This episode was inspired by an article I read about the race to develop artificial intelligence. It reminded me of a story that I heard about Jospeh Heller, which got me thinking about the concept of enough.
References
Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent
Vonnegut on Heller on Enough
6,200 Pairs of Shoes
A $248,000 Tree House
30,000,000 to 8,000
as peanuts are served today
4,000,000 to 0
by accident
0 to 4,000
600 times more powerful than
paper clips to end the world
cowboys v. spacemen (Boulding's original paper here)
freedom, books, flowers, and the moon
incredibly lucky
the great filter
Men standing with pile of buffalo skulls, Michigan Carbon Works
Transcript
Hi, this is Jaime Escuder. And welcome to another episode of None Sense.
I read a headline this morning and it reminded me of something, a story that I once heard about Kurt Vonnegut. And so, I'm gonna talk to you about all of that.
Here's the headline, "Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent: Nearly all big tech companies have an artificial intelligence project. And they are willing to pay experts millions of dollars to help get it done."
Okay. And here is the Vonnegut story. This is Vonnegut speaking.
"True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer, now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, 'Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch 22 has earned in its entire history?' And Joe said, 'I've got something he can never have.' And I said, 'What on earth could that be, Joe?' And Joe said, 'The knowledge that I've got enough.'"
This podcast today is going to be about the idea of enough.
Enough is something that people really don't do. We are avaricious and greedy. Most of us are demented, as Walt Whitman said, "with the mania of owning things." This is why Imelda Marcos had over 1,200 pairs of shoes. This is why a guy named Dan Burnham spent $248,000 on a tree house for his grandkids. "Adorable and worth every penny," said Mr. Burnham.
And we are rapacious.
This is a thing that we do: we develop technologies, and then we abuse them. There used to be, think about this, 30 million buffalo in North America. Do you know how many un-hybridized buffalo there are in America right now? There's a general population of 500,000. So, down from 30 million to 500,000. That's an astonishing decline. [98.4%] But of those, you know how many are un-hybridized, meaning the actual buffalo that were here originally? 8,000. [0.026%]
Here's another example. Did you know that the United States used to be the largest producing caviar exporter in the world? And that the caviar was of exceptionally high quality? This is from a website I found on the history of caviar. This is the quote, "There was so much American caviar being produced in North America at the time (so around the turn of the 20th century) that bars would serve the salty delicacy to encourage more beer drinking, as peanuts are served today." At the turn of the 19th century, there was more caviar going to Europe from North America than from Russia. At that time, there were roughly 4 million pounds of sturgeon being harvested from the Great Lakes per year and now, virtually gone.
I'm mentioning this because it's the concept...it's the idea that we don't accept the concept of enough, as Joseph Heller did, that causes us to do things like fracking. And it's also the idea that we don't accept the fact that we have limitations, that we cannot be trusted with these technologies as we develop them that causes us to create things like nuclear weapons, which we then do things like leave them unguarded. They've been flown across the country by accident. [Same incident.] They've been overbuilt. We have...there's something like 4,000 nuclear weapons in the American arsenal.
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