Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future
He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as well as acting as a panopticon lower management, and centralized social credit system.
The other society uses the similar technology not as a social class moat, but as a tool to form a synthesis with all members of their culture and and unlock new levels of individual freedom.
The dystopian part was only enabled (within the story) by the fact that humans were utterly unnecessary to the rich.
None had any jobs, because the AI could do all for less… so why would the oligarchs waste money employing human wage slaves when the machines would always be cheaper than slaves?
All the rest of it is a narrative about consequences.
Anyway, the AI there isn't like our LLMs either. It's an AGI capable of long term societal prediction.
Which means the owners will constantly be playing whack-a-mole with edge cases and emergent properties that they couldn't anticipate from a prior fix.
This is what would destabilize the dystopia; though that doesn't imply more freedom. It could just mean replacing one set of oligarchs with another; skynet; or just anarchy if Manna started becoming very buggy.
On the otherhand, I don't think Vertebrane is Turing complete though I haven't given this a deep amount of thought; though I can't see how a bad actor couldn't coopt Vertebrane into a Manna.
are you sure that the technology of the former was not really fantasy technology - as in not possible yet at the time of writing? I think it probably isn't quite possible yet at this time, although some people I'm sure are hoping to make it.
But I would like to point out that the “utopia” has a few serious panopticon elements which are very 1984. It seems as though high-welfare and high redistribution societies are predicated on high trust of your peers, and this takes that to the extreme…
> Another core principle is that nothing is anonymous. Eric grew up during the rise of the Internet, and the rise of global terrorism, and one thing he realized is that anonymity allows incredible abuse. It does not matter if you are sending anonymous, untraceable emails that destroy someone’s career, or if you are anonymously releasing computer viruses, or if you are anonymously blowing up buildings. Anonymity breeds abuse. In [utopia], if you walk from your home to a park, your path is logged. You cannot anonymously pass by someone else’s home. If someone looks up your path that day to see who walked by, that fact is also logged. So you know who knows your path. And so on. This system, of course, makes it completely impossible to commit an anonymous crime. So there is no anonymous crime. Anyone who commits a crime is immediately detained and disciplined.”
Since no one else has brought it up yet, I want to say that one of his websites, "Why Won't God Heal Amputees" (https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/) was very important in my world. It may not exactly be the most highbrow philosophical or theological treatise you've ever encountered, but it crystallized several points I still consider hugely significant.
For anyone raised by Christian fundamentalists of the type who continue to claim to believe in miracles being possible as a direct result of prayer, it is one of the most important things you may ever read. It lays bare the blatant falsehoods at the root of all such claims, forcing you to grapple with the fact that whatever higher power(s) may exist, they do not keep their supposed written promises in any way that we human beings would consider honest amongst each other.
It's interesting to read the Nicholas Kristof op-ed from 2006 (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03kristof.html) which he links because it mentions the site (in its incarnation as "whydoesgodhateamputees.com") as "part of an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive", and essentially argues that the New Atheists should back off and stop being so mean.
While the New Atheists were definitely sharp-tongued (another page on the site asserts that there's no such thing as an 'atheist', for the same reason that someone who doesn't believe in leprechauns wouldn't be called an 'aleprechaunist', and atheists should instead call themselves 'rational people'), I think they had some excellent points about how the religious point of view is treated as the default in public discourse - and one of the ways that manifests is that arguments for religion (and more nebulous spirituality) are seen as expected and ordinary, while arguments against religion are seen as inherently aggressive and mean-spirited.
In the words of the Bible, “ the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. ...” meaning his guide will only take him to further darkness and misguidance.
These are all incredibly subjective concepts with a multitude of meanings to different people. Plenty of people are confused about them, because they simply cannot be universally defined and are therefore by their very nature confusing.
For better or worse, large numbers of humans believe in a literal, conscious deity who can read their thoughts and then act upon the real world to make physical changes in it, provided they shape those thoughts 'just so'. There is no hard evidence these kinds of beliefs are true, and at least some evidence that they can be harmful.
I am not opposed to prayer. I even still do it myself sometimes. However, I think people should be more careful about making strong claims that anyone is actually listening to those prayers, let alone acting on them. Marshall Brain's website helped me to much better understand and articulate this in simple, concrete terms.
No need for goalpost moving. The holy book claims that God answers prayers. This is, in fact, a lie. Some people aren't yet fully convinced of this, and reading the website helps them along. (see uncle comments)
It's worse than that, it's bad theology on a topic that has been discussed for millennia.
The most salient point he made as far as I'm concerned is that there are very specific claims made throughout the Bible and other Christian literature about what exactly prayer does-- and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that many if not most of those particular claims are false.
I am not opposed to people praying, and in fact wholeheartedly support it in many cases. What I am opposed to is making unreasonable assertions about what is happening when someone prays, and what kinds of results are to be expected.
I'm very much in favor of showing how silly or self-contradictory (A) is, but it is fundamentally unsound to jump from that to asserting (B) is true.
Disclaimer: I didn't read the entire website yet.
Now that I'm more of an agnostic utilitarian realist, it all seems a bit silly at this point, but there are certainly some fun thought experiments to explore.
I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website.
Back then, the site was clean and had very good clean and expertly written explanations of how various mechanical, everyday and scientific equipment worked. Nowadays that website is not the same, seems riddled with SEO spam and fluff articles like a content mill.
Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, thank you for all your contributions to my (and likely others) life
[1] Which is still incredibly up: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/capacitor.htm
He inspired me daily with his dedication to his students, incredible work-ethic and love for entrepreneurial engineering. My life is forever changed for having met and been mentored by Marshall, I cannot express enough gratitude for the time I got to spend with him.
Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, a real-life legend.
Misanthropic environmentalism isn’t environmentalism at all. Environmentalism designed by humans should be good for humans, not give them scheduled death dates.
They were? I remember a lot of awful stuff about those years, but this isn't one of them. I remember people making somewhat mean-spirited but understandable comments about (some) older people getting killed off by Covid due to their own actions (refusal to take the threat seriously and take precautions, leading them to catch it, and then have much worse outcomes due to the fact that the disease was much more deadly for unhealthy and older people).
My first introduction to programming was building a Geocities website in HTML (using notepad, of course) at a science camp in 1999. They also showed us the "How HTML Works" web page as a resource, which became my first technical resource. I remembering struggling with something on my website and eventually emailing my question to Howstuffworks, not expecting much back. Not only did a very patient and informative woman respond to me, she continued to answer my questions and offer helpful guidance to this very eager kid for the rest of the summer. Without that positive experience, who knows if I would have stuck with it. It's been on mind a lot since I just realized that was 25 years ago.
I hope Marshall knew how much people valued the things he created and the impact they had.
I still remember their animations about car differential which were magical.
I was one of those students. I now own my own company as a result of his teachings. He was very influential and a wonderful human being. This news is tragic.
RIP Marshall. You were loved.
He will be dearly missed.
His commentary near the end of this interview is also telling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o
An optimist in (increasingly) a cynic's world. Be at peace, Marshall Brain.
Brain makes a comment beginning at about the 30 minute point, I'm listening to that now, though it doesn't seem to match your description.
The bit a couple of minutes later (32m) beginning "I have four children now in college..." seems closer.
I have to comment that the song about how bright the future was (by Timbuk3) was absolutely satiric and ironic, though that point is often missed. As is often the case, in music and otherwise (Beastie Boys "Fight for your Right", Bruce Springstein "Born in the USA", Neal Stephenson Snow Crash & the Metaverse, etc., etc.).
Aside from his futuristic works, his Win32 API book was extremely good and my first introduction to Windows programming.
It’s our loss to loose such a talented human being.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010202064900/http://howstuffwo...
I read a few of those How Stuff Works articles printed on paper at the public library on those long hour bus rides. They'd keep my spirits up.
What are you up to now?
My condolences about Marshall.
Very thankful for his work.
Later in the year we were both in Manhattan and decided to meet under the WTC towers to head to lunch.
He got there a little early, stepped off the base of one of the World Trade Center towers, and knowing the length of one side of one tower and the number of floors, estimated how many Zebulon NC's would fit in the 2 towers (Zebulon was where he either lived at the time or where he was born.)
I've forgotten the value he came up with, but the mental math there amused me that he'd bother to try.
Super neat guy.
And all of us, even the von Neumanns and the Ramanujans, have restraints and guard rails.
There's the old joke about how several different blind men perceive an elephant differently, but that's not too far off from how we perceive the world around us.
Marshall clearly thought things were getting significantly worse towards the end of his life. What if that perception stemmed from a poorly selected input that was never challenged by any other person's perception of reality?
For example; "There is no point to living after 65" - when there's plenty of 65+ year old people who enjoy life and contribute to the world around them. My grandparents contributed significantly to my existence when they were older than 65. If they'd both passed away at 65, my existence would be far poorer for it.
It's important to have people in our lives that help us keep our perception of reality from spinning off into dark versions that don't accurately represent actual reality.
He wrote an essay about people being euthanized after age 63 in order to relieve the environmental strain of the high population. I don't know if he really believed that, but if he did and saw his health and quality of life deteriorating rapidly, then it is possible that he literally was trying to serve as a role model to people of how to be a good citizen and fight climate change.
I personally hope that we don't have to resort to such things as a society. But I believe that resource constraints and climate or other challenges are much more severe than people understand. I hope that we will be able to leverage technology to avoid disaster.
Intelligent people are able to understand and solve problems. That's why they don't ignore them and hope they will go away, like many less intelligent people. Brain might have been demonstrating a "last-resort" but effective solution to these types of global challenges.
I wonder what was happening with him.
>While the university would not confirm any details related to his death, sources close to Brain said he died by suicide.
:(
Marshall was a frequent poster in subreddits such as /r/collapse.
https://www.reddit.com/user/MarshallBrain/
I don’t think it’s hard to see what things concerned him. I think it’s important for all of us to realize that no matter how we think the world is going there is still brightness in the world and Marshall contributed to that brightness through his contributions to society.
RIP Marshall, I hope you knew what an inspiration you were.
May he rest in peace.
Dang - deserves a black bar?
What a loss.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o
[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-...
[3] https://marshallbrain.com/manna
Edit: Fixed "free to download from Amazon" - it's not
The podcasts that came out of HSW.com have heavily influenced my life. Especially Stuff You Should Know (still a top 20 podcast but no longer owned by How stuff works.
I remember 16 years ago going through the whole rigmarole of downloading the podcast on my white MacBook, syncing to my iPod, repeating each week so I could keep up with the episodes of SYSK coming out. Fast-forward to today I still listen to each episode religiously and have learned so much from Josh and Chuck.
I suspect that the pursuit of happiness, without the capture, leads to success. Or perhaps a strong avoidance of the fear of failure (iirc, that was a common motivation for Olympic athletes)
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/?q=marshallbr...
He seems to have a lot of domains, if you know of any, please post them here.
RIP
If I had gone through with it, I would have killed myself - and any euphemisms being thrown around would serve no-one at all (especially not those still living in that hole).
I would much rather have it framed as me having done something unforgivably stupid and completely preventable - but as a society we'd much rather reject that reality and instead refuse to acknowledge that more often than not the signs were all there; that not only was the death an irreversible act of idiocy, but it was also something that we could've and should've stopped yet did nothing to prevent.
Depression isn't a failing on the person's part, and it isn't stupidity. Nor is suicide resulting from depression. It's a disease, and you "die from suicide" the same way you "die from cancer" - from the effects of your disease disrupting vital functions of your existence until you can no longer survive.
For me, at least, understanding and healing from severe mental illness required understanding that the illness wasn't "me". It was this crappy thing I had to live with because some part of my brain Just Does That Sometimes. See [1] among other posts, but the only way I've ever found to beat my own tendencies towards mental illness - and they are extremely strong - is to treat them like a chronic disease. The same way that a person with liver disease has to avoid drinking, I have to avoid the things that trigger my own chronic depression.
