retro-terraforming the world

things right now 56—week of 12.15.25

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Abundance or Elon Musk’s techno-optimism

The View from 1930 or "The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren"

Homo Faber or The Human Condition

The Gooncave or Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Retro-terraforming or Tenet

Cosplay Zones or The Peripheral

Echogeist or our LLM Ghosts

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A friend tells me about a panel discussion he attended featuring current Twitch CEO and former interim OpenAI CEO, Emmett Shear. "He said we will have to raise AI's like babies." I shudder at the thought. It already presupposes the next generation is not human. That we belong to the past.

But then I wonder if AI is really an agent of the future.

Today, Elon Musk posted:

The future is going to be AMAZING with AI and robots enabling sustainable ABUNDANCE for all!

There’s a world in which artificial intelligence and robotics really do create unprecedented material abundance and yet that world is still not AMAZING. We already live in a world of material abundance that would shock our great-grandparents. But the one unifying belief amongst the citizens of the wealthiest countries in the developed world is that things are not particularly AMAZING.

In 1930, the father of modern macroeconomics, John Maynard Keynes, whose theories charted the path out of the Great Depression, wrote:

…there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.

This essay, "The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren", is usually cited to mock Keynes' prediction that in the future (our present) people would only work fifteen hours per week. Its real insight—the prediction that has proven true—is that material solutions can't fix spiritual problems. We may not be homo economicus, economic man, but we are certainly homo faber, man the maker, a term popularized by Hannah Arendt in her 1958 book, The Human Condition.

She categorizes the human condition into three interlocking, ascending parts: animal laborans or the laboring animal, homo faber or man the maker, and zoon politikon, the Aristotelian term for a political being.

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.

It is through engagement with the world that we find freedom. These three together constitute vita activa, the active life.

The techo-optimist’s era of artificial abundance doesn’t engage with any of these three essential components to our humanity, instead it hopes something akin to "fully-automated luxury communism" will solve them—provide the inactive life.

DoorDrones will deliver your food. Waymo will drive you around. LLMs will give you companionship. AI OnlyFans will get you off. And in between, the rest of your hours will be filled with personalized content streams from NetflixHBOMaxPlus.

It’s the pod. It’s the gooncave. You will do nothing and you will create nothing. Only the LLMs will be your friends. Or I suppose that is the hope.

We had a preview of this in 2020 with pandemic measures providing a preview of AI-enabled UBI (universal basic income). With no work, alcohol consumption skyrocketed along with the American waistline. Mental health decayed. It did, however, supercharge the zoon politikon, the political animal in us all. Though retrospectively, in light of our ever-hardening political tribes, we find ourselves ambivalent about whether or not this was an upside.

I suppose the techno-optimist hope is that once abundance sufficiently quells animal laborans and homo faber, zoon politikon will quiet as well.

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the future at war with the past

I remember watching Christopher Nolan’s Tenet on New Year’s Eve 2020 in a finished basement in suburban Rochester. Unpopular opinion: I think it's a great movie. Like most viewers, my friends were nonplussed—confused and bored as soon as the opening sequence, a terrorist attack on a brutalist ziggurat: Estonian, post-Soviet, abandoned, standing in for the Kyiv Opera House. Champagne-drunk, bored with the convoluted plot line, my friends nodded off in fully reclined La-Z-Boy chairs.

I was also bored and confused, but couldn’t sleep. When the movie ended, I restarted it. On second watch, with the help of some overly long Letterboxd reviews, I could piece together the circular plot.

It was a movie about a future at war with the past. Unlike most stories about time travel, there was no teleportation involved. Physical matter traveled backward in time, its entropy reversed.

After a year of revolutionary zeal, a film about a future at war with the past felt very timely. It reminded me of something else as well, Roko’s Basilisk. A thought experiment posted on the effective altruist board LessWrong in 2010. Like Pascal’s Wager, that one should believe in God even if one is uncertain because the downsides of disbelief should you be wrong (Hell) are much worse than the downsides of belief, Roko’s Basilisk argued you should not work against the creation of a machine god even though it may never come into existence. If it were to be created, you would have marked yourself a heretic and would soon feel its wrath.

Can the future retro-terraform the past with information?

It’s a question posed by William Gibson’s 2014 novel The Peripheral, in which a quantum computer is used to send information backwards in time. In the process, new dimensions, new timelines branching off the point of contact are created as a technologically advanced post-apocalyptic society of abundance tries to prevent a catastrophe, darkly alluded to as the Jackpot, in their own recent past.

These questions are all speculative, but recently I’ve been wondering… What if we flipped the equation? We do not know if information from the future can be sent to the past, but we do know information from the past has already arrived in our present.

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the past at war with the future