Albert Camus broke with Jean-Paul Sartre and the French left over the most concrete political question there is: can the people alive today be treated as acceptable casualties in the pursuit of a better future?2
Sartre and the Marxists said yes. History has a direction. The revolution requires sacrifice. Camus said no. Any system of thought that subordinates living people to a hypothetical future has already committed the foundational moral error. Once you accept that logic, there is no limiting principle. Any atrocity becomes justifiable. Any amount of present suffering can be rationalized as a necessary input to the glorious output.
This is the structure of the AI acceleration argument. The technology will eventually benefit humanity (trillions of future humans, lives of abundance and meaning we can barely imagine), so present disruption is tolerable. Displaced workers, hollowed communities, the erosion of democratic leverage, the concentration of power in a handful of private actors who have exempted themselves from the consequences of their own project: regrettable but necessary. The expected value math works out.
[...]
Camus staked his intellectual legacy on the claim that the person standing in front of you is not an input to a utility function. Their suffering is not redeemed by a future state of affairs they may never see. Their dignity is not negotiable against projected outcomes. The person who exists now (who has a job they’re about to lose, a family they support, a community that depends on a functioning local economy) is the unit of account. Not humanity in the abstract. Not the trillions of future beings that the longtermists conjure to win their expected-value calculations.
Once that commitment is abandoned, the door opens to every form of rationalized cruelty that the twentieth century spent a hundred million lives trying to teach us to reject.
The entire AI acceleration project is premised on abandoning it. It asks present people to bear costs for future benefits they may never see, distributed to people who do not yet exist, administered by a self-appointed class that has insulated itself from the consequences entirely.
"Camus staked his intellectual legacy on the claim that the person standing in front of you is not an input to a utility function."
You must be new around here. Because I have written extensively on this point. The tradition of refusing this does not start with Camus. It can be found much earlier in intellectual history. Particularly in the form of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who observed that reason is and ought always be the slave to the passions. That reasons alone cannot compel action. He was criticizing the intellectuals of his time who thought the universe could be apprehended through pure reason. I have a completed book manuscript that I hope to get around to publishing—if the universe calms down—which talks deeply about this!
I am new here; a subscriber of mine pointed me here and said we'd have much in common.
Appreciate the response. Camus was far from the first to make this call. He just did it with unusual clarity and rare moral force, which is why he was useful for the argument. The lineage is real and predates him. I just don't think it runs through Hume, much as I adore the man. One of the absolute Greats.
The slave-of-the-passions line from Treatise 2.3.3 is a claim about how moral judgment functions, not about what we owe each other. The sentence Hume writes a few lines later is the famous one: it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of his finger. Reason has no resources to forbid it. Whatever forbids it has to come from sentiment.
That is not a refusal to treat persons as inputs to a utility function. It is the ground classical utilitarianism was built on. Bentham read Hume carefully. Mill did too. Humean sympathy gives you an approbation-based account of virtue that sits comfortably with discounting present persons against projected outcomes, because the framework has no constraint that forbids it. Only a sentiment that might happen to oppose it, or might not.
Camus is doing something else. The break with Sartre is a constraint on what counts as permissible reasoning about persons: the concrete present individual cannot be cashed in against a hypothetical future, full stop. That move belongs to a different lineage. Kant's second formulation, the Dostoevskian critique of revolutionary instrumentalism that Camus works through openly in The Rebel, the religious-existentialist thread from Kierkegaard through Buber and Levinas. Hume is in the other room. The utilitarian frame Camus rejects comes down from him, not against him.
Would genuinely like to read the manuscript when it lands. The hard problem for any genealogy running back through Hume is bridging sentimentalist moral psychology and the deontological-existentialist constraint Camus is actually asserting, without conceding the Bentham-Mill descent. Anyway, I could riff on this stuff forever and I've already clogged up your comments. Really enjoy your work. Cheers.
How much of the 401k investment being managed in global hedgefunds is enmeshed in the neoliberals’ fifty year global property Ponzi scheme ? Those comfortable upper middle class suburbanites benefitting will shrug their shoulders and suggest those Tahoe residents just ‘move somewhere else’. Except that this stealing of their energy source renders their properties worthless. This kind of unscrupulous resource extraction for ‘growth’, is happening everywhere. It is also eating away at the foundations of that global property Ponzi scheme upon which even the secondary bond markets depend. I do not believe that the destruction of Gaza or Tahoe in order to expand the worth of assets on paper will outrun the global economic and social collapses created by this corrollary falling of, once perpetually rising, global property prices.
Absolutely abhorrent how, in the amoral minds of tech investors, humans are secondary or tertiary to their profits, and how regulations and laws aren't there when AI comes in. The answer is: private investors again. NV Energy is a private, investor-owned utility holding company. Private capital is destroying the playing field for human beings on many fronts again. Utilities should never be privately owned and operated for profit; public services in general should never be in the hands of those where profits are above service. These utility companies were not designed to serve capital; they were designed to provide services to humans. The tech companies should be blocked from competing with humans for water, electricity, and other resources, including land: it should be mandatory that they build the infrastructure to feed their data centers, including renewing water supplies, using renewable energy sources, and more. We should have nationwide regulations in place on this matter. All the damage to our economy in the last few decades has been driven by private capital investments, from the high cost of housing (roughly 15% is owned by private capital investment firms) to the damaging data centers (tech private money). Data centers do not generate economic returns for anyone in the communities where they are built; they don't generate many local jobs once operating (they do have jobs while being built, more on that another time...), and they are heavy users of utilities. The only ones profiting from it are the investors. Again, private capital. There should be regulations on the level of investments these privately owned funds can do in matters of public interest, such as utilities, properties, communications, mail, and more to make sure humans, the 50,000 in Tahoe basin, do not face this type of amoral situation.
It's so scary how quickly it's happening too. It came on my radar about a year ago when a friend in a rural county of my state of Maryland mentioned that the new data center near her home had ruined her summer (power outages, increased costs, and constant noise). I wrote about it yesterday. We need to figure out ways to share strategies across states. I really think that this is a huge part of the authoritarian playbook- resource extract from us right here in our backyards, literally.
Thank you for the link. This article was incredibly informative. Southern Arizona is desperately trying to fight off data center development with little luck. AI development corporations seem intent on draining our severely drought-stricken desert of every last drop of water.
Yes it is very helpful to elaborate on concrete cases like these 50,000 in support of the larger analyses that are unfolding across these Substack posts.
Generative AI delenda est. More compute is not going to solve the current problems, and it's unclear whether the desired "solution" will serve human flourishing anyway. (Unless, as I suspect given what we know about Jeffrey Epstein's cronies, the tech-right doesn't actually see anyone outside their tiny class as meaningfully human.)
And this is to say nothing of the obscene noise pollution of data centres.
"The result, in the Fortune piece’s careful summary, is a system where California sets the rules, Nevada runs the wires, federal jurisdiction applies to the wholesale market, and no single entity is accountable for the outcome."
In 1961 the Ghanaian government determined to dam the Volta River at Akosombo, primarily to generate hydroelectric power for the country's aluminum industry but also because, as we know, economic prosperity generally is highly positively correlated with electricity generation and usage. The project was successful; Ghana is today one of the most electrified countries in Africa and even exports a fair deal of electricity to Togo and Benin.
The cost?
Communities that had lived around the Volta River and relied on its basin were forced to move due to the flooding resulting from the side effects of constructing and operating the dam. To this day that community remains substantially impoverished and many of the traditional farming practices they used have simply vanished. Perhaps the human cost was worth it--the societal benefits of electrification were known and measurable in 1961, unlike what might come of AI buildout today--but the human cost was real and cannot be forgotten.
I would also suggest that this does not require a “ban all AI” response. Just that an appropriate amount of, as you put it, “regulatory friction” is needed for this society to fulfill the Enlightenment dream toward which we are supposed to be striving.
That can’t happen if sci-fit robot villains like Marc Andreesen are allowed to call the shots.
From a piece I wrote a few weeks back (https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory), which seems relevant to your effective accelerationist bit:
Albert Camus broke with Jean-Paul Sartre and the French left over the most concrete political question there is: can the people alive today be treated as acceptable casualties in the pursuit of a better future?2
Sartre and the Marxists said yes. History has a direction. The revolution requires sacrifice. Camus said no. Any system of thought that subordinates living people to a hypothetical future has already committed the foundational moral error. Once you accept that logic, there is no limiting principle. Any atrocity becomes justifiable. Any amount of present suffering can be rationalized as a necessary input to the glorious output.
This is the structure of the AI acceleration argument. The technology will eventually benefit humanity (trillions of future humans, lives of abundance and meaning we can barely imagine), so present disruption is tolerable. Displaced workers, hollowed communities, the erosion of democratic leverage, the concentration of power in a handful of private actors who have exempted themselves from the consequences of their own project: regrettable but necessary. The expected value math works out.
[...]
Camus staked his intellectual legacy on the claim that the person standing in front of you is not an input to a utility function. Their suffering is not redeemed by a future state of affairs they may never see. Their dignity is not negotiable against projected outcomes. The person who exists now (who has a job they’re about to lose, a family they support, a community that depends on a functioning local economy) is the unit of account. Not humanity in the abstract. Not the trillions of future beings that the longtermists conjure to win their expected-value calculations.
Once that commitment is abandoned, the door opens to every form of rationalized cruelty that the twentieth century spent a hundred million lives trying to teach us to reject.
The entire AI acceleration project is premised on abandoning it. It asks present people to bear costs for future benefits they may never see, distributed to people who do not yet exist, administered by a self-appointed class that has insulated itself from the consequences entirely.
"Camus staked his intellectual legacy on the claim that the person standing in front of you is not an input to a utility function."
You must be new around here. Because I have written extensively on this point. The tradition of refusing this does not start with Camus. It can be found much earlier in intellectual history. Particularly in the form of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who observed that reason is and ought always be the slave to the passions. That reasons alone cannot compel action. He was criticizing the intellectuals of his time who thought the universe could be apprehended through pure reason. I have a completed book manuscript that I hope to get around to publishing—if the universe calms down—which talks deeply about this!
I am new here; a subscriber of mine pointed me here and said we'd have much in common.
Appreciate the response. Camus was far from the first to make this call. He just did it with unusual clarity and rare moral force, which is why he was useful for the argument. The lineage is real and predates him. I just don't think it runs through Hume, much as I adore the man. One of the absolute Greats.
The slave-of-the-passions line from Treatise 2.3.3 is a claim about how moral judgment functions, not about what we owe each other. The sentence Hume writes a few lines later is the famous one: it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of his finger. Reason has no resources to forbid it. Whatever forbids it has to come from sentiment.
That is not a refusal to treat persons as inputs to a utility function. It is the ground classical utilitarianism was built on. Bentham read Hume carefully. Mill did too. Humean sympathy gives you an approbation-based account of virtue that sits comfortably with discounting present persons against projected outcomes, because the framework has no constraint that forbids it. Only a sentiment that might happen to oppose it, or might not.
Camus is doing something else. The break with Sartre is a constraint on what counts as permissible reasoning about persons: the concrete present individual cannot be cashed in against a hypothetical future, full stop. That move belongs to a different lineage. Kant's second formulation, the Dostoevskian critique of revolutionary instrumentalism that Camus works through openly in The Rebel, the religious-existentialist thread from Kierkegaard through Buber and Levinas. Hume is in the other room. The utilitarian frame Camus rejects comes down from him, not against him.
Would genuinely like to read the manuscript when it lands. The hard problem for any genealogy running back through Hume is bridging sentimentalist moral psychology and the deontological-existentialist constraint Camus is actually asserting, without conceding the Bentham-Mill descent. Anyway, I could riff on this stuff forever and I've already clogged up your comments. Really enjoy your work. Cheers.
Andresen has a toddler. No introspection. Diabolical
Andreessen has a compound in New Zealand or some shit. He thinks his kid will be okay.
How much of the 401k investment being managed in global hedgefunds is enmeshed in the neoliberals’ fifty year global property Ponzi scheme ? Those comfortable upper middle class suburbanites benefitting will shrug their shoulders and suggest those Tahoe residents just ‘move somewhere else’. Except that this stealing of their energy source renders their properties worthless. This kind of unscrupulous resource extraction for ‘growth’, is happening everywhere. It is also eating away at the foundations of that global property Ponzi scheme upon which even the secondary bond markets depend. I do not believe that the destruction of Gaza or Tahoe in order to expand the worth of assets on paper will outrun the global economic and social collapses created by this corrollary falling of, once perpetually rising, global property prices.
Excellent, Mike. So spot on! Thank you.
Absolutely abhorrent how, in the amoral minds of tech investors, humans are secondary or tertiary to their profits, and how regulations and laws aren't there when AI comes in. The answer is: private investors again. NV Energy is a private, investor-owned utility holding company. Private capital is destroying the playing field for human beings on many fronts again. Utilities should never be privately owned and operated for profit; public services in general should never be in the hands of those where profits are above service. These utility companies were not designed to serve capital; they were designed to provide services to humans. The tech companies should be blocked from competing with humans for water, electricity, and other resources, including land: it should be mandatory that they build the infrastructure to feed their data centers, including renewing water supplies, using renewable energy sources, and more. We should have nationwide regulations in place on this matter. All the damage to our economy in the last few decades has been driven by private capital investments, from the high cost of housing (roughly 15% is owned by private capital investment firms) to the damaging data centers (tech private money). Data centers do not generate economic returns for anyone in the communities where they are built; they don't generate many local jobs once operating (they do have jobs while being built, more on that another time...), and they are heavy users of utilities. The only ones profiting from it are the investors. Again, private capital. There should be regulations on the level of investments these privately owned funds can do in matters of public interest, such as utilities, properties, communications, mail, and more to make sure humans, the 50,000 in Tahoe basin, do not face this type of amoral situation.
Here is some additional information about where they are going to go next when communities push back....this needs more attention
https://morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/the-great-data-center-swindle?r=e5iz9&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
It's so scary how quickly it's happening too. It came on my radar about a year ago when a friend in a rural county of my state of Maryland mentioned that the new data center near her home had ruined her summer (power outages, increased costs, and constant noise). I wrote about it yesterday. We need to figure out ways to share strategies across states. I really think that this is a huge part of the authoritarian playbook- resource extract from us right here in our backyards, literally.
https://lucyahowey.substack.com/p/america-is-a-colonial-flat-circle?r=e5iz9&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
Thank you for the link. This article was incredibly informative. Southern Arizona is desperately trying to fight off data center development with little luck. AI development corporations seem intent on draining our severely drought-stricken desert of every last drop of water.
Yes it is very helpful to elaborate on concrete cases like these 50,000 in support of the larger analyses that are unfolding across these Substack posts.
I really hate these would be tech-overlords. I'm not a violent person but burn it all down enters my mind when I read things like this.
Generative AI delenda est. More compute is not going to solve the current problems, and it's unclear whether the desired "solution" will serve human flourishing anyway. (Unless, as I suspect given what we know about Jeffrey Epstein's cronies, the tech-right doesn't actually see anyone outside their tiny class as meaningfully human.)
And this is to say nothing of the obscene noise pollution of data centres.
"The result, in the Fortune piece’s careful summary, is a system where California sets the rules, Nevada runs the wires, federal jurisdiction applies to the wholesale market, and no single entity is accountable for the outcome."
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." (John F. Kennedy, from https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-first-anniversary-the-alliance-for-progress )
In 1961 the Ghanaian government determined to dam the Volta River at Akosombo, primarily to generate hydroelectric power for the country's aluminum industry but also because, as we know, economic prosperity generally is highly positively correlated with electricity generation and usage. The project was successful; Ghana is today one of the most electrified countries in Africa and even exports a fair deal of electricity to Togo and Benin.
The cost?
Communities that had lived around the Volta River and relied on its basin were forced to move due to the flooding resulting from the side effects of constructing and operating the dam. To this day that community remains substantially impoverished and many of the traditional farming practices they used have simply vanished. Perhaps the human cost was worth it--the societal benefits of electrification were known and measurable in 1961, unlike what might come of AI buildout today--but the human cost was real and cannot be forgotten.
Well since Andreessen bought into the site we are currently on, well over a year ago, perhaps some response will be forthcoming...
I would also suggest that this does not require a “ban all AI” response. Just that an appropriate amount of, as you put it, “regulatory friction” is needed for this society to fulfill the Enlightenment dream toward which we are supposed to be striving.
That can’t happen if sci-fit robot villains like Marc Andreesen are allowed to call the shots.
Tell those billionaires to fuck off!
Hey
Plaster their properties with solar!
Roofs: siding, fields,parking lots and new wind turbines with no blades!
It should be a requirement