nuclear weapons. Yes. I mean, yes. Wolf, this is what we are talking about. This is exactly what we are talking about.
And so, if the particular people that you want to look at there are FDR or Chairman Mao or Stalin or Vannevar Bush or whatever, that’s more of a historical kind of case study. That’s more of a historical question you can answer through case studies.
Wolf: Point being, people today are faced with these things. We’re faced with a world we can’t control because it’s—a lot of it is these—enormously powerful organizations—that may not even be piloted by a live player anymore.
Marko: They are definitely not. Most of them are definitely not piloted.
Wolf: And there’s nobody you can appeal to.
Marko: There’s nobody you can appeal to.
Wolf: And so in the face of that, it’s very easy to imagine, well, maybe we need a new technological revolution, new kinds of agency—new intelligence. Some enormously powerful thing to be able to overcome—those problems and—build a new world.
Marko: Exactly. Exactly. And that is almost to a T what people imagine the AI is, right? It’s like literally, gee, what would we need to overcome the power of the US government or of ExxonMobil or of the Catholic Church or all these other organizations or the Chinese government? Not to sound like I want to overthrow the US government, right?
But it’s like how could I even negotiate? How could I reform these institutions? I mean we, not just me, but everybody. How could we all collectively try to change—some things around here? How could we just try to do things a little bit differently?
Wolf: Yeah. How do we fix things?
Marko: How? How could we fix things? What can we do? And it just seems impossible, right? And it just seems impossible, and because it seems impossible through any kind of semi-normal kind of relatable mechanism that people can imagine, the only thing that they can imagine is, well, I’m going to create this magic box that’s literally just going to be this fount of magic military power that’s going to kill everybody and then just rearrange the entire world the way it should be, atom by atom.
Wolf: Yeah. And of course, the way it should be is it’s going to go and build a Dyson sphere and—
Marko: Yeah, all that great stuff
Wolf: turn the stars into stuff.
Marko: Yeah. All that great stuff which we are perfectly capable of doing ourselves, actually, right? With or without maybe assistance from some less—
Wolf: Some enormously powerful technologies
Marko: powerful form of AI. Yeah. We will most certainly be creating enormously powerful technologies if we expand into space, by definition, right? By definition, we will most certainly be creating unbelievably powerful technologies, whether that’s through the artificial intelligence of computing or if it’s even more powerful antimatter bombs or whatever you can imagine. And so basically, the key mechanism here is that these extremely powerful globe-spanning, multi-continental, whatever, I’m just throwing out adjectives.
I’m just throwing out superlatives here, but it has to be emphasized how much more powerful these organizations are today than any organizations in the past.
Wolf: Well, what I find interesting, actually, here’s another aspect to it. Those organizations, that order, has a name, right? And that name is humanity. Right? Like, just in terms of the history—of what came out of the Second World War.
It was the UN—
Marko: Well, it’s an apt name
Wolf: the Declaration of Human Rights.
Marko: It’s an apt name.
Wolf: Humanity has this like, these things are the organized agency of humanity, right? And so, isn’t that an interesting parallel that when we imagine an escape from it, we’re imagining an escape from humanity.
Marko: Yeah. We’ve kind of—
Wolf: We go into AI. It’s like, well, we need to invent something that isn’t human—
Marko: It’s kind of ironic
Wolf: to escape from it.
Marko: It’s kind of ironic. Well, and you know what’s even more ironic, Wolf? It’s that what we imagine the AI to be, which is this dynamic, revolutionary, life-affirming force—full of power that can take over the whole universe. That actually is the real humanity, and what you just described as humanity, this order of these dead institutions that cannot react to changes and conditions, that is much more like a machine.
Wolf: Yeah. It’s like the—
Marko: That is much more like a machine
Wolf: it’s the last man, right?
Marko: Well, and it’s—
Wolf: Yeah, no, and to the extent, let me—
Marko: That is the artifice. You understand? That is the artifice.
Wolf: Let me—
Marko: And we’ve actually switched the labels.
Wolf: Right. I know. We’ve switched it around. And just to back up the point that you made that that’s actually the real humanity, look at what the definition of humanism is, right? Humanism is this philosophical position that takes—as its reference point and its center and its goal, the development of the kind of being who is the center of philosophy—and historical agencies, a moral agent—can change things around, it can change its environment.
We imagine this being that has this—this open-ended moral agency in the universe, and we call that being the human. Right? And this is what we mean by humanism. And like—isn’t that funny that that being now in our imagination is called the AI? Right?
And—
Marko: Yes. It is. I don’t know what to s—
Wolf: We’ve switched the labels.
Marko: We’ve completely switched the labels.
Wolf: We’ve switched it around. Now humanity—
Marko: It’s incredible
Wolf: just means the last man, and AI means the referent of humanism.
Marko: Yes. No, this is all true. And basically, so to go a bit further, because I’m sure people listening find this kind of interesting and kind of weird, but it—
Wolf: Maybe some of them
Marko: probably speaks to them in a certain way. Because you do have this feeling of being trapped. You do have this feeling of being caged or trapped, right? And I would say in the past, you would still have these extremely powerful organizations, but you kind of had a natural, you had something of a natural escape valve just because so much more of planet Earth was not completely locked down by powerful organizations, right? You sort had the steppe—
Wolf: Well, the interesting thing is, of course—
Marko: You sort of had the desert, you had sort of less advanced societies who might accept you if you were intelligent or maybe a good warrior.
Wolf: Well, let me propose that in the Middle Ages—things were maybe even more locked down or there was even less potential for change.
Marko: Maybe.
Wolf: Because certainly things were moving slower. They were moving slower.
Marko: Things were moving slower. I mean—
Wolf: And to go along with that, people certainly were very religious, right? They had these—ways of imagining escape, right? Whether it’s heaven and hell or ascetic kind of practices that develop their spirituality in some way out the side of the system.
Marko: Well, let me put it this way.
Wolf: So I think this is an eternal problem—is that we fight, we seek escape from—
Marko: It’s—
Wolf: from the immediate order of things—in these imaginary entities.
Marko: Yes. So what I would say is that what you’re describing is exactly, it’s totally natural, and it’s a totally natural response to the feeling of being the human being who has become part of the automated process of someone else who’s more powerful than you. And you discover that you have no ability to change the process unless you kind of have the particular powers and the sort of social capital and skills of the person who created that process in the first place, right?
Wolf: Yeah. And you start trying to imagine ways that you get out somehow. Or that things get fixed—or corrected or reformed.
Marko: So most of the time, people do not have the understanding or vision of their own society to realize what the practical path to reforming those processes. I like saying processes. Those institutions, what the actual path to that would be. Because that is secret and defended, highly defended and secret knowledge by design. Because—
Wolf: The people in charge—
Marko: Of the people in charge
Wolf: of those machines don’t want you to be changing them. They don’t want you to have the password.
Marko: They don’t want you to have the password, right? And the more impa—the problem that we kind of face as the human stem cell. This is one of the big philosophical problems that we face, is that even though all of our capabilities sort of come from this process of someone reorganizing other human beings and the matter and energy that they’re capable of individually maintaining and organizing in their various subprocess, even though that’s the only way that we gain capabilities—of any kind, and that’s a cool thing to have. We like to have more capabilities. Even if we don’t have them, we just like to see the effects of them.
It sort of gives our lives meaning.
Wolf: We like to participate in that.
Marko: We like to participate, and we are participating. By being cogs in the machine, we are also participating, right? We are playing this, in a way—
Wolf: Well, you know that classic story about the janitor at NASA? Someone goes, it’s like, “What are you doing here? Are you sweeping the floor?” And he’s like, “Well, I’m putting a man on the moon.”
Marko: Exactly. No, that’s exactly how it is. But the problem is, the flip side of that is when that highly defended knowledge of how to control the thing, when it dies with the person who was in charge of it, when they fail the succession problem, which is something Samo Burja talks about a lot. It’s one of the linchpins of this kind of entire worldview. You could even say it’s like when they fail to pass on that knowledge and power to someone else, then you no longer have this carefully maintained garden of artificially stupid subroutines that help us achieve something that someone actually cares about.
Wolf: No, you just have a bunch of stupidity.
Marko: You just have a bunch of stupidity that we’re trapped inside. And we don’t know how to change it because we don’t have the keys. We don’t have the password. Actually, nobody does. And the only hope for it to change is for someone else to become powerful enough to take over the whole thing from the outside, basically, right?
And maybe at most resolutions, maybe in most places and times, that’s been okay enough. It always feels terrible to be trapped in this totally uncaring kind of—
Wolf: Trapped in the system
Marko: trapped in the system. It never feels good, and so to go back to what you were saying about we always imagine these escapes, I think that’s maybe where a lot of it comes from. Because you’re trapped and you don’t know how to get out of it.
Wolf: And I think the important thing to emphasize here is the escapes are always, there’s some element of reality to them, and there’s some element of imagination. Or even superstition, like just a total unreality. And a real reality.
Marko: Well, I would say—
Wolf: And to apply that to the AI question
Marko: Go ahead, yeah
Wolf: there’s a certain reality to AI, right? It’s like, clearly this is incredibly powerful technology, much more power still promised on the roadmap. Very, very high potential to do a lot of things. But I notice that a lot of what we’re doing with it is projecting, frankly, quite superstitious ambitions—onto it. that it’s filling this psychological niche of the need for escape.
And I think if I can kind of offer an element of your program, it’s that what it behooves us to do is undertake the hard work of disbelieving in the imaginary part—and finding the real—figuring out how to do the actual work. These institutions were ultimately built by men, or maybe they’re more competent than us. Maybe they had access to things we don’t.
Marko: They definitely did.
Wolf: Maybe we’re trapped inside their system.
Marko: They definitely did. Yeah.
Wolf: But they were built by men.
Marko: They were built by men.
Wolf: There are things we can do.
Marko: There are things we can do.
Wolf: The humanistic faith is that we do have agency.
Marko: Yes. Yes. We do have agency.
Wolf: We are able to act.
Marko: There are things we can do.
Wolf: But it is hard.
Marko: It is extremely hard.
Wolf: And we have to put—
Marko: It’s never been harder
Wolf: to put aside—
Marko: I would say it’s never been harder. It’s never been harder.
Wolf: Yeah. We live in a bigger world than ever.
Marko: A bigger world with more powerful technology, more powerful institutions. We’ve never faced the scale of this kind of a problem before
Wolf: yeah. But the essential problem is not to escape into these psychological escape hatches. But to put that aside, to put aside the superstition, to think in these material agency sort of terms—and find that path through. And I suspect, this is my suspicion on this conversation, is that if we were doing that more effectively, I think we’d be more interested in directly just reforming our institutions to go to space—than we are in AI. And that’s, I think, the answer to this question.
Marko: That’s what I’m interested in, basically. Yes. That’s kind of how I look at it and why I’m more interested in space than AI. I totally agree. And I think it’s like—
Wolf: And just to reiterate why that is, why is space not the escape? Space is the goal. So everyone understands—
Marko: Space is the goal
Wolf: space is the goal.
Marko: Space, yeah.
Wolf: But it’s like if we felt powerful, if I felt powerful, if I was a super intelligence, well, of course. You go to space. You build a Dyson sphere. Maybe we keep the Earth sort of in its own gravity well. Maybe we smear it out, turn it into solar orbit stations.
I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.
Marko: So many fun things. So many fun things.
Wolf: But there’s a lot of fun things we could do. And if I was a super intelligence, of course that’s what I would do, right? So if I felt powerful, of course that’s what I would do, right? That’s what I would want. But if I don’t feel powerful, maybe I start to get these revenge fantasies against the system, and I—I start to think, “Oh, well, maybe the AI will smash up the system for me.”
Right? And that’s, I think, the psychological dynamic that—that’s very present. If not totally driving it. I don’t want to dismiss AI. It’s clearly a very powerful and important technology.
Marko: Not totally. I mean, there’s—
Wolf: It’s a very, very powerful and important technology
Marko: yeah. No, there’s very real technology there.
Wolf: But we have to be aware of these psychological dynamics.
Marko: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s what we project onto the technology, right? The technology and what we—
Wolf: The projection is the false part here.
Swift collapse makes reform possible (1:01:24)
Marko: Yeah. And so it’s kind of like one of the ways out of that is to have kind of discussions like we’re having, just to realize that you’re doing this psychological projection. Okay. One of the ways out of that mindset, perhaps, to begin with, is just to realize that these systems are not actually permanent. They will 100% fall apart sooner or later—because they’re not being maintained by any human being.
I mean, man, are you watching the news? Some of these systems are dramatically falling apart right in front of our very eyes. I mean—
Wolf: Yeah, there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on
Marko: what’s going on with the Strait of Hormuz and Iran and US military supremacy and the freedom of the seas and the oil, which is kind of the lifeblood of the current global economic system. Or China. What’s going on with China taking away all our industry, which is what actually underpins all of this entire system, right? America was the China of the world in the 1940s and in the 1950s when it sort of built these—superpower scale institutions, right? So there’s a way in which it feels completely, utterly inescapable and inevitable, and that’s also the message that the system’s always—sending, right?
Wolf: It wants you to think that because it makes you more reliable.
Marko: It wants you to think that because it makes you more reliable. Absolutely. Of course it would. But it’s just absolutely false, and I would even go further and it’s like, okay, well, sure, Marko, the Roman Empire also collapsed, but it took like 1,000 years. You had a long dark age.
It was very sad and pathetic and I’m not motivated by the idea that centuries down the line, all of my enemies will be dead and in the ground. Who cares? I’m going to be dead. I’m not going to be able to do anything about it, right? That’s not very compelling.
And what I would say to that is, it’s like fair enough, right? We don’t just want to be sitting here and saying these kind of trivial things, right? These trivially true things. But what I would say is these systems could very well collapse a lot faster than the Roman Empire did.
Wolf: They could be reformed very quickly.
Marko: Well, I personally am maybe a little—the more I study them, the less convinced I am that they can be reformed.
The more—
Wolf: But maybe they can be knocked over quickly.
Marko: They will knock themselves over very quickly. And the reason for that is that in the same way that the more complex a material physical technology is, the more fragile it is. It takes smaller and smaller defects and problems to render the entire thing completely unusable because it’s so much more complex and you have so many more moving parts and so many more dependencies, and so many more things that can go wrong, right? This is also kind of just part of the basic fabric of the way reality works. It’s like the more capabilities you want, the more complex things kind of have to become.
Wolf: But the flip side of that is we’ve gotten really good at managing that complexity, and these systems are quite robust. We’ve got all these—
Marko: Well, the—
Wolf: feedback systems within—capitalism and—
Marko: Sure. True. No, this is true. And our institutions, our social systems, our social machines and processes are actually very similar. And their designers had much the same kind of problems and principles in mind when they designed them, which is why they haven’t collapsed already, right?
It’s why they don’t collapse as soon as the creator is gone, right? That’s why, right?
Wolf: Because they’re well-designed.
Marko: Because they’re well-designed, and they’re designed just to keep going, even when the creator’s—maybe that’s not so much by intentional design, but it seems like that’s kind of how it tends to shake out.
Wolf: Well, if you look at how people build these things up, it’s like you have the thing running, and it’s running, it’s doing a job, it’s kind of stably going along, and then they add pieces to it. They change it, they change its direction, but it’s fundamentally got a lot of inertia. And then when they’re gone, it just keeps its inertia.
Marko: What I would say, I think what the factor behind that is that the same design principles that make it difficult for your contemporary enemies and competitors to take control of your institution while you’re running it are exactly the same as the ones that make it impossible to reform after you’re gone. Right? Because—
Wolf: You’ve encrypted the keys.
Marko: You’ve encrypted the keys because someone who wants to reform your institution 10, 50, whatever, 100 years after you’re gone is functionally exactly the same as some guy who is trying to take it away from you while you’re running it, and you definitely don’t want that to happen. You want to maintain control of it. And it’s hard to maintain control of it because people are very competitive—and seek power, right? And what’s a juicier target than a big, beautiful institution that someone else has built, right? And all you have to do is displace one guy and it could all be yours.
It could all be yours. We just have to nationalize SpaceX, Wolf. We just have to expropriate all these companies and take the money, right? That will have no negative consequences whatsoever, Wolf, right? So anyway, really if you want to blame someone, you have to blame the live players who fail the succession problem out of ignorance or just kind of out of circumstance.
It’s a very difficult long-term—
Wolf: But it seems, it’s very inevitable, right? It’s like at some point they’re going to fail succession. And then you’ve got these decaying institutions. And this is—
Marko: At some point it’s inevitable
Wolf: just the nature of the world.
Marko: This is the nature of the world. It’s inevitable.
Wolf: So, okay. We live in a world that’s kind of beyond our power.
Marko: Can I just finish an earlier point?
Wolf: Go for it.
Marko: Just a thread that I forgot to wrap up. So—I don’t think that our institutions and our technology... Let’s focus on the institutions. The institutions rely on the technology. And both are equally complex.
And they have all these fail-safes and whatever. Yes, all that’s true. But, when they do break down, they break down completely and catastrophically. Once all the fail-safes have failed, the thing just breaks. There’s nothing to be salvaged, really.
It’s just a broken machine. Or, it can be salvaged.
Wolf: Maybe parts of it keep going in some form, or forms keep going.
Marko: Actually, no. I disagree.
Wolf: You don’t think so?
Marko: No, I don’t think so.
Wolf: Because in the Roman Empire, the late Roman Empire—
Marko: Well, hold on.
Wolf: Tell me why it’s different.
Marko: I’ll tell you why it’s different.
Wolf: But the Senate kept going for hundreds of years after—Rome was irrelevant.
Marko: So what I would say is, okay, so ancient Rome. This is basically, let’s say, an agricultural society rather than an industrial one. Maybe they were getting close to ind—we don’t have to get into that right now. But for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s an agricultural society, and they’re at that classical, agricultural level of technology, which is not that different from medieval technology. We’re talking about swords and sandals.
They’re at swords and sandals. That’s what they have. Swords and sandals. And basically, I would make the argument that when you’re trying to control the behavior of lots of people using swords and sandals, you have to use even simpler and more stupid and more durable processes, that are less capable on a short timeframe, but maybe because of that, for the same reasons they’re kind of—
Wolf: They’re more robust
Marko: they’re more robust. They’re more durable—
Wolf: So your—
Marko: over the long term
Wolf: hypothesis is that in an industrial society, the systems—
Marko: Industrial sys—
Wolf: of control are actually more fragile.
Marko: Yes. They’re more—yes
Wolf: they may change faster.
Marko: They are more fragile, and so they can change faster, and you can make a very similar analogy to physical material technology in the sense that it’s a lot harder to keep the knowledge of extreme ultraviolet photolithography machines going. Because you can’t just keep the blueprints in the attic. The machine has to be constantly producing things. You have to have people working on the machine, gaining that knowledge, transmitting that knowledge—et cetera. That’s inherently a much more difficult, expensive, and complicated process than to maintain the technology of casting iron swords.
Wolf: Yeah. Or getting guys to meet and to call themselves the Senate.
Marko: Exactly. That’s a very simple one in some ways. It’s a very simple one. And so in a way, it’s much more durable. Even when everything around you is breaking down, you’re still able to keep that going.
So, what I would then say is that because we have these institutions of power made up of people that rely on complex material technology, when that complex material technology starts to fail or the capabilities that it provides are no longer quite supporting the—they’re sort of, what’s the word? They’re maybe shearing away slowly.
It’s starting to rust and the metal’s bending off and the—screw is coming loose and, oops, now it’s leaking and just as that can collapse very quickly because it’s fragile, the institutions that rely on it will also collapse, because once they don’t have that, they’re very tightly interlinked. It doesn’t—
Wolf: But this is all to say that we should perhaps feel more agency about reforming these institutions or replacing them—
Marko: We should
Wolf: than might be otherwise apparent.
Marko: Yes. We should feel agency about the fact that when these things collapse, and if they collapse very quickly, that we can rebuild them if we’ve taken the lessons from their dysfunction of however many years that we’ve been observing them. If we learn the right lessons, then when they collapse, we can quickly rebuild them and rebuild the technology.
Wolf: Well, ideally, we almost rebuild them first. We build—new things that—come in and—
Marko: I think that’s—
Wolf: replace their functions
Marko: I’m not going to say that’s impossible, but the difficulty level is extremely high for all of the reasons that we’ve been discussing. I’m not going to say it’s impossible, but I think the difficulty level is extremely high, and it’s not guaranteed by any means.
Wolf: So there’s this certain sort of waiting process involved that—
Marko: I think
Wolf: where it’s like you can’t just execute really fast to—
Marko: Well, you could—
Wolf: change the world
Marko: if your power level was high enough.
Wolf: If you had... Yeah.
Marko: If your power level was high enough.
Wolf: Maybe if you have AI.
Marko: Maybe if you have... Maybe. I mean, it’s certainly possible.
Wolf: Maybe that’s the way to space—
Marko: It’s certainly possible
Wolf: is to use AI to reform our institutions—
Marko: Maybe
Wolf: so that we can go to space
Marko: maybe it’s possible. Yeah. No, I’m not going to say that’s not possible. It could be possible. I don’t know.
If I knew that it was possible, I’d be doing it myself. And, I would be the one telling you to build rockets, because I would be in charge of the world. But I don’t see the path to that, so—
Wolf: Well, speaking of—
Marko: I’m just analyzing the situation
The origins of spaceism (1:13:23)
Wolf: So this has been fascinating, but I do want to touch a little bit before we wrap up, also the concept of the ideology of spaceism—which is kind of implied in this. That we’re proposing a worldview, maybe, or an orientation that we should actually just build rockets and go to space and explore the galaxy.
So let’s talk a little bit about the history of that, because in the late 19th century, you had people starting to flirt with these ideas, taking the materialist kind of picture of the world and saying, “Wait a minute, that means that you can get up there.” And like when they discovered the rocket equation, it implies you can use a rocket to travel through space to other worlds, right? And someone wrote a book on that. Who was it who wrote that book? Do you remember?
Marko: Uh...
Wolf: That literally like space travel via the rocket to other worlds.
Marko: The German guy. It would be—
Wolf: It might’ve been a German guy
Marko: I mean, there were many people kind of coming—
Wolf: Was it Oberth? No, it wasn’t Oberth.
Marko: There’s Hermann Oberth, but I mean, Tsiolkovsky was like I think kind of—
Wolf: It might’ve been Tsiolkovsky
Marko: thinking along, he was so, I mean, for just like—
Wolf: But point being—
Marko: For whatever, yeah
Wolf: point being it was someone earlier these guys started reading this book. Von Braun read the book—and the whole—
Marko: That was Oberth. That was Oberth
Wolf: Oberth read—
Marko: Von Braun read Oberth, yeah. And Oberth probably read Tsiolkovsky. I mean, it was in the water. It was in the water, right?
Wolf: Well, it was this tradition.
Marko: Different tradition.
Wolf: Tradition being developed.
Marko: Yeah. Different human beings came up with the same revelations from nature.
Wolf: And people got super hyped. I think von Braun was also reading about Goddard’s experiments. And—
Marko: They were all in touch
Wolf: the German rocket cult got going—in the 1920s.
Marko: And the Soviet rocket cult. Let’s not forget the Soviet rocket cult.
Wolf: Was there an independent Soviet rocket cult?
Marko: Oh, of course. Of course. What, you think the Russians weren’t in on this? They were—
Wolf: Well, I know they captured a lot of German scientists after the war, but—
Marko: No. No, in the ‘20s and ‘30s. No, it was very international. You had rocketeers, there’s this quote from von Braun where he said that all of the people involved in kind of the rocket community, if you will—
Wolf: The rocket community
Marko: the rocket community in the 1920s, he was basically like, “It wasn’t really the rocket community. It was the space community.” They all wanted to visit other planets.
Wolf: Yeah, the whole point was—
Marko: The whole point was to visit other planets
Wolf: to use rockets to visit other worlds. As Oberth wanted.
Marko: Yeah. They weren’t so especially interested in making missiles or making rocket-powered cars, right?
Wolf: Yeah. Well, von Braun always had those comments that the rockets are landing on the wrong planet, right?
Marko: There you go. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Exactly.
Anyway. But no, it was very much an international, I mean—
Wolf: So why, now at the time, they hadn’t quite proven it, they hadn’t made this big, massive accomplishment of landing on the moon. They were starting to be able to bomb London with these things, but—
Marko: That was a little later. I’m talking about the ‘20s
Wolf: no, but—
Marko: It was a very vibrant scene in the ‘20s and the ‘30s
Wolf: they developed and von Braun got enough of an industrial concern under him that he was able to build some rockets. Some real rockets. That flew, and went to space. And landed on London, unfortunately.
Marko: Actually, I think, interesting fact, the first human object to reach outer space was launched by Nazi Germany during World War II. By Von Braun.
Wolf: Of course it was von Braun.
Marko: That was the first. Yeah. People don’t like to bring that up, but you know. Interesting historical fact, actually. Yeah
Wolf: but at the time, everyone was fighting. They had other ideas about what was important, as humanity versus the Germans or the Ubermensch or whatever, these concepts, communism, the arc of history. But they didn’t yet have the concept of space, and space was sort of still subordinate to these things. And then after that, we’re in this lockdown, Eleanor Roosevelt, like 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights world, where there’s no longer this open dynamism of an impending war, but you have things kind of locked down. But nonetheless, the space cult continues to grow—continues to be in this subordinate position.
They do get their man on the moon, effectively like post-war science fiction—is about this. You know? It’s about the rocket. Starting with guys like Clarke, Arthur C. Clarke inventing the geosynchronous orbit satellite. They have all these ideas of expanding through space using rockets.
Marko: Yeah, you have this like, not renaissance, but like this blooming of ideas—
Wolf: Yeah, this blooming. But of course—
Marko: and accomplishments, actual accomplishments
Wolf: by the 1970s, this tendency unfortunately is mostly, defeated god of live players
Marko: it was direct, it was completely defeated in one fell swoop, actually. Because, the two, okay, I mean, so yeah, I mean, the two guys who were leading the space race were Wernher von Braun at NASA—
Wolf: And Korolev
Marko: and Sergei Korolev in the Soviet Union. And Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev, Korolev, whatever, originally, they had been in that scene literally since the 1920s. They were responsible for some of the earliest accomplishments, right? So it was not like a second generation even, it was still the very first—
Wolf: It was just those guys
Marko: it was just those guys. It was the first founding generation of rocket engineers who read the original crazy books by Tsiolkovsky, who had like, I mean, it’s kind of forgotten now, but you had this communist atheist strain of spaceism, which is what Tsiolkovsky believed in.
Wolf: Yeah, cosmism.
Marko: Cosmism. Oh, but I think he went even further. He was thinking, he was interested in the possibility of a life without gravity because gravity is an oppressive force that prevents us from—biologically or mechanically expanding in any direction that we want, and—
Wolf: Yeah. They had some truly wonderful ideas about what new Soviet man would be like.
Marko: The new Soviet man. But I mean, who knows? Who knows, man?
It was a very intellectually and kind of aesthetically productive scene. Anyway, so those were the two guys, and they basically built each some of the largest rockets that had ever flown. And I think Korolev just died of medical problems in 1966. And his successor kind of was not quite Speaking of succession problems and not knowing how to run the institutions that were built, he didn’t—
Wolf: But they did build some impressive rockets after that, but never—
Marko: They didn’t work
Wolf: never quite as good.
Marko: They didn’t work. The biggest ones didn’t work, right? I think it was the Energia—
Wolf: Yeah. They never got the N1.
Marko: The Energia rocket, I think it was called, never worked.
Wolf: Energia, that was the one that they had their space shuttle, the Buran, right?
Marko: I think I—
Wolf: That was supposed to fly on the Energia.
Marko: Yeah. I’m sure we’ll be cor—
Wolf: I think they flew that once. I think they flew that once
Marko: we’ll be corrected in the comments, but their answer to the rockets that took them into the moon was supposed to be Energia, and it never really worked, and basically, that was 1966, so they were kind of stalling then for a few years. Von Braun beat them to the moon, and then von Braun, the story is that he wanted to go to Mars, and he had a plan to put astronauts on Mars by 1983. He had a schedule. It was all planned out.
Here’s the plan. We just did the moon.
Wolf: It’s time for Mars.
Marko: Time for Mars.
Wolf: We’re going to build a space shuttle, we’re going to build a low Earth orbit station—
Marko: I mean—
Wolf: we’re going to go to Mars
Marko: nobody even died, Wolf. It went off without a hitch. Nobody even died. Like, shit
Wolf: nobody died in space.
Marko: In space. Sure.
Wolf: John Glenn and—
Marko: Point being—
Wolf: Apollo 1, right? They did die
Marko: it was such a great accomplishment, you would think that with such a great accomplishment, everybody would be itching to go to the next step, right? But the problem was, in von Braun’s own words, he said, even he could not actually explain why we should go to Mars to Congress. Even von Braun himself was not able to explain to anybody why we should spend all this money, and all this time, and all these resources—on a Mars program. What are we getting out of it?
Wolf: Yeah, and meanwhile—the acolytes of humanity are getting more and more aggressive with slogans like, “Pennies for the hungry, billions for space.”
Marko: Well, look, I think that’s just... I see that as just a kind of particular expression of a perennial impulse, and I prefer to view the problem not as like...
Every institution, by default, is dysfunctional. Every institution, by default, is dysfunctional because the people within it, playing their little role in the machine, are maybe not even aware of the overall purpose of the organization, and their most immediate concern is kind of kicking back and relaxing, and looting anything they can for their own personal enjoyment and pleasure, and kind of—
Wolf: Yeah, and that of their friends and so on
Marko: and that of their friends and whatever. But the point is, every institution then has to have very strong safeguards against people going off mission, if you will, right? And even at the highest level then, for anything specific in particular to get done, there has to be some kind of compelling justification. And so it’s like the ambient laziness and entropy and lack of kind of agency and mission orientedness is like you’re arguing with entropy. It doesn’t need to be argued with or even really thought of.
Of course that’s what’s going to happen.
Wolf: It just is.
Marko: It just is. What else would it be? What else would it be? It’s the particular mission—
Wolf: So point being, we lose—
Marko: and the particular structure that’s unique
Wolf: we lose the pre-war generation—
Marko: That needs to be explained. Yeah
Wolf: they did not—
Marko: Von Braun retired in 1972. So Korolev dies in ‘66, and then von Braun retires 1972. And that’s it.
Wolf: Nixon guts the program, and that’s that.
Marko: And that’s that. And nothing happens until Elon Musk comes along in the 2000s and the 2010s and starts building reusable rockets. And it’s still Elon Musk. So basically, you have this one generation of these guys—and then a whole many decades of nothing.
Wolf: Yeah, or approximately nothing.
Marko: Approximately. I mean, nothing. It’s nothing.
Wolf: The space shuttle, but yeah.
Marko: That’s nothing. That’s stagnation and the decline rather than... You have to think, Wolf, the sort of folk theories of progress are that progress only goes in one direction. And yet we’re sitting here, and we know that we put men on the moon, and then we just gave up on that for 50 years.
What? That’s crazy. That doesn’t make any sense. Until Elon Musk came along and decided to push it further.
Wolf: Yeah. I remember—Doesn’t the story literally go, he’s asking, “Well, when do we get to Mars? What’s the plan?”
Marko: Yeah. What’s the plan? There was no plan.
Wolf: And then there was no plan.
Marko: It was not in the plan. It was not in the plan because getting to Mars is extremely hard and difficult, and so on and so forth. And just like, whatever, building satellites or space shuttles is marginally easier for everybody in the organization who doesn’t have the charisma, and the power, and the foresight to pull everyone together and argue through the US government, which is a big part of the job of being NASA administrator or the head of the space program. There’s nobody capable of doing that. Even von Braun was not capable of doing that, honestly.
Wolf: Yeah. And the way Elon’s overcome this is he’s argued to various people—to fund it—
Marko: He found a new strategy
Wolf: fund it on the basis of the intermediate value that you can create along the way, right? We’re going to build military value. We’re going to be able to put things in orbit for cheaper. We’re going to be able to have this nice space internet—space data centers, all this stuff that’s being offered. But people talk about asteroid mining.
No one’s really proposed that seriously as an economic proposition yet. But there’s these intermediates along the way, but fundamentally, Elon’s not motivated by this. He’s motivated—
Marko: He’s not motivated by this, and I would even say—
Wolf: He’s motivated by—
Marko: Elon Musk—
Wolf: spreading consciousness throughout the universe.
Industrialism requires a higher mission (1:25:50)
Marko: Yes, which he’s said many times, and I would even go further and say Elon Musk is in many ways the ideal human stem cell for industry. Because Elon Musk understands that you don’t start off with the business plan. You start off developing the technology, and when you discover new business plans that will make you profit and allow the technology to keep developing within the confines of our social institutions, including the price system, and the free market, and all this stuff, then you just seize them. I don’t think the original plan for SpaceX was Starlink. I think—
Wolf: No. That was something he came up with along the way
Marko: that was something he came up with along the way, and he said, “Oh, shit. Perfect. Let’s do that, too.” Right? And that’s kind of—
Wolf: And it’s not just the technology.
Marko: Or look at Tesla. Or look at Tesla, right?
Wolf: He started with the need for the technology—that came from the transcendent purpose—of let’s go to space. And I find that’s an important point that Elon Musk, the ideal stem cell of industry, this guy who is recognizably the world’s best industrialist—he is the world’s best industrialist because he believes—
Marko: That’s right
Wolf: in something to do with it.
Marko: That’s right. Exactly.
Wolf: And that’s an important fact about this whole thing is part of your whole argument is that even if all you cared about was keeping industry going, keeping capitalism going, building these toys, you need to have people who believe in what to do with it. You need to have an end to it all.
Marko: Well, so I completely agree with that. And the interesting question is why those two things are related in that way. And what I would say is that, the precise causes and whatever is a very difficult historical question. But for better or worse, we have kind of not had this desire as a society or a civilization to continue expanding—to continue expanding the sum total of the capabilities, made up of these industrial technological processes that we are capable of building. We kind of sometime in the ‘60s or the ‘70s, and there were, I don’t know, I guess there were elements of that even earlier in World War I and World War II because there’s fears about the impact of technology on the environment or the capability of mankind to destroy himself—with the more powerful weapons that he’s building.
So like, okay, whatever. That’s a thing that goes back decades, maybe centuries. But for whatever happened around the ‘60s or the ‘70s, we kind of set a limit on maybe everything except for computers. Which is like kind of Peter Thiel’s thing, like everything—but computers kind of stopped advancing, right?
Wolf: Yeah. This comes back to like now we project all our ambitions into computers because—it’s the only open frontier, right?
Marko: Yeah. And to be clear, clearly there are more ways that we can scale even the technology that we do have, like nuclear power or even rockets earlier. Now Elon is scaling it, but before Elon, we could’ve been doing more with that, too, right? We had the sort of physical capability—in the same way that we scaled semiconductors. But it appears like we just chose not to, maybe because of fears of the military consequences or maybe because of deeper whatever.
Wolf: Or it’s simply that we lacked a live player who had a coherent vision.
Marko: Absolutely. And it’s very poetic in a sense. It’s like, wow, the Industrial Revolution, we just had this incredible spurt of technological and industrial growth that looked like it was completely unstoppable until someone conquered the world, and then it just stopped. And doesn’t that make sense in a way? Doesn’t that kind of make sense in a way?
Because up until then, that was the ambition of every Caesar and Alexander the Great and Napoleon.
Wolf: Right, to conquer the world.
Marko: The highest possible ambition was not to conquer the cosmos. Or maybe the ambition is the same. It’s to conquer the known world, right? And it’s just that—
Wolf: We just lived in this medieval dome
Marko: we just lived in this medieval dome, and we didn’t even realize it, and we haven’t updated our priors, if you will, that the world is so much bigger than we realize.
Wolf: Yeah, so coming back to this historical question, like we’re now maybe reaching the end of this sort of post-war institutional order, where as we say, these things are starting to fray around the edges and perhaps collapse.
Marko: They’re fraying.
Wolf: This is—
Marko: There’s still some time for collapse, I think.
Wolf: There’s still some time.
Marko: There’s still some time. But don’t get too excited.
Wolf: Don’t get too excited.
Marko: Don’t get too excited. Take it easy. There’s like—
Wolf: Nothing ever happens, et cetera.
Marko: Yeah. Take it easy.
Wolf: But nonetheless—
Marko: Yeah, take it chill, pal. You can relax for now, Elon
Wolf: nonetheless, it looks like we’re reaching some kind of moment of reform, I would say. I think there’s a possibility. And now would be the time historically for that, I call it the rocket cult, you can call it spaceism—like for that—
Marko: Now—
Wolf: For that now to take the—
Marko: Now we need the next thing to begin to coalesce and to—
Wolf: For that thing now to take the primary seat—
Marko: develop and yeah
Wolf: right? Where it’s always taken the secondary seat, whether under Germany or under America. It may now take the primary seat, and that’s kind of what you’re proposing, is that actually—the rocket cult or spaceism or this idea of expanding into space, conquering space, this is actually a well-formed holistic vision for what to do with society—overall.
Man as liability (1:31:18)
Marko: Yeah. And so what happened was that when we decided to stop expanding our capabilities because we are these kind of human stem cells that have to be constantly working and growing our capabilities by automating processes. Once we decide to stop doing that, what do we do instead? Right? There’s nothing to do then.
Wolf: Right. You just stagnate.
Marko: Then you have this idle labor, right?
Wolf: Save the owls.
Marko: Idle... What’s that?
Wolf: Save the owls.
Marko: Save the owls. To be honest, there’s so many different things we’ve tried to do with our time instead, and it’s all been kind of lame and boring. And everyone seems to get tired of it, and that could all be subjective, but I think the damning evidence is that fertility rates have completely cratered in every developed country—because for a very long time now—
Wolf: We’ve nerfed that creative impulse
Marko: we’ve nerfed that creative impulse. We’ve decided—
Wolf: And we have no need for people. Like what?
Marko: We have no need for people. We have no need for people.
Wolf: Because we’re not doing anything.
Marko: We think that we’ve built this wonderful technological system. We’ve built this wonderful industrial technological system, and we love the fruits of it. And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to freeze it in place and get rid of all the people who compose it and replace them with machines. And then we’re going to continue enjoying the fruits, but somehow, hopefully, without the bad parts of it, without the risk of war or destruction or—but I would say it even goes deeper, without the hard work that goes in maintaining it. But obviously, this is all completely wrong.
Wolf: Yeah, all we have to do is—
Marko: This is completely wrong
Wolf: move some numbers on a spreadsheet, pour some—finances into AI and like—
Marko: Drink a coffee, push a button, and it’ll run itself.
Wolf: Claude will do it.
Marko: Wolf, it’s not AI that has been enabling our affluent lives. It’s the Chinese . We’ve lost all our industry, and it’s not because we’ve automated—
Wolf: This is not an accident. They know this
Marko: They know this, which is why they’ve been doing it, because they want to have those capabilities. Right? This is the story of what’s been happening for decades, is we’ve been kind of doing, not this vertical, absolute increase in human capabilities, but more like this horizontal transfer of the capabilities from what was the developed world, the Western world, United States foremost, to China primarily. It’s not quite the West versus China. I think that’s kind of fake.
It’s not really the US versus China, because the US has, in other ways, even allowed Europe, for example, or Japan or South Korea to take over these industries that previously used to be—that you previously had an American version of, right? Really what you’re seeing is this attempt to freeze human development in amber while preserving the fruits of it, and it doesn’t work because people need to be working to maintain it. And—
Wolf: Well, if I can put it shortly, the post-war humanism imagines the human being as an end, right? As something to be fed, something for resources to be poured into. Whereas what you’re proposing is much more the human being as a means. The human being is this essential component of the industrial order—that exists for the purpose of—
Marko: For the purpose of this great—rearrangement of matter and energy throughout—space and time according to the principles of nature as we’ve discovered them.
Wolf: And if we’re not doing that, if we’re not doing that—
Marko: If we’re not doing that—
Wolf: we have no need for the person.
Marko: We have no need for the person.
Wolf: The person is just a liability. The other word for—
Marko: Yes, the person’s just a liability
Wolf: an end. The other word for an end in itself is a liability, right?
Marko: That’s true. Yeah.
Wolf: Because it’s something you owe to.
Marko: So we’ve turned ourselves into liabilities. And what do you do with liabilities? You get rid of them.
Wolf: You remove them from the balance sheet.
Marko: You remove them from the balance sheet, which is exactly what we’ve been doing with incredible efficiency. Again, like—
Wolf: Well, we could’ve done better, but—we don’t want to think too much about that
Marko: South Korea is doing even better than we are. China might do it better than them even. We haven’t even seen yet how low the fertility rates can get and what other crazy social phenomena can happen. But it is totally the natural thing that occurs because we don’t need the people. The people realize they’re not needed, in a way.
And so they kind of just pass the time. They turn inwards. Basically everything... I have this idea that, I sort of thought, well, according to this logic, basically unless you’re... And I’m going to simplify it a little bit, but it’s like unless you’re working in China at these factories or you’re like Elon Musk, everybody’s just coping with whatever it is that they’re doing.
They’re just coping. They’re just passing the time. That’s not totally true. There’s a lot of people who play really useful roles and still—
Wolf: Yeah. But there’s—
Marko: in this system, in society
Wolf: a lot of just sitting around, enjoying ourselves.
Marko: There’s a lot of sitting around and enjoying ourselves, fake jobs, kind of, all this stuff that will never result in any kind of ultimate increase in human capabilities, right? And there’s a lot of ways that we can hide it. We’re in a post-scarcity society already, right? That was one of the things I’ve argued, that post-scarcity—is this fake idea because you can—
Wolf: We already achieved it.
Marko: Well, what’s the metric by which you define scarcity, right? Is it like—
Wolf: Yeah, it’s like people starving to death, people—you know?
Marko: Yeah. Like—
Wolf: Not having houses.
Marko: Yeah, not having houses, basic material scarcity. We solved that more than 100 years ago. I guess not everybody can have their own personal skyscraper or their own personal yacht. Ironically, if that’s how you see post-scarcity, you would still need to go to space because we’re going to run out of matter and energy—for all the stuff that people are going to want, right? But it turns out people don’t even want that much stuff, right?
People don’t even want that much stuff. We can give people all the stuff that they want as consumers, and it’s not enough stuff to motivate the impersonal forces of capitalism to—
Wolf: Well, it’s again—
Marko: continue developing—
Wolf: man as a liability instead of an asset, right? It’s like, what’s the point, right? Why do we need to expand?
Marko: There is no point.
Wolf: Why do we need to expand—
Marko: There is no point
Wolf: the standard of living? There’s no point.
Marko: Yeah. There is no point. There’s no point. And so, in all of these ways, we are doing nothing. Nothing is happening except us experiencing the completely logical and predictable consequences of what we’ve been trying to do with global civilization, basically.
There is no such thing as stagnation (1:38:23)
Marko: And okay, if you want to make the human being an asset again—the human being is going to be working. And if the human being is working, think about this—
Wolf: We need something to do with all that work
Marko: We need something to do with all that work, because again, the work cannot be fake. Okay? It cannot be fake work. Fake work doesn’t work, okay? People can tell.
Wolf: Yeah. We need something—
Marko: People can tell. They know it. And if you give them fake work, they kind of go crazy even—and then they burn out. Okay? They burn out with real work, let alone with fake work.
And it’s kind of funny because in this way, as a society, we kind of want to have the fruits of a dynamic society full of young people changing the world. But we don’t want them to actually do it because it means things have to change, and we don’t want them to change because that’s uncomfortable and that interrupts the kind of sleepy vacation that humanity’s on.
Wolf: It interrupts the retirement home.
Marko: It interrupts the retirement home, right? Like, “Oh, those young people need to work.” But we’re going to make everything illegal to do. We’re going to ship all the industry to China. Actually, don’t do anything.
Do work, but don’t actually work, right?
Wolf: So you’ve got to get off this stagnation track, and you’re proposing spaceism, go to space, expand into space—
Marko: I’m saying, yeah
Wolf: as this obvious—
Marko: Yeah. I think it’s obvious
Wolf: kind of telos that is now in reach.
Marko: Well, you say telos, but I’m maybe not even saying that it’s some kind of telos or a goal. But I’m saying that because of what we are as human beings, I’m sort of proposing that the human condition and human nature is such that we kind of have to work, we want to work, we create tools out of things and out of each other, and these tools have to exist in the real—all the real work that we do has to have these consequences, ultimately, on everybody else, right? You can’t just, again, it’s this—
Wolf: You can’t just do all this work and have nothing change. So there has to be something we’re trying to accomplish with all this. What are we doing with it all?
Marko: It has to exist in the real world. You can’t just—
Wolf: Expand it.
Marko: Yeah. You can’t just have everybody sit in a room and close their eyes and do mental work in their heads and have the same... That’s not how it works, right? It’s like no. The mental work is not real unless it interfaces with the physical world.
If it interfaces with the physical world, it’s going to have externalities. It’s going to change things. It’s going to require resources that maybe somebody else wanted. You get a human civilization. You get a society with conflict and dynamism and new discoveries and surprises, etcetera.
All the things that we want out of life, right? So I’m sort of making this anthropological claim. And if you say, “Great, we’re not going to interrupt this process,” you inevitably have to expand off of planet Earth, because planet Earth is limited. And this process—
Wolf: I see. So space is almost this just necessity to the process of—not killing ourselves.
Marko: Yes. If we keep—
Wolf: If we—if we choose life—we also choose space.
Marko: Exactly. There’s no choosing stagnation, right? It’s sort of like, well, Marko, why can’t we just... Okay, I’ve heard all this logic, I’ve heard all these arguments. Why can’t we just choose to maintain industrial society at exactly the kind of the level that we have right now?
We’re not going to go further.
Wolf: Sort of the eternal 1999. Yeah.
Marko: Yeah, eternal 1999. 1999 was perfect. Why don’t we just keep it at eternal 1999, and basically, we’re not going to go further, but we’re also not going to go behind. We’re just going to pay people to work enough to maintain the system forever. And okay, maybe on some level that sounds reasonable, but the problem is you’re going to have to get rid of all the human capital, and people are going to ask themselves—
Wolf: Well, it’s also just not possible. There is no such thing as stagnation, right? There’s only decline or growth.
Marko: Well, yeah. I agree. But I’m trying to be the devil’s advocate here. Why can’t you just have enough growth to maintain the thing in stasis, right? Why isn’t that just the right choice?
Why isn’t it the right choice just to maintain the thing in stasis kind of indefinitely, right? And it’s sort of like you—
Wolf: Well, I guess the way I would say it is all of those components presume some purpose. And if you’ve—if you’ve stagnated it and saying, “We’re not going to accomplish that purpose very quickly or at all,” then you’ve actually destroyed the logic of the system.
Marko: You’ve destroyed the logic of the system, and actually what you’re saying is that the purpose of the system is no longer to continue ascending up the ladder of industrial technology and capabilities. You’re going to have to get rid of a lot of the human capital and the human labor that got you there, which we’ve been doing. And that you’re actually saying the new purpose of the system is kind of, we’re going to—
Wolf: It’s just to lock things down.
Marko: Well, it’s to lock things down, but maybe that would even work. But it’s actually worse than that in a way. You’re sort of saying the purpose of the system is just to gratify everybody’s pleasures. It’s to give everybody the wonderful gratification of living in 1999 forever. Okay?
And we’re going to spread that across every generation until the end of time. Okay? So, for the next billion years, we’re going to keep reproducing at 2.1. Earth is going to have people, and they’re all just going to be endlessly living in 1999.
Wolf: The end of history.
Marko: And they will all get their little share of the joy and pleasure of living in 1999. And it’s like, okay, well, if that’s the goal, why don’t we just enjoy the pleasure of living in 1999 to its fullest right now? And we won’t reproduce the system. We’ll kind of just loot it for what it’s worth right now. And what’s the difference between one generation that gets to live this enjoyable, pleasurable life versus a million of them, right?
Is that utilitarianism maybe? Is that kind of how utilitarians see it?
Wolf: Well, I think they—
Marko: It’s kind of like—
Wolf: they want it to keep going, but what you’re saying is psychologically—
Marko: I’m saying psychologically, it’s kind of incoherent.
Wolf: Yeah. It doesn’t work.
Marko: It’s kind of incoherent psychologically. And again, I’m sort of making this anthropological claim. When a person who’s working successfully automates one process, and it requires less human labor, through whatever form that takes, they don’t want to stop.
Wolf: Yeah. They want to do it again. They want to do the next thing
Marko: they want to do it again. They want to do it again, and again and again and again, right? And if you forcibly stop them, maybe you just break something about that person.
Wolf: Yeah. This is what I mean.
Marko: Maybe—
Wolf: Stagnation is not actually possible. You’re either going up or down. And therefore, let’s go up.
Marko: Let’s go up, because the other choice is dying. And if you’re going to die, then you can go do that right now and nobody will stop you. It’s the rest of us who want to live that need to have these discussions. So
Wolf: Yeah. Well, this has been very long, but very rich and productive.
Marko: Excellent.
Wolf: So thank you very much, Marko.
Marko: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to watching this myself, and I hope it wasn’t too heady and abstract, and I hope we were both clear about these big, crazy, big picture concepts, and yeah. It was a pleasure.
Wolf: All right.
Marko: So onward to Mars. Onward to Mars.
Wolf: Onward to Mars. Up we go.
Marko: Up we go. Up we go.