NVIDIA CEO: Every Country Needs Sovereign AI

From the article:

Every country needs to own the production of their own intelligence, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang told attendees Monday at the World Governments Summit in Dubai.

Huang, who spoke as part of a fireside chat with the UAE’s Minister of AI, His Excellency Omar Al Olama, described sovereign AI — which emphasizes a country’s ownership over its data and the intelligence it produces — as an enormous opportunity for the world’s leaders.

“It codifies your culture, your society’s intelligence, your common sense, your history – you own your own data,” Huang told Al Olama during their conversation, a highlight of an event attended by more than 4,000 delegates from 150 countries.

“We completely subscribe to that vision,” Al Olama said. “That’s why the UAE is moving aggressively on creating large language models and mobilizing compute.”

Huang’s appearance in the UAE comes as the Gulf State is moving rapidly to transform itself from an energy powerhouse into a global information technology hub.

Dubai is the latest stop for Huang in a global tour that has included meetings with leaders in Canada, France, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam over the past six months.

There's more at the link. 

Once every nation gets its own sovereign AI, how will those AIs interact with one another? What tasks will they be entrusted with? How will they interact with their human supervisors? (Partners?) If ever there was a task of alignment research to investigate, this is it.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Personality, understanding, and anxiety as the driver of cultural evolution [Tech Evol]

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue, 1) on general principle, 2) in recognition of the strife that's broken out recently, cued by tragic events in the Middle East, and 3) out of curiosity about what Robert Wright calls "cognitive empathy," the ability to take another's point of view for the purpose of understanding their behavior. What does the theory of cultural ranks have to contribute to our understanding of cognitive empathy?

 

This is another excerpt from David Hays, The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks (1995). This is from Chapter 5, “Politics, Cognition, and Personality”, section 5.4, “Personality and Understanding”. You might well wonder, as I did, what these topics have to do with technology. Hays’s reply, more or less: Why not? That is, he was taking a comprehensive view of the history of technology, but why not, in this chapter, use this comprehensive view of technology as an opportunity to look around the corner at other matters of interest, like governance and cognition more generally.

So that’s what he did.

In this section he argues that anxiety is what drives cultural evolution. It’s a powerful suggestion. I also believe it, but it’s not clear to me what we need to do to make a strong argument. I devoted a fair amount of energy to characterizing anxiety at the neural level in Beethoven’s Anvil (pp. 86 ff.) Note that I have a fair number of posts on the topic of anxiety.

* * * * *

Life is hard. Life is hard because it is lived in brains that strive always to understand, and often fail to understand, both the world and themselves. Our brains are the most complex devices known. The workings of cognition, emotion, and volition are scarcely understood at all even now. We do not know enough to guide parents and teachers, eliminate crime and the use of drugs, or achieve universal and lasting peace.

The psychobiological consequence of failure to understand is often fear, anxiety, anger, hostility, and hatred. These states are unpleasant and disruptive. They disrupt thought, and they disrupt society.

The fundamental significance of cultural evolution, in my opinion, is that the human capacity for understanding has grown. The striving was there from the beginning; gradually, over some 50,000 years, the striving has come to be satisfied more fully:

"Kroeber, who is by no means an evolutionist, suggests three criteria for measuring progress: "the atrophy of magic based on psychopathology; the decline of infantile obsession with the outstanding physiological events of human life; and the persistent tendency of technology and science to grow accumulatively (Kroeber, 1948: 304)." (Quoted from Julian Stewart, Theory of Culture Change, p. 14)

In rank 1, psychotic visions are treated with great respect. Too much attention is given to "blood and death and decay". These are indications that the understanding is unable to cope with the emotions of ordinary life.

Alfred L. Kroeber, who may be the greatest American anthropologist of the century, published a book called _Anthropology_ from which his three points are quoted.

The same Peace Corps volunteer I quoted above describes an event that illustrates the manifestation of anxiety in a culture not far up the growth curve from rank 1 to rank 2:

I awoke at one o'clock in the morning to horrible wailing and moaning. All the Tuaregs I live with were up, too. Umuna, one of the Bouzoo women, was making all this noise, writhing around on the ground beside one of the Tuareg tents. She claimed that she was 'invaded' by a bad spirit sent to her by her great-grandmother.

None of the others were concerned. They told me it was an odd time for spirits to be possessing people, in the middle of the Ramadan, a holy month. I was assured that she would be all right. I was glad to have so many experts on possession; had it been left to me, I would have thought she was seriously ill, perhaps dying. After fifteen minutes of carrying on, Umuna was fine. Interesting how the old animist beliefs coexist with Islam. (_Washington Spectator_, Jan 1, 1990, p. 1)

The Bouzoos, he explains, were "slaves of the Tuareg until very recently," having been taken in raids southward. The Bouzoos still live about as before. This Peace Corps volunteer also saw sex magic for sale, and healing of a headache by laying on of hands and chanting verses from the Koran.

In reading to prepare to write this book, I have learned that the wheel was used for ritual over many years before it was put to use in war and, still later, work. The motivation for improvement of astronomical instruments in the late Middle Ages was to obtain measurements accurate enough for _astrology_. Critics wrote that even if the dubious doctrines of astrology were valid, the measurements were not close enough for their predictions to be meaningful. So they set out to make their instruments better, and all kinds of instrumentation followed from this beginning. (That from White, MRTe*). Metals were used for ornaments very early – before any practical use?

In its original manifestation the compass was a divi- nation, or future-predicting, instrument made of lode- stone, which is naturally magnetic." (George Basalla, p. 172; in BIBLNOTE*)

I suspect that we could get many further examples, up into the growth curve from rank 2 to rank 3.

In fact, someone in the future may look back on psychoanalysis and remark that its origin was in parapsychology – dreams were interpreted first for divination, second for diagnosis of pathology.

Here is my first point: The driving force behind progress in social organization, government, technology, science, and art is the need to control anxiety, to satisfy the brain's striving for understanding.

To take a political example: In the origin of government, is the key problem why men choose to follow leaders, or how men succeed in making themselves into leaders? [Not a sexist formulation; just the way things happened.] For most of my life, I took for granted the first answer. Recently I recognized the second problem and adopted it. Ethnographies (culture reports) from hunting-and-gathering societies show absolute egalitarianism. But more: They show an absolute unwillingness to rise above one's fellows in any respect whatsoever.

Here and there we find a clue as to the kind of child-rearing practices (sometimes brutal) that produce such adults.

Since the earliest community leaders were war leaders, who gradually came to exercise some authority between wars, perhaps the answer to the key question is this: The first leaders draw their ability to accept the responsibility of leadership from success in war, from religious experience, and from innate genius or special accidents of handling in early childhood.

And my second point: At each rank, and excepting the few persons of extraordinary talent, a person's capacity for understanding is limited to analytic systems of quite specific logical structure. When rank shifts upward, a new system appears that transcends the old. The new system can rationalize situations, both internal and external, that were beyond the logical capacity of the old system. Understanding fails less often, and the negative states of fear, anxiety, hostility, etc. arise less often. As Kroeber put it, there is less concern "with the gratification of the ego" (KrAn* p. 301). The person of higher rank has a stronger character.

This means, among other things, that a higher rank can solve more kinds of social problems without resorting to (a) withdrawal, (b) fighting, or (c) submission.

But technology, art, science, and social-political-economic organization feed on each other. A favorable change in one makes possible changes – sometimes favorable – in all the rest.

Technological innovation over the long haul

1840s—70s: Key manufacturing innovations occur (pneumatic process for cheap steel and sewing machine are invented); Transport (improvements in steam-engines. The Bollman bridge, air brake system, cable car are patented); Consumer Goods (board game, toothbrush, picture machine).

— Tamay (@tamaybes) February 22, 2021

1910s-50s: Chemistry (key inventions in plastics: PVC, nylon and bakelite. The broad spectrum antibiotic Tetracyline, and the first oral contraceptive are registered. Rubber, teflon and ethyl gasoline are patented). Chem innovations make up ~50% of all innovations in the 30s.

— Tamay (@tamaybes) February 22, 2021

1980-2000: A wave of innovations in genetics occurs—recombinant DNA methods, the PCR method for copying DNA segments, heat-stable DNA-replication enzymes. Share of health-related innovations reaches its peak.

— Tamay (@tamaybes) February 22, 2021

1990s onward: the Information Age continues: Koss patents the Excel Function, Bezos patents 1-click buying, Page creates Pagerank. ~80% of top patents now Electronics/IT related. Innovation has hardly ever before been this concentrated in so few sectors. pic.twitter.com/tePal0xbrD

— Tamay (@tamaybes) February 22, 2021

Note in particular the concentration of inventions in a few fields in recent decades, vs. the breadth of innovation in the late 1800s.

— Jason Crawford (@jasoncrawford) February 22, 2021

Investment and the conditions for exponential growth [#Progress Studies | Tech Evol]

At the end of their article, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? (2020), Nicholas Bloom, et al. Begin to draw some conclusions, thus (p. 1134):

The evidence presented in this paper concerns the extent to which a constant level of research effort can generate constant exponential growth, either in the economy as a whole or within relatively narrow categories, such as a firm or a seed type or a health condition. We provide consistent evidence that the historical answer to this question is “no”: as summarized in Table 7, research productivity is declining at a substantial rate in virtually every place we look.

A bit later (p. 1138):

This analysis has implications for the growth models that economists use in our own research, like those cited in the introduction. The standard approach in recent years employs models that assume constant research productivity, in part because it is convenient and in part because the earlier literature has been interpreted as being inconclusive on the extent to which this is problematic. We believe the empirical work we have presented speaks clearly against this assumption. A first-order fact of growth empirics is that research productivity is falling sharply.

Future work in the growth literature should determine how best to understand this fact.

In my 2019 working paper in which I commented on this paper, Stagnation and Beyond: Economic growth and the cost of knowledge in a complex world, I argue that what they see as a decline in research productivity reflects the (unavoidably) increasing costs of obtaining knowledge about the world and then briefly outline that account of cultural ranks that David Hays and I have developed. It is my impression that the growth literature centers on the growth accompanying the Industrial Revolution, which is a reflection of Rank 3 modes of thought, in terms of our account. Perhaps the usual growth models, where “a constant level of research effort can generate constant exponential growth,” are valid for the conditions obtaining during the Industrial Revolution but fail because those conditions no longer obtain. We are moving into a different world which may well require different models.

That is to say, it is inappropriate to search for a growth model that is valid everywhere and always. There is no such thing. Rather different material and cultural circumstances require different models. Note that I am not proposing potentially hundreds or even tens of models. I am proposing only a handful, corresponding to the handful of cultural ranks we have proposed.

And that brings me to another excerpt from Hays’s The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks (1993). This excerpt is the opening section of Chapter 6, “Investment; with a life-cycle cost analysis of one individual human being.” Hays uses the idea of the factory to characterize rank 3 economic production, though of course he realizes that agriculture continues and that there are rank 3 innovations other than the factory system. I follow this excerpt with a brief comment about the specific case studies Bloom et al. develop in their article.l

As I have mentioned before in this series of excerpts, Hays wrote the book for an online course in the 1990s and distributed the book to students on an MS-DOS disk – chosen by the school, I assume, as the least common denominator among personal computer operating systems. Thus it was written as a text file in a simple hypertext system. It was never published in hardcopy. I reproduce it below more or less as Hays created it, in a mono-spaced font.

Investment

Capital is a concept of rank 3, but investment in skill and land were necessary in ranks 1 and 2. Sapients who believe in the future will attempt to prevent the net worth of Earth from declining.

6.1. INVESTMENT

6.1.1. Stone Tools and Hides Require Skill
6.1.2. The Land
6.1.3. The Factory System

The main investment in rank 1 is the acquisition of lore. For rank 2, the improvement of land for agriculture requires large investment. In rank 3, capital is assembled to invest in the ensembles of machines that produce large quantities of goods – and to invest also in transportation, communication, urban systems, and education.

Day by day a person works and uses the fruits of his (or her) labor for subsistence (food, clothing, shelter), for ritual, for pleasure, and so on. Whatever the rank, if each day's consumption equals each day's income, there is no investment.

Investment is the conversion of a portion of income into capital. The purpose of investment is to increase expected future income. Consumption yields instant gratification; the investor has to postpone gratification. The future increment must be larger than the present decrement to justify investment. Maybe I will put aside a dollar a day this year, but I want to get back two dollars a day next year!

The theory of rank says that the nature of capital changes from rank to rank, according to the technology. Figure 6.1 contains a sort of chronology of investments.

6.1.1. Stone Tools and Hides Require Skill

Rank 1 lives by hunting and gathering. In fact, most people of rank 1 seem to live, or to have lived, mostly by gathering with occasional feasts when the hunters get lucky. Emphasis on hunting appears to be sexist; women do the bulk of gathering. What do rank 1 people have that they do not consume on the day they get it? Some weapon-tools, a little clothing made from hides, and very simple shelter. My impression is that they are willing to leave these things behind and make new ones. An igloo does not pin down an Eskimo as your home holds you.

So rank 1 has almost no material capital; but it does have skill. The best over-simplification is probably that the rank 1 person's head is as full as yours or mine. Our knowledge is more specialized, and I assert that our knowledge is more abstract. One of us can teach video, one can repair automobiles, and so on; I can't teach video, and I suppose that only a few of us can. The rank 1 person is also a specialist, in a way that is not so obvious: The rank 1 person's concrete skills are specific to an environment, a climate, a range of vegetation and animal life, an area on a map.

But these skills are considerable, and take time to acquire. Little or none of them are acquired in situations comparable to schooling. Mostly the children watch adults, help, imitate, and play. No doubt they get some verbal guidance, orally since there is no writing. But not a great deal. The investment necessary to acquire skills is made in childhood. Children work less than adults, or at least less productively. A rank 1 society does not put its children to doing routine simple tasks and thus preclude their acquiring adult skills, as Britain did during the worst part of the Industrial Revolution. But at puberty the children must be ready to play adult roles. The rank 1 adult's skills are as fixed as our speech patterns. Few of us learn a second language after puberty with the exact speech patterns of a native speaker, and no one in rank 1 acquires a new skill after puberty.

Five technology surges so far. When's the 6th?

We're on or rapidly approaching the informatic plateau. Next surge requires a gestalt switch in how we think about and implement computation. (Note: numbers in chart below are different from the surge numbers. Rank 4 is the 5th surge.) pic.twitter.com/nigbgWZeu3

— Bill Benzon (@bbenzon) September 6, 2020

See my recent post, We’ve run through 4 cultural ranks, are we ready for 5? [cultural evolution, progress].

Stagnation, Redux: It’s the way of the world [good ideas are not evenly distributed, no more so than diamonds]

Tyler Cowen has just posted a conversation with Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economist interested in economic growth. That gives me a chance to revise a working paper I’d written last year, Stagnation and Beyond: Economic growth and the cost of knowledge in a complex world [2], which is based on a paper Bloom had published along with three colleagues, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? [3]. I took two of their case studies, Moore’s law and drug discovery, examined them in an informal manner and concluded that (much of) the increasing difficulty of discovering new ideas can be attributed to the cost of finding out more about the world.

At the time I wrote that paper I was unaware of Paul Romer’s 1992 article, Two Strategies for Economic Development [4]. He develops his argument with a toy model that is similar in spirit to the idea I’d advanced in my working paper. The objective of this post is to update that idea in view of Romer’s model by deploying some toys of my own.

First I set the stage with some passages from Cowen’s conversation with Bloom. Then I introduce Romer, after which I offer my elaborations. First I introduce some simple diagrams through which we can visualize the relationship between our conceptual systems (maps) and the world itself (territory). I conclude by anchoring that story in time and space making it one that is, in principle, about the evolution of human society over time.

Bloom’s conversation with Cowen

Bloom sets the stage:

The big picture — just to make sure everyone’s on the same page — is, if you look in the US, productivity growth . . . In fact, I could go back a lot further. It’s interesting — you go much further, and you think of European and North American history. In the UK that has better data, there was very, very little productivity growth until the Industrial Revolution. Literally, from the time the Romans left in whatever, roughly 100 AD, until 1750, technological progress was very slow.

Sure, the British were more advanced at that point, but not dramatically. The estimates were like 0.1 percent a year, so very low. Then the Industrial Revolution starts, and it starts to speed up and speed up and speed up. And technological progress, in terms of productivity growth, peaks in the 1950s at something like 3 to 4 percent a year, and then it’s been falling ever since.
Then you ask that rate of fall — it’s 5 percent, roughly. It would have fallen if we held inputs constant. The one thing that’s been offsetting that fall in the rate of progress is we’ve put more and more resources into it. Again, if you think of the US, the number of research universities has exploded, the number of firms having research labs.

Thomas Edison, for example, was the first lab about 100 years ago, but post–World War II, most large American companies have been pushing huge amounts of cash into R&D. But despite all of that increase in inputs, actually, productivity growth has been slowing over the last 50 years. That’s the sense in which it’s harder and harder to find new ideas. We’re putting more inputs into labs, but actually productivity growth is falling.

Cowen responds by saying, “Let’s say paperwork for researchers is increasing, bureaucratization is increasing. How do we get that to be negative 5 percent a year as an effect?” A bit later he’ll offer:

Doesn’t the explanation have to be that scientific efforts used to be devoted to public goods much more, and now they’re being devoted to private goods? That’s the only explanation that’s consistent with rising wages for science but a declining social output from her research, her scientific productivity.

In his response to Tyler, Bloom makes two suggestions that are consistent with my hypothesis:

Why is it happening at the aggregate level? I think there are three reasons going on. One is actually come back to Ben Jones, who had an important paper, which is called, I believe, “[Death of the] Renaissance Man.” This came out 15 years ago or something. The idea was, it takes longer and longer for us to train.

Just in economics — when I first started in economics, it was standard to do a four-year PhD. It’s now a six-year PhD, plus many of the PhD students have done a pre-doc, so they’ve done an extra two years. We’re taking three or four years longer just to get to the research frontier. There’s so much more knowledge before us, it just takes longer to train up. That’s one story.

A second story I’ve heard is, research is getting more complicated. I remember I sat down with a former CEO of SRI, Stanford Research Institute, which is a big research lab out here that’s done many things. For example, Siri came out of SRI. He said, “Increasingly it’s interdisciplinary teams now.”

His third suggestion repeats one of Cowen’s:

Then finally, as you say, I suspect regulation costs, various other factors are making it harder to undertake research. A lot of that’s probably good. I’d have to look at individual regulations. Health and safety, for example, is probably a good idea, but in the same way, that is almost certainly making it more expensive to run labs…

I am most interested in pursing the notion that ideas are getting harder to find because that’s just how the world is. Even assuming that I am correct, one must still show that that factor is stronger than the one’s Cowen favors and, for that matter, other factors one might suggest. That’s a different kind of argument and one I won’t pursue here.

Romer’s model

Let’s start Paul Romer’s toy model from 1992. Romer sets it up with one that is standard in economics, that of a factory (p. 67):

One of the great successes of neoclassical economics has been the elaboration and extension of the metaphor of the factory that is invoked by a production function. To be explicit about this image, recall the child's toy called the Play-Doh Fun Factory. To operate the Fun Factory, a child puts Play-Doh (a form of modeling compound) into the back of the toy and pushes on a plunger that applies pressure. The Play-Doh is extruded through an opening in the front of the toy. Depending on the particular die used to form the opening, out come solid Play-Doh rods, Play-Doh1-beams,or lengths of hollow Play-Doh pipe.

We use the Fun Factory model or something just like it to describe how capital (the Fun Factory)and labor (the child's strength) change the characteristics of goods, converting them from less valuable forms (lumps of modeling compound) into more valuable forms (lengths of pipe).

But Romer isn’t interest in the production of physical goods. He’s interested in the production of ideas. The child’s chemistry set proves useful (p. 68):

Another child's toy is a chemistry set. For this discussion, the set can be represented as a collection of N jars, each containing a different chemical element. From the child's point of view, the excitement of this toy comes from trying to find some combination of the underlying chemicals that, when mixed together and heated, does something more impressive than change colors (explode, for example). In a set with N jars, there are 2^N–1 different mixtures of K elements, where K varies between 1 and N. (There are many more mixtures if we take account of the proportions in which ingredients can be mixed and the different pressures and temperatures that can be used during mixing.)


As N grows, what computer scientists refer to as the curse of dimensionality
sets in. The number of possible mixtures grows exponentially with N, the dimension of this system. For a modestly large chemistry set, the number of possible mixtures is far too large for the toy manufacturer to have directly verified that no mixture is explosive. If N is equal to 100, there are about 10^30 different mixtures that an adventurous child could conceivably put in a test tube and hold over a flame. If every living person on earth (about 5 billion) had tried a different mixture each second since the universe began (no more than 20 billion years ago), we would still have tested less than 1 percent of all the possible combinations. […]

Continuing on, Romer observes (pp. 68-69):

The potential for continued economic growth comes from the vast search space that we can explore. The curse of dimensionality is, for economic purposes, a remarkable blessing. To appreciate the potential for discovery, one need only consider the possibility that an extremely small fraction of the large number of possible mixtures may be valuable.

What interests me is that this vast search space of possibilities is mostly empty of useful ideas, combinations of chemical elements in this case. Moreover I want to distinguish between the space itself and the strategy we have for searching that space. That strategy is based on our theory or theories about that space, or domain as I sometimes like to call it. I want to examine the relationship between the world, on the one hand, and our ideas of it on the other. To do so I must enter the den of the metaphysician, to borrow a phrase from Warren McCulloch.

On the relationship between the world and our ideas of it

The background space in the following simple diagram represents the space of potential chemical combinations (in this case) while the black dots indicate the useful ones.

Figure 1: Useful ideas in the field of all possible ideas

Notice that some areas are less sparsely populated than others. Now let us superimpose a mental map on it – the orange grid is that map:

Figure 2: Our theory of the domain (in orange)

We can now see that while, yes, some regions of the territory are less populated than others, on the whole the mental map – our theory of the domain – is highly congruent with the territory. Most “bins” in our map contain a useful idea, though it isn’t in the same place in each bin. If we search each bin, then, we will very likely find a useful idea. Some searches will take longer than others, but most searches will be rewarded.

Are we grappling with problems beyond our conceptual means? [counterfeit capitalism][#Progress_Studies, NOT]

I take the question from the final chapter, of David Hays,  The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks (1993). In section 8.4, “The Rise and Fall of Civilizations” Hays observes:

For the fall of empires, there have been many explanations, all too specific for me. Do I care whether it was disease, depletion of the soil, restlessness of the proletarians, intrusion of barbarians, corruption of the elite? Not much. The level of abstraction appropriate to this question seems to me to be this: Every empire has grown too large for its cultural rank. Specifically, every empire has grown until it created for itself problems too complex for it to solve with the means of thought available to it. The substance of the problems may be unique to each empire, but the increasing complexity of problems with size of political unit is universal.

Don’t let the word “empire” mislead you. It by no means excludes the current American imperium, though Hays would not have used that term. He was, we both were, and I remain, concerned about the future.

The issue seems particularly acute during the current pandemic. While some/much of the inadequacy of America's response can be attributed to the flailings of the Trump administration, I don't think all of in can. And, in any event, we have the fact, after all, that Donald Trump was elected in the first place – see, e.g. the podcast by Robert Wright and Ezra Klein I embedded here. Is America's political system failing?

Pizza Aribtrage

Tyler Cowen has just linked to a much narrower and more specific example involving "pizza arbitrage." Ranjan Roy tells a story of a friend who runs a pizza business. Friend wasn't offering delivering services but a startup, Doordash, was not only offering to deliver Friend's pizzas, but was charging less than cost for those pizzas:

Doordash was causing him real problems. The most common was, Doordash delivery drivers didn't have the proper bags for pizza so it inevitably would arrive cold. It led to his employees wasting time responding to complaints and even some bad Yelp reviews.

But he brought up another problem - the prices were off. He was frustrated that customers were seeing incorrectly low prices. A pizza that he charged $24 for was listed as $16 by Doordash.

My first thought: I wondered if Doordash is artificially lowering prices for customer acquisition purposes.

My second thought: I knew Doordash scraped restaurant websites. After we discussed it more, it was clear that the way his menu was set up on his website, Doordash had mistakenly taken the price for a plain cheese pizza and applied it to a 'specialty' pizza with a bunch of toppings.

My third thought: Cue the Wall Street trader in me…..ARBITRAGE!!!!

They decided to try an experiment:

[Friend] called in and placed an order for 10 pizzas to a friend's house and charged $160 to his personal credit card. A Doordash call center then called into his restaurant and put in the order for those 10 pizzas. A Doordash driver showed up with a credit card and paid $240 for the pizzas.

It worked.

Trade 1

We went over the actual costs. Each pizza cost him approximately $7 ($6.50 in ingredients, $0.50 for the box). So if he paid $160 out of pocket plus $70 in expenses to net $240 from Doordash, he just made $10 in pure arbitrage profit. For all that trouble, it wasn't really worth it, but that first experiment did work.

My mind, as a combination trader and startup person, instantly had the though - just run this arbitrage over and over. You could massively even grow your top-line revenue while netting riskless profit, and maybe even get acquired at an inflated valuation :) He told me to chill out. Maybe this is why he runs an "actual business" while I trade options while doing brand consulting and writing newsletters. [...]

So over a few weeks, almost to humor me, we did a few of these "trades". I was genuinely curious if Doordash would catch on but they didn't. I had visions of building a network of restauranteurs all executing this strategy in tandem, all drinking from the Softbank teat before the money ran dry, but went back to work doing content strategy stuff.

Ranjan goes on to point out that this sort of fakery isn't unique to Doordash; Grubhub and UberEats have been doing such things as well. He goes on to conclude:

You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It's used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and increased prices. But is that even viable?

The Chinese were printing with moveable type three Cenbturies before Gutenberg

The book is The Auspicious Tantra of All-Reaching Union 吉祥遍至口和本續 [shown in Tangut script below]. 9 volumes - 7 of which are complete - were discovered in the ruins of the Baisigou Pagoda in Helan County, Northwest China in 1991, after it had been illegally blown up. 2/7 pic.twitter.com/AXUHXSUfqE

— Incunabula (@incunabula) December 10, 2019

Technology adoption

We overestimate how fast technology adoption has historically occurred. Take the transition from animal to mechanical: the first canaries in coal mines were after 1913, around 7 million horses were used in WW2, and dog noses are still better than many sensors, as the TSA knows. pic.twitter.com/NVXZ779Qer

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) October 20, 2019

The structure of technology revolutions

2/6 The first part of the @forbes piece (https://t.co/YSmjiYykf0) discusses the structure of technology revolutions, as described a quarter century ago by Carlota Perez, with some refinements, in terms of how we might think about the long-term upside of bubbles, by @grossdm pic.twitter.com/RFpxgEUegw

— David Shaywitz (@DShaywitz) October 20, 2019

Cultural Evolution: Expressive culture before practical culture [Progress]

I'm jumping this to the top to accommodate some additional remarks about progress which I've placed at the end. [Latest update: Monday morning, 30 Sept., at 9:19 AM.]

* * * * * 

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. 

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

The ‘collective mind’, the mesh, the cultural reticulum (to use my current technology) is the medium in which culture evolves. By that I mean the “connected” minds/brains of individuals in a given society. I’ve put connected in scare quotes to indicate that the connection is not permanent, hard-wired, as it were, or necessarily synchronous. Face-to-face interactions are synchronous, but temporary, and the connection is through sound, sight, and possibly touch, odor, or even taste. But one can be connected through written documents, paintings, sound recordings, and so forth. In those cases, the connection with others will be asynchronous and could be quite scattered. And so forth.

Cultural beings thrive or fail in the mesh. Cultural being is my current term for the cultural analog of the biological phenotype. As such it is the mental trajectory of a collection of coordinators (the cultural analog of the biological gene). That is most obviously true for expressive culture – stories, dance, charms, pictures, music, and so forth – but true as well for all manner of practical devices and practices.

And, yes, I know this is a bit dense with strange terms. They’re all defined on this page with discussion scattered, alas, throughout this blog and in working papers.

Moving on, we’ve got to make a distinction. For the moment we’ll call it a distinction between expressive culture and practical culture. Expressive culture–song, dance, art, stories, religion, etc.–lives in the reticulum. It speaks to our need for meaning and coherence in the world. Practical culture, on the other hand, supports the body in one way or another, providing nutrition and protection. The devices and practices of practical culture, however, must be consistent with the designs of expressive culture.

Expressive culture leads

Not only that, but I posit a principle for consideration:

Expressive culture leads; the seeds of practical culture are always in expressive culture.

But is that true? I don’t know.

It was suggested to me by the following passage from David G. Hays, The Evolution of Technology, Chapter 5, “Politics, Cognition, and Personality”:

In reading to prepare to write this book, I have learned that the wheel was used for ritual over many years before it was put to use in war and, still later, work. The motivation for improvement of astronomical instruments in the late Middle Ages was to obtain measurements accurate enough for _astrology_. Critics wrote that even if the dubious doctrines of astrology were valid, the measurements were not close enough for their predictions to be meaningful. So they set out to make their instruments better, and all kinds of instrumentation followed from this beginning. (That from White, MRTe*). Metals were used for ornaments very early – before any practical use?

In its original manifestation the compass was a divination, or future-predicting, instrument made of lodestone, which is naturally magnetic." (George Basalla, p. 172; in BIBLNOTE*)

I suspect that we could get many further examples, up into the growth curve from rank 2 to rank 3.

In fact, someone in the future may look back on psychoanalysis and remark that its origin was in parapsychology – dreams were interpreted first for divination, second for diagnosis of pathology.

Here is my first point: The driving force behind progress in social organization, government, technology, science, and art is the need to control anxiety, to satisfy the brain's striving for understanding.

To take a political example: In the origin of government, is the key problem why men choose to follow leaders, or how men succeed in making themselves into leaders? [Not a sexist formulation; just the way things happened.] For most of my life, I took for granted the first answer. Recently I recognized the second problem and adopted it. Ethnographies (culture reports) from hunting-and-gathering societies show absolute egalitarianism. But more: They show an absolute unwillingness to rise above one's fellows in any respect whatsoever.

Here and there we find a clue as to the kind of child-rearing practices (sometimes brutal) that produce such adults.

Since the earliest community leaders were war leaders, who gradually came to exercise some authority between wars, perhaps the answer to the key question is this: The first leaders draw their ability to accept the responsibility of leadership from success in war, from religious experience, and from innate genius or special accidents of handling in early childhood.

And now to find more examples where practical technologies and practices are preceded by their appearance expressive culture.

What does this imply for Collier/Cowen's Progress Studies?

I note in the first place that Hays's examples (in that first paragraph) are all old. I note, however, that in a fairly standard account the rise to Rank 3 culture in the West began in the visual arts with the sciences emerging later. The following table lists some representative figures and dates:

This is not quite the phenomenon Hays was pointing out, which is specific to particular devices, but supports a general view that change expressive culture precedes change in practical culture.

Just how prevalent is that dynamic and does it still hold in the modern world, and in what way? I"m thinking, for example, of Neil deGrasse Tyson's recent talk on Mars settlement. He notes that, despite all the inspirational rhetoric that accompanied it, the political motivation for the Apollo project came from Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. But he also pointed out an inspirational series of articles that appeared in Collier's Magazine in between 1952 and 1954. What effect did they have on the nation's appetite (and aspirations for) venturing into space? I note as well that Walt Disney used his Sunday evening television program (which premiered in 1954) to evangelize for space exploration. I wonder if Tyson and others have been under-valuing or misunderstanding the role of that inspirational rhetoric. And then we have some anecdotes mentioned by Frederik Schodt in his history of Japanese robots, Inside the Robot Kingdom (Kodansha America 1990). In the early days of industrial robotics a new robot would be welcomed to the production line by a blessing ceremony officiated by a Shinto priest. Hmmmm.... Is THIS why "moonshot" has become a metaphor for high risk/high gain endeavors despite the fact that, technologically, the Apollo program wasn't all that risky? We pretty much had the technology in hand; we just had to develop the will to implement and deploy it.

Finally, consider the Technological Singularity, that point in the future when machines will surpass us in intelligence and all sorts of awesome things – whether good or bad (for us) it’s hard to tell – will come to pass. Judged as practical goal setting and prognostication it leaves something to be desired. Taken as expressive culture though, more akin to art and religion than to science and technology, it makes sense.

To see what I mean compare the state of our knowledge with respect to establishing permanent settlements on Mars with the state of our knowledge regarding computational superintelligence. As far as I can tell the only gap in our knowledge about Mars settlement concerns human ability, both mental and physical, to last. We have already sent humans to the moon and back, and we’ve landed exploratory unmanned vehicles on Mars where we’ve been able guide them in doing useful work. Lastly, we have had humans orbit the earth in a space station for months at a time, in one case for a year. That’s a long time, but not as long as a Mars mission. In short, we know a lot. We also know that it will be very expensive.

But machine intelligence, that’s a roller coaster ride. Starting in the early 1950s the federal government funded research into machine intelligence. The objective was a practical one, to translate technical documents from Russian to English. That enterprise went bust in the mid-1960s and was defunded. Good old-fashioned symbolic AI was riding high in the early 1980s and commercial ventures were formed (e.g. Symbolics, to manufacture LISP machines). Then AI Winter set in. The business is now riding machine learning and neural nets in a truly spectacular up-phase. But a self-driving car is a long way from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). We don’t really know how these marvelous sports do what they do. Common sense reasoning, one of the problems that laid waste to symbolic AI, is still problematic. We lack anything like a coherent theory that moves from sensory processing and motor action through cognition and speech to abstract reasoning. We have no theory on which to base our super-intelligence.

But wait! I get it. We don’t have to have such a theory. The computer will think it up for us.

Ha!

When it comes to creating human-class intelligence, we don’t have a viable theory. We don’t know what we’re doing. That’s very different from the situation we face in thinking about settling Mars. The idea of the Technological Superiority belongs to expressive culture, not engineering or scientific culture.* But who knows what practical developments will come out of this fundamentally expressive (religious) ambition.

Moreover, there are constraints on practical things

So, yes, as Hays suggests, we have anxiety and the need to control it through understanding. But, when it comes to the creation of practical devices, we have constraints as well. The devices, or social practices for that matter, must actually work as intended. And that, I suspect, imposes more constraints on them than the medium does on expressive culture. Expressive culture has more freedom to wander and explore than does practical culture, or so I’m maintaining at the moment.

And what of politics?

Expressive or practical culture? Something of both I would think.

All of this bears further investigation. 

More later.

* * * * *

*See, for example,  Sabine Hosenfelder debunks "tech-bro monotheism".

Transcendent cognition, the rise and fall of civilizations [#Progress_Studies]

The recent call for progress studies:

Why did the Industrial Revolution start when it did? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Human progress is understudied, and @patrickc and @tylercowen want to change that. https://t.co/do55DQ5yHi

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) July 30, 2019

and the generally ill-considered Twitter reaction against it, e.g.:

I joke about this shit, but it *is* shit, and it's infuriating. There is a historiography of science and technology. There are studies of projecting, of planning the future, of ideas and practices meant to improve or transform things, going back centuries and published each year. https://t.co/HZx4RfZu3c

— Ted McCormick (@mccormick_ted) July 31, 2019

naturally got me thinking about the theory of cultural ranks that David Hays and I developed in the last quarter of the previous century. Not, mind you, that we developed the theory under the rubric of progress, but that we certainly believed that an understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of how culture had evolved up to the present would be useful, perhaps even essential to moving ahead.

And, yes, we were (and I remain) aware of the ideological mischief that has been done in the name of progress. To that, I believe David Chapman had a perceptive reply:

Realizing, in the mid-20th century, that the Myth of Progress was an eternalistic quasi-religion, and asking pointed questions about “cui bono” and “why should we believe this,” was hugely valuable and necessary.

It’s now a lazy trope, suitable for mindless mechanical MPUs.

— David Chapman (@Meaningness) August 1, 2019

And that brings me to another excerpt from Hays’s The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks (1993). These excerpts are the last two sections from the final chapter, “They Did the Best They Knew How”.

In section 8.3, “Transcendent Cognition”, Hays summarizes his reasons for believing that each rank has gone beyond the previous ones. This section consists of 15 short statements which necessarily depend on arguments developed earlier in the book. As such it indicates the range of material the book covers. In the section 8.4, “The Rise and Fall of Civilizations” Hays observes:

For the fall of empires, there have been many explanations, all too specific for me. Do I care whether it was disease, depletion of the soil, restlessness of the proletarians, intrusion of barbarians, corruption of the elite? Not much. The level of abstraction appropriate to this question seems to me to be this: Every empire has grown too large for its cultural rank. Specifically, every empire has grown until it created for itself problems too complex for it to solve with the means of thought available to it. The substance of the problems may be unique to each empire, but the increasing complexity of problems with size of political unit is universal.

Don’t let the word “empire” mislead you. It by no means excludes the current American imperium, though Hays would not have used that term. He was, we both were, and I remain, concerned about the future.

As has been my habit for these excerpts, I retain the mono-spaced ASII formatting of the original.

* * * * *

8.3. TRANSCENDENT COGNITION

I believe that each of the four ranks has its own system of thought, its own cognitive processes, I believe and that the cognition of each rank transcends the one before. What reasons do I have for my beliefs?

1. Wiora's rhythm, melody, harmony, texture. One could not say that some cultures "need" melody but others do not, could one? Changes in music must be attributed to changes in capacity to think about musical material.

2. Speech, writing, calculation, and computation. Writing transcends speech by setting the visual-manual channel in correspondence with the vocal-auditory channel all over again. Calculation transcends writing by the algorithmic correspondence of writing with enumeration. And computation transcends calculation because it is built on the algorithm of algorithms.

3. The spiritual religion and natural philosophy of rank 2 transcend the tabu, mana, animism, and practical lore of rank 1. The humanism and science of rank 3 transcend these in turn.

4. Lore, practice, engineering, and systemics. Each offers its critique on the methodology of its predecessor. Systemics picks and chooses among criteria; engineering takes its criteria for granted. Engineering picks and chooses among techniques for accomplishing a purpose--materials and designs--while practice is limited to the ones acquired in apprenticeship. Practice makes perfect what lore does unthinkingly.

5. Family, monarchy, democracy, ... Charisma transcends kinship in that it extends trust beyond personal acquaintance. Consent of the governed transcends charisma in that it bases trust on self-confidence.

6. Fire, ambient, fossil, free. To capture ambient energy requires, first, the conception of prime movers and, second, a range of structures and machines from saddles to windmills. To extract fossil energy requires both a conception of inorganic energy sources and a technology to penetrate the earth; not to mention new machines. The freedom of rank 4 requires the conception of the earth as a system and, for that conception to have consequences, both a host of technological possibilities and the systemics to derive choices from values and facts.

7. Will, essence, causality, cybernetics. Essence is the concept that emerges from self-analysis. Causality emerges on distinguishing subjective from objective connections.

8. Skill, land, factory, information. Deliberate action to improve the land requires thinking about agronomy; slash-and-burn does not. Deliberate construction of productive facilities requires anticipation of future gains; peasants* live in an eternal present. Education and research require faith in the human capacity to translate knowledge into welfare.

9. Evolution of language: Simple ways of expressing complex ideas.

10. Evolution of writing: Rank 2 writing sprawls; rank 3 gets organized. Rank 4 interweaves graphics.

11. Counting, arithmetic by insight, algorithms, summation and other parametric operations.

12. Anxiety. Rank 1 controls anxiety by repetition and magic. Rank 2 depends on religion and philosophy. Rank 3 has strength of character. Rank 4 uses psychoanalysis to find and modify the sources of anxiety.

13. Society. Kinship, institution, role, ...

14. Change. Chaos, inspiration, invention, investigation.

15. Evolution and development. Rank 1 evolves toward rank 2 without guidance or even awareness. Rank 2 develops toward rank 3 with intent at some level. Rank 3 attempts to guide the advancement.

8.4. THE RISE AND FALL OF CIVILIZATIONS

My friend Naroll, whom I have quoted several times, planned to write a book on the evolution of culture under the title Painful Progress. Humanity has spent blood, sweat, and tears on progress, mostly in vain as it sometimes seems. One after another the civilizations of the past have risen and fallen to rise no more. In Egypt, at least until quite recently, life in farming villages was the same as it had been thousands of years ago. Of ancient Mesopotamia, only archeologists can find any trace. The Roman Empire that stretched from Spain to Palestine and beyond is gone, and so are the several Chinese empires of the past. So are the empires of America, and the kingdoms of Africa. Spengler* wrote on _The Decline of the West_ in the late 20s, and we may feel that World War II and the subsequent rise of Japan only bear out his gloomy views. Each of the Great Powers* that has arisen since the Renaissance has spent its substance on military establishments and bankrupted itself.

Change and Development [Tech Evol]

Sections 7.3, “Change” and 7.4, “Development”, from Chapter 7, “Appropriate Technology” of David Hays, The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks (1993). As has been my habit for these excerpts, I retain the mono-spaced ASII formatting of the original.

* * * * *

7.3. CHANGE

The acceleration of change from rank to rank has required new generations to live with rates of change that their ancestors could not tolerate.

In rank 1, it seems, change occurred without intent or even awareness. Doing as one's ancestors did was taken for granted, analysis and questioning were almost entirely absent, but the most effective methods of control (writing, most importantly) were absent and so change occurred in spite of cultural intent.

In rank 2, awareness of change developed, and active resistance to change appeared. Thus, the guilds intended and acted to keep their crafts constant. Innovators were punished. The Catholic Church forbade competition. Remember that legitimacy stemmed from special access to occult sources. God inspired the writing of the Bible. Aristotle was in better touch with reality, the real reality, than we could be, and not through his ordinary senses. A change that was not thus _inspired_ could not be accepted. Psychologically, rank 2 character structure is not sufficiently flexible to handle much change; in part, all this explicit apparatus to legitimize constancy is rationaliza- tion.

In rank 3, for the first time, changes became part of the life experience of many persons. Invention was invented, and change came to be welcomed. Even so, a certain framework was taken as eternal and universal. Science tried to reveal that framework, and political thinkers tried to make government consistent with it. Clearly, rank 3 character structure had to deal with change, and succeeded rather well.

As we move toward rank 4, we have given up the universal and eternal framework. Bertrand Russell, early in the 20th century, could ask how we know, but he was the last serious philosopher to believe that we do know. The answer to his question, since Popper ( SCIBIBL* ), is that we don't know, we only have a plausible framework and, within it, some tentative facts. The framework may be replaced at any time when someone imagines a better one, and any or all of the facts may vanish because they cannot be attached to the new framework. Character structures that can cope with that situation are still very rare. If I ever manage to build one, my ability to think will be released from a bondage that I find irksome--or so I have felt for ten or fifteen years. Persons born later than I may be much better off.

Technologies appropriate to rank 1 people must not trigger their defenses against change. For rank 2, the problem is to avoid institutional defenses. Rank 3 will accept anything new, often to its detriment. Rank 4 could apply skeptical, thoughtful judgment: Appropriateness need not be measured by whose ox is gored, and how deeply, but by criteria that I have suggested in this chapter, and other criteria that I don't know about, including of course the criteria that will be seen as crucial once a better framework is offered.

As rankshifts accelerate (from 0 to 1 50,000 years ago, from 1 to 2 5000 years ago, from 2 to 3 500 years ago, from 3 to 4 50 years ago? ... go on to 5 years, 0.5 years, etc.), the problem of generations comes up. If a person's major paradigm is internalized in growing up, can a rankshift take place in less time than a human being needs to reach adulthood? For this I have no answer. The crystallization of rank 4 thought seems tardy to me, but perhaps I just can't see that it has happened. The beginnings of rank 5 may be evident by now, but not to me. So we may be holding back, we may be up against the minimum interval for a generation to mature, or the random nature of the process that leads to crystallization of new paradigms may be responsible.

7.4. DEVELOPMENT

The regions of Earth at the end of the twentieth century vary greatly in the cognitive rank of their people and in the amount of investment in place. Education is the solution to the first problem. Developing countries have the opportunity to invest in technologies of the future; they have often chosen instead to invest in those of the past.

As late as the 17th century, Britain was an underdeveloped country, producing wool for export to manufacturing countries. In the 18th century it developed, and in the 19th it was "the world's workshop". Until after 1800, America was an under-developed country, and Britain wanted very much to keep it so, a source of raw materials and agricultural products and a market for manufactures. The beginning of industry in the USA depended on illegal migration of experts from Britain and theft of blueprints.

For as long as Europe regarded the rest of the world as "the colonies", the anti-development policy continued--until after World War II. Remember the example of Malta: Little education before independence, rapid progress in 30 years or so after in- dependence. Various versions of this story can be told about Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Europe got its start into rank 3 by borrowing from antiquity and Islamic culture, which in turn had borrowed widely. Britain got its start toward industrial growth by borrowing from continental Europe. America borrowed from Britain and elsewhere.

Up to now, growth has been accomplished in part by exploiting the less developed. Americans took the Indians' land, not knowing and not caring that the Indians needed all the land they had to support themselves in their own way. But rank 3 culture has taken from all the world and given as little as possible in return.

Within nations, those with wealth and power have exploited those with neither. Marxist thought is, in my view, a blind alley that has no access to rank 4. But class exploitation is a fact. Did the upper classes give the lower classes anything in return for wealth and power? On the whole, I think, they gave as little as possible.

The nations that have not yet developed industrially are clamoring for help. The poor people in rich countries are, at present, quiet; but they could again present their demands as forcefully as they have sometimes done.

You already know that rankshift is my prescription for development. Education is the only effective policy. To provide enough to go around, the world will have to control population and use sophisticated methods of production, getting more goods for less energy and raw materials. Most of the technology has to diffuse from countries that are now advanced, just as technology has always diffused. But sophisticated systems cannot diffuse into an uneducated population.

Education threatens political structures and old ways of living. The resistance of fundamentalist Christians in America to the teaching of evolution is one example. China's recent decision to reduce the number of students who can go abroad for graduate study is another. The US government's resistance to teaching about birth control is a third.

So the first problem in development is how to get enough education going, against political and traditionalist opposition.

The second problem is how to get developing countries to choose the technology of the future rather than that of the past. The goal of catching up is easy to understand, and that is the goal that most developing countries choose. Thus they get our problems along with our successes. Eastern Europe has pushed for development on the path that Britain and America followed between 1750 and 1950; one consequence is devastating pollution from East Germany to Russia--but then, West Germany allowed itself to suffer from bad pollution also. If only we knew how to move forward to non-polluting, minimum-energy, minimum-raw-material technology, and could persuade the Third World to move with us, the world's future would be more hopeful. Steep and narrow as that path seems, however, it may be open.

One recent book about this complex of problems is _Preparing for the Twenty-first Century_, by Paul Kennedy ( PREP21* ).

Effects of energy increase in technological evolution [Tech Evol]

This is another excerpt from David Hays, The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks (1995). This is from Chapter 3, “ENERGY”, section 3.7 “Effects of Energy Increase”. In this section Hays concludes that it wasn’t until the Industrial Evolution that cultural evolution was a good deal for everyone, not just the ruling elite.

As with other excerpts from the book I preserve the mono-spaced ASCII text of the hypertext original.

* * * * *

3.7.1 EFFECTS OF ENERGY INCREASE

A society with greater flux of energy has more material goods, more education, longer lifespan, different kinds of government, and, in the long run, different modes of cognition. Some of these differences may be attributed largely to the plenitude of energy, but most must result when many factors change together.

3.7.1. Primary Effects

Material welfare, we might suppose, responds most directly to changes in the flux of energy. Let's look at some components:

My ratings are nothing but impressions; the reader may freely disagree. These ratings concern the typical person, with neither power nor wealth.

According to my calculations, material welfare is about the
same for a modern factory worker as for a forager:

The USA in recent years takes from the environment about 40 times as much energy per capita as a typical foraging society. Material welfare comes out about equal. Suppose we take away from the rank 1 forager half of what I have allowed, and give the modern American twice as much; then the ratio comes out a 4:1 on material welfare. But not 40:1.

Paul A. Samuelson, a renowned economist at MIT, presents a chart of "English price levels and real wage, 1270-1980" in his textbook of economics (11th edition, p. 257). The source is an article by E. H. Phelps Brown and S. V. Hopkins ( WAGEBIBL* ), and the source is careful to caution the reader about the weakness of the data. The curve for real wages is flat from 1300 to 1800 (the period when I estimate $27.66 per person per week), then rises to eight times as high in 1980 while I only arrive at a doubling.

We may ask why the economist's figures grow faster than mine, and why neither his nor mine grow faster than they do.

The most plausible answer to the first question is that my figures are wrong. (Further checking will test that answer.) But we should also note that economists have usually not given credit for unpaid work: Raising food to eat, not to sell; housework; child rearing; and so on. I believe that material welfare depends on unpaid as well as on paid work, and I may take more account of it than the economists. Also we may wonder whether the late rise in wages results in averaging in some higher-paid workers, managers, etc., who are not included in my estimate.

Nevertheless, even if it turns out that the best measure of real wages, or material welfare, grows by a factor of 16 from agriculture to advanced industrial society, that gain is small (ONLY 16:1?) in comparison with the amount of invention, innovation, and organization that has been invested. And agriculture looks to be poor in comparison with foraging. So I feel the need for an answer to the second question, whatever mistakes I have made in my calculations.

And the only answer I can believe is that increasing population density has introduced new costs that absorb the products of invention and labor. To force sufficient food from the same Earth as population grows by a factor of 1000 or 10,000, we must be clever and diligent. Shelter, transportation, and communication become more difficult: One house has to be built on top of another, traffic jams intensify, etc. My conclusion is that we have paid dearly, for 10,000 years, for our propensity to breed above replacement rate.

Joel Mokyr, whose _Lever of Riches_ (in BIBLNOTE* ) was
published after the preliminary edition of this diskbook, says,

When the resource base of an economy expands, it can do one of two things: it can enjoy higher living standards, or it can, in H. G. Wells's famous phrase,"spend the gifts of nature on the mere insensate multiplication of common life." In recent history, economic growth has occurred _despite_ population growth. Before that, as Malthus and the classical political economists never tired of pointing out, the growth of population relentlessly devoured the fruits of productivity growth, and living standards, as far as we can measure them, changed very little in the long run. (p. 7)

So my conclusion merely coincides with an old and well-argued line of thought. Since population growth turns out to be a major variable, I add an appendix describing the growth of Earth's population.

We should remember, in all of this, that material welfare is only crudely measured in dollars. Electronics comes cheap, and the fee of a good modern physician may not be higher than that of a shaman, however much more effective modern medicine may be in reducing pain and prolonging life.

3.7.2. Secondary Effects

The secondary effects of increasing energy flux are diffuse. Furthermore, they are mostly the joint effects of energy increase together with one or more of the primary effects.

Let me begin with competition. In a society where energy is scarce and costly, very little travels far between production and consumption. Most goods are offered for sale only within a narrow radius, and within that territory there are few suppliers for many goods. A peasant either shoes his own horses or takes them to the blacksmith in his own village; he does not go to the nearest town. Effectively, the blacksmith has no competitor. In the eighteenth century, the British market for iron was segmented geographically and inter-regional competition hardly occurred (Hyde, p. 48, in InRvBIBL*). Without railroads, food did not travel far; local famines could occur, and certainly market gardeners did not compete with imported fruits or vegetables. Cheaper energy enlarges market territories and makes possible more competition.

Next, new domains of resources become available. Coal could be brought from deeper underground when energy could be applied to pumping water and lifting the coal. Europe could obtain raw materials from overseas colonies; sailing ships sufficed in the beginning, but steamships enlarged the commerce. Energy must be used to produce fuel for nuclear reactors. Will space flight open a new domain of resources? One possibility is that we capture sunlight that does not reach Earth and beam it down; as an alternative to burning fossil fuel, this possibility has merit, but as a supplement it is merely another contributor to global warming.

Going further, take longevity. Energy increase aids longevity, since there is enough heat to keep everyone warm in cold weather, and eventually to cool them in hot weather. The increase in agricultural production yields more food for all, and the increases in production and distribution yield more varied diets for many. Energy is used to pump the water that carries away excrement from cities, making them cleaner and healthier, but various technologies have to advance to provide the parts of the sewage system.

Another secondary effect is education. Having more energy is a necessary condition for widespread education. General advance in technology motivates governments to educate their populations, since – from the industrial revolution onward – uneducated workers are inadequate to run the system.

Another is change in the criteria for sociopolitical prominence. As long as all work is done by human muscle, the only kind of organization is for fighting and, perhaps, ritual. The prominent persons are those skilled in organizing and carrying out combat and rites. Even in rank 2, with beasts of burden, sailing ships, and a few waterwheels, leadership does little more; some leaders may have skill at keeping a community tranquil, or skill as traders. The higher energy levels of rank 3, and the resulting increase in all sectors of the economy, raise the value of both technology and organization. Persons who can make a factory succeed rise to prominence. Some of them acquire social power. What happens at rank 4 is obscure, but my guess is that gross energy flux – input – will not go up much, net energy flux – output – will increase, and the leadership that achieves this outcome will have somewhat different qualities from those who have been most prominent in western civilization for the last century or two.

Finally, for this chapter, a secondary effect of increasing energy flux and efficiency is longer hours of work for most of the population. Ethnographers tell of simple societies in which the average person works 2 hours a day. We went up to 70-80 hour weeks, and fought our way back to 35-40 hour weeks. Why should labor-saving machines induce us to work more? Probably just because they made work useful. Human beings seem voracious, not just for food, warmth, and a dry place to sleep, but for diversity of experience and for aesthetic experience. Psychopathology may be involved somewhat, and in our present condition we may raise demand artificially with advertising and also (for example) by showing affluent homes on television. If 2 hours work a day yields all the food you want, and more work would yield nothing but unwanted food, why work another hour? If an extra hour a day earns the income to buy a fresh experience, a healthy person might decide to do the work even without propaganda or compulsion.

These, and surely many more, secondary effects of energy increase are direct: They happen regardless of higher-order patterns of culture. When higher-order patterns change, they lead to tertiary effects, my next topic.