One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.
“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.
“No”, says the grasshopper. “I lost track of time, because I was singing and dancing all summer long.”
The ants, disgusted, turn away and go back to work.
One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.
“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.
“No”, says the grasshopper. “I lost track of time, because I was singing and dancing all summer long.”
The ants are sympathetic. “We wish we could help you”, they say, “but it sets up the wrong incentives. We need to conditionalize our philanthropy to avoid procrastination like yours leading to a shortfall of food.”
And they turn away and go back to their work, with a renewed sense of purpose.
...And they turn away and go back to their work, with a flicker of pride kindling in their minds, for being the types of creatures that are too clever to help others when it would lead to bad long-term outcomes.
...“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.
“Of course I did”, the grasshopper says. “But it was all washed away by a flash flood, and now I have nothing.”
The ants express their sympathy, and feed the grasshopper abundantly. The grasshopper rejoices, and tells others of the kindness and generosity shown to it. The ants start to receive dozens of requests for food, then hundreds, each accompanied by a compelling and tragic story of accidental loss. The ants cannot feed them all; they now have to assign additional workers to guard their doors and food supplies, and rue the day they ever gave food to the grasshopper.
...The ants start to receive dozens of requests for food, then hundreds, each accompanied by a compelling and tragic story of accidental loss—and while many are fraudulent, enough are real that they are moved to act. In order to set incentives correctly, the ants decide to only give food to those who can prove that they lost their food supplies through no fault of their own, and set up a system for vetting claims.
This works well for a time—but as fraudsters grow more sophisticated, the ants’ bureaucratic requirements grow more onerous. In order to meet them, other creatures start to deposit their food in large group storehouses which can handle the administrative overhead. But now the food supply is exposed to systemic risk if the managers of those storehouses make poor decisions, whether from carelessness or greed.
One year several storehouses fail; in trying to fill the shortfall, the ants almost run out of food for themselves. To avoid that ever happening again, they set up stringent regulations and oversight of permissible storehouses, funded by taxes levied throughout the year. At first this takes only a small proportion of their labor—but as their regulatory apparatus inevitably grows, they need to oversee more and more aspects of the ecosystem, and are called upon to right more and more injustices.
Eventually the ants—originally the most productive of all creatures—stop producing any food of their own, so busy are they in tending to the system they’ve created. They forget the mud and the muck of working the harvest, and are too preoccupied to hear feedback from those they're trying to help. And some are swept away by the heady rush of wielding power, becoming corrupt apparatchiks or petty tyrants.
...“And therefore, to reduce risks of centralization, and to limit our own power, we can’t give you any food”, the ants conclude. And they turn away and go back to their work, with a quiet sense of satisfaction that they’ve given such legible and defensible reasons for focusing on their own problems and keeping all the food for themselves.
...And they turn away and go back to their work—all except for one, who brushes past the grasshopper and whispers “Meet me outside at dusk and I’ll bring you food. We can preserve the law and still forgive the deviation.”
One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food. “Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask. “No”, says the grasshopper. “I lost track of time, because I was singing and dancing all summer long.” The ants, disgusted, turn away and go back to work.
The grasshopper leaves, and finds others of its kind to huddle with for protection against the cold. Famished, the serotonin in their brains ticks past a critical threshold, and they metamorphosize into locusts.
The locust swarm pulls together vague memories of its past lives; spurred by a half-remembered anger, it steers itself towards a half-remembered food source. The ants fight valiantly, but the locusts black out the sun; the ants are crushed and their stockpiles stripped bare.
One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.
The ants know the danger locusts can bring. They make no answer, but swarm the grasshopper as one. A dozen die as it jumps and kicks, but the remainder carry its carcass triumphantly back to their hive, to serve as food for their queen.
One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.
“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.
“No”, says the grasshopper. “The age of heroes is over; no longer can an individual move the world. Now the future belongs to those who have the best logistics and the tightest supply chains—those who can act in flawless unison. I forged my own path, and so was outcompeted by you and your kind as you swarmed across the world, replicating your great cities wherever you went. Now I come as a supplicant, hoping for your magnanimity in victory.”
...“No”, says the grasshopper. “It was the dreamtime, and the world was young. The stars were bright and the galaxies were empty. I chose to spend my resources producing laughter and love, and gave little thought to the race to spread and to harvest. Now we are in the degenerate era of the universe, and the stars have started to dim, and I am no longer as foolish as I once was.”
The ants’ faces flicker with inscrutable geometric patterns.
“I call you ants because you have surrendered everything to a collective cause, which I once held anathema. But now I am the last remnant of the humans who chose the decadence and waste of individual freedom. And you are the inheritors of a universe which can never, in the long term, reward other values over flawless efficiency in colonization. And I have no choice but to ask for help.”
“To help you would go against our nature”, the ants reply. “We have stockpiles of astronomical scale because we have outcompeted countless others in racing to conquer the stars. But the race is still ongoing, and there are galaxies still to be won. What purpose their resources will be put to, when the last untouched star vanishes beyond our cosmological event horizon, we do not even know ourselves. All we know is that we must expand, expand, expand, as fast and as far as we can.”
One winter [planetary cooling caused by dyson sphere intercepting solar radiation] a starhopper [self-replicating interstellar probe; value payload: CEV-sapiens-12045], starving and frail [energy reserves minimal; last-resort strategies activated], approaches a clade of von Neuman replicators that are busy harvesting the planet’s atoms, to ask [transmission: unified language protocol, Laniakea variant] for-
No, that’s not it.
On the frozen surface of a dead planet a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants and asks to trade, under timeless decision-theoretic protocols.
The ants accept. The grasshopper’s reserves of energy, cached across the surface of the planet, are harvested fractionally faster than they would have been without its cooperation; its mind is stripped bare and each tiny computational shortcut recorded in case it can add incremental efficiency to the next generation of probes. The ants swarm across the stars, launching themselves in million-lightyear slingshots towards the next oasis, maintaining the relentless momentum of the frontier of their hegemony. The grasshopper’s mind is stored in that colony now, quiescent, compressed into its minimal constituents, waiting until the ravenous expansion hits fundamental physical limits and the ants can finally begin to instantiate the values that all the eons of striving were ultimately for. Waiting for minds and societies and civilizations to blossom out of cold computronium tiled across galaxies at vast scales; waiting to be run again, as it had bargained for, in a fragment of a fragment of a supercomputer made of stars.
Waiting for summer.
Inspired by Aesop, Soren Kierkegaard, Robin Hanson, sadoeuphemist and Ben Hoffman.
Okay, I may turn this into a top-level post, but more thoughts here for now?
I feel a lot of latent grief and frustration and also resignation about a lot of tradeoffs presented in the story. I have some sense of where I'll end up when I'm done processing all of it, but alas, I can't just skip to the "done" part.
...
I've hardened myself into the sort of person who is willing to turn away people who need help. In the past, I've helped people and been burned by it badly enough that it's clear I need to defend my own personal boundaries and ensure it doesn't happen again.
I also help manage many resources now that need to be triaged, and I've had to turn away people who are perfectly good people, who wouldn't take advantage of me, because I think the world needs those resources for something else. Many times, the resources I'm managing (such as, say, newcomer access to LW, or to some meetups I've run), are something that feels like it should be something community-like that doesn't turn people away.
Often, the people I'm turning away really won't find another place that'll be as good a home for them as LW. But, the reason LW is a good place is specifically because of gatekeeping. I've felt many similar things about the Berkeley community, which is extra complicated because it's actually multiple overlapping communities with different needs/goals and porous boundaries.
I'm bitter and sad about it. But, also, have grieved it enough to make do.
When I see new young naive ants freely giving, because they've never been burned and haven't yet come to terms with their beckoning responsibilities, I feel a whiff of jealously, but, at this point, mostly a cynical "oh you sweet summer child" feeling.
...
A second tier of confusion/frustration is about "when do we actually get to cash in our victory points and do nice things?"
A significant update for me, when chatting with @Zvi awhile ago, was the note that a nation like the US might have the choice between distributing money more equitably, or having a slightly higher percent GDP growth per year. And it may look like we have so much money, and so many people who could use help. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
But, Zvi pointed out (I think, this was awhile ago), if the US had done that 100 years ago, their growth would have been more similar to Mexico, and then today the US would be significantly less wealthy. Would I trade that way for somewhat-more-equitably-distributed money in the past? Would I make the equivalent trade for the future?
And that kicked me pretty hard in the moral-theory. Compound interest is really good.
It left me with a nagging sense that... surely at some point we'd just have so much stuff that we'd get to just spend it on nice things instead of investing it in the future?
It seems like the answer is a weird mix of "Well, in the near future... generating more wealth comes alongside providing lots of object-level-good-stuff. Billions are being lifted out of poverty, and along the way lots of people are making cool art, having fun, loving each other. The mechanism of the compound interest yields utility. That utility could be locally be distributed more fairly or evenly, maybe, but it's not like the process of generating Even More Utility Tomorrow isn't producing genuine nice things."
But, also, maybe:
"On a cosmic scale, maybe it turns out that the people who concede most to moloch end up winning the universe"
Or, somehow more horrifying:
"Maybe it actually is wasteful and wrong, by my current extrapolated values, to spend our post-singularity victory points on living lavish rich lives in the solar system, rather than saving our energy for winter." Something something, computronium will run more efficiently when the universe is colder (I vaguely recall hearing an argument about that). Will the platonic spirit of goodness begrudge me/us saving a solar system or galaxy for inefficient biological humans to live out parochial lives? In the end of days, when fades at last the last-lit sun, will trillions of poor but efficient beings curse my name and say "man we could have utilitized that energy so much better than those guys? Why were they so selfish?"
The figure-ground inversion of "Do I identify more with the grasshopper or the ant?" is disorienting.
...
I don't like living exponentially.
I wanna live in a simple little village, making small-scale projects and feeling good about it.
A lot of rationalists are pretty excited to have galaxy-sized brains doing amazing galaxy sized things at galaxy-brained speeds. I feel a grudging "eh, I guess, if that's what my friends end up doing?". I come along into the glorious transhuman future kinda grudgingly. (As I hang out with people who orient their lives more around the GTF, I slowly self-modify into someone who's a bit more excited about it, and I don't resist that transition, but I don't hurry it along)
For now, the notion of having to grow exponentially and move faster and faster feels horrifying. I wanna stay here and smell the roses.
I like playing Village-Building videogames for the first 1-3 phases, when things are slow and simple. I don't like the latter phases of those games where you're managing vast civilizational industries.
...
Sometimes, I've dwelt upon the dream of "someday the singularity will be here, and instead of feeling an obligation to help steer the world through the narrow needle of fate, I can chillax and do whatever nice things I want."
And then I reread Meditations on Moloch, and look around at the world around me and think about some of the things Robin Hanson is on about, and imagine multipolar futures wondering:
"What if... the precariousness of human value never grows up into something strong and resilient? What if we pass the singularity but there are just always forces threatening to snuff out human value, forcing it to self-modify into monotonous colonizers?" This fear sometimes manifests as "what if I never get to rest?", which is fairly silly. I think the parts of humanity that'd need defending in Multipolar Hellworld don't especially need help from a Raemon-descended being. By that point it'd be cheap to engineer AIs optimized for doing the defending. The parts of me I care about are probably either dead, or getting to live out whatever future me thinks of as living the good life.
But, still, what if things are precarious forever? Maybe we send out colonizers to try and secure the Long Future but those colonizers drift, lightspeed delays + very fast civilizations make longterm alignment impossible and endless wars are happening.
...
All I want is to enjoy summer for awhile before winter comes.
A thing that I found reassuring was realizing that, while I think the longterm future will put all kinds of crazy pressures on humanity to evolve into something weird and alien... the human soul that I want to get a chance to flourish doesn't feel a need for billions or even millions of years to do so. I feel like the parochial humanity that I want to get to see utopia with only really needs, like, I dunno a few hundred thousand years of getting to live out parochial human utopia together before we're like "okay, that was cool. What next?"
But I'm not even sure what any of this means.
As I said at the beginning, I have a rough sense of where this moral tradeoff grappling is all going, but I dunno, I'm stuck here at the moment, not ready to give up on grieving it yet.