Nailing the Landing
Convo with Adam Becker & Cathy O'Neil on April 28! & Craft Countdown for April!
Busy busy over here. Setting aside politics (which I am doing for purposes of this note b/c otherwise it would be longer and angrier than I have time for now)—writing, outlining, more writing, pitching, trying to stay on top of email, trying to heal & get back out on the road. At least I can sit up without wincing in pain! Most of the time.
On April 28, Cambridge (US)-area folks can catch me in conversation with Adam Becker and Cathy O’Neil (Weapons of Math Destruction) about Adam’s new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. I’m chewing through the book right now, enjoying the hell out of it.
Maybe enjoying is the wrong word. A particular raft of ideological commitments (and in fact IMO religious commitments but we do not have time for that conversation) quite common in Silicon Valley are long overdue for the kind of… broad-spectrum normal-people questioning that this book will permit. I was surprised, during the first denouement of the Sam Bankman-Fried1/FTX debacle2, by the horror with which my extremely smart and well-read mother-in-law responded to a tame and relatively accurate description of some relevant threads of extreme longtermist effective altruism. Many people who are generally kindly disposed toward space exploration and discussing how to do the most efficient good with limited resources (hi!) would like to get off the train before it reaches the extreme of “it is our duty to the future megaquintillions of soul-dubbed human sequelae languishing in digital hells of their own making in distant star-systems that have been gray-goo mulched into compute, for us in 2025 to spend zero dollars on mosquito nets and all dollars on apocalypse bunkers and rockets and AI think tanks staffed by my buddies.3” It’s good for folks who’d reach for Bullfinch when you say “Basilisk” to know what these folks are on about.
I do think we, as a society, need room for weird little cul-de-sacs of thought, coral reefs of discourse: people getting high off their own supply. I’ve spent too much time on internet forums and bullshitting in dorm rooms at 2am to believe otherwise without rank hypocrisy. But the sunlight has to come in sooner or later, and the time for that is long before those ideas turn into policy, or failing that: now. I hope folks who seriously embrace one or all of this raft of ideas welcome the stress-test.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to this conversation and I hope to see you there: https://www.harvard.com/event/adam-becker.
I just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture series—after making a very grown-up decision to read the last hundred pages of Lords of Uncreation this morning as opposed to last night—and damn but these books stick the landing. Chills throughout. Proper revelation, world-changing confrontations, bit of humor, characters stepping up to Do Their Thing, inspiring and bar-setting, lawyer jokes, just the right read as I’m contemplating a series end myself. One of those lovely, rare cases where the final book serves as a capstone, where the ending makes the whole project and each of its constituent pieces better. It’s funny to look back through my read of the trilogy overall and identify moments of meta-stress, akin to what I’d imagine an ice skater feels watching another skater perform a challenging routine: oh shit is he going to pull this off? I’ve seen that setup go wrong before… is this the right angle of approach? the momentum, the momentum! And then: it works!
I have long felt that endings can end up under-baked in publishing, for structural reasons. A story hooks readers (+ publishers, agents, reviewers) on concept and opening—by the time readers reach the end, they’re invested, and will be forgiving. I don’t think anyone sets out with this as a goal—there are just fewer filters in place in the last 10 pages than there are in the first 10. What a relief to read a resolution.
Another great ending: have I talked about Metal from Heaven by August Clarke? I’d advise against reading the back cover blurb, personally—it isn’t misleading, all that stuff does happen, but it sets you up for a differently-paced project than you are in fact confronting—but it’s a fantastic expansive stylish leftist sapphic fantasy novel with a tech vibe somewhere around ultra-decadent FFVI. Bit of Bas-Lag, bit of LeGuin, bit of Mike Ford in its buildungsroman structure. Quite hot, too (this must be where all that sex Gideon the Ninth is not having got off to). In more contemporary terms it should probably share a shelf with Riot Baby and The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, maybe the Broken Earth books, and probably a boxed set of Arcane (at least to judge from the two episodes4 and fan art I’ve seen). But very much its own thing!
Recent releases of note, which I haven’t read yet but am regarding in a salivary manner, like a hungry wolf in a Disney cartoon, whenever my eye turns to my TBR pile:
Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance
Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Drop of Corruption
This month, the Craft Countdown brings us to Two Serpents Rise! We’ll have the book club on Wednesday, April 22, and the AMA on Thursday, April 24!
Last month was a blast. Looking forward to a repeat—with fewer reddit outages this time maybe?
And that’s what I have for today! Take care of yourselves, friends. Happy reading. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.
Writer: Because he’s the man who fried the bank! Showrunner: get the hell out of my office
I think we’re arguably in that debacle’s third or fourth denouement at the moment—the rightward turn of a certain set of Silicon Valley billionaires coincides too neatly for my taste with the singular reality that a Democratic president actually sent one of their Remarkable Boys to real federal prison for breaking the law.
There is no doubt, I write with a heavy sigh, some forum post out there arguing about the percentage chance that The World Works Like That (that nanomachines and self-bootstrapping AGI and hyperlongevity and FTL and brain-uploading and the rest of the TESCREAL zoo are even possible), and what magnitude of googolplex soul dubbed human sequelae population you’d need to exist in that eventuality to justify putting any chips whatsoever on that space on the craps board… I also wonder how discount rate math works out even assuming 100% likelihood the TWWLT. Hm. Quick consultation with an online NPV calendar indicates that the value of 10^150 human lives 6800 years in the future at 5.5% discount rate is 0.08 human lives today? I am not certain I’m using the formula correctly—I am after all a plain simple caveman frozen in ice for 10,000 years and your modern world confuses and infuriates me—but also, I’m not planning to use this observation to drive policy. Yet.
I have a kid. It’s hard to watch things.
The event sounds cool! I RSVPed. Still not 100% sure I can make it, but will try :)
Very excited about the book recs, can't wait to read some Tchaikovsky!