Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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To Begin

I put the newsletter on pause last week; did I miss anything?

Given what is unfolding right now, it’s hard to make this newsletter anything other than a generative AI revolution update. I don’t want to stoke the hype yet further, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this.

Given all that, this week we’ll dive into a high-profile petition to pause work on new generative models. Also, we’ll look at the new hyperreality taking shape around us via Midjourney and its community of inventive users.

But it’s not all AI; there’s also an intriguing new report on global population change from the Club of Rome.

Let’s get into it.

🤖 For the people

This week, another generative AI story that pushes 2023 deeper into the realms of what seemed, recently, possible only in science-fiction.

It’s not yet another platform, plugin, or viral image (more on those below) but a call to slow down. Over 1,000 technology leaders signed a petition demanding a pause of at least six months on the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

Signatories included Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari, Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. And their language was pretty apocalyptic:

According to the authors of the petition: ‘recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.’

The scale of their concern was lent support by a research paper published last week. It saw Microsoft researchers report that GPT-4 shows ‘sparks of AGI’. The model, they point out, shows high-level competence across mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, and psychology, and can solve novel problems in those domains without any need for special instructions: ‘in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance’.

Meanwhile, the iconic and ever-controversial AI safety expert Eliezer Yudkowsky went full pelt in Time magazine. He didn’t sign the petition, he says, because it doesn’t go far enough:

All training of large models, says Yudkowsky, needs to be shutdown indefinitely and worldwide. He says the governments of Earth must come together in a concerted effort to stop an AI-fuelled human extinction.

⚡ NWSH Take: Pretty intense, right? Yudkowsky is, and has long been, an outlier on all this. Meanwhile, others say this week’s petition signatories have fallen prey to OpenAI’s apocalypse marketing: a plan to get everyone scared and then sell subscriptions. // For my part, I don’t think AI annihilation is imminent; nor do I think these fears are founded only in hype. GPT-4’s competence across all kinds of reasoning tasks is insane. And for all the reams of coverage (guilty), I don’t think we’re anywhere near processing the implications. It no longer seems far-fetched that an AI model could start behaving in strange and uncontrollable ways in the near-term. It’s emphatically time to get serious about alignment. // Alignment is first a technical problem: how do we make sure AIs only do what we want them to do? After this, though, it becomes a political problem. Whose values should we align our AIs with? Those of Californian tech bros? // We can’t put the AI genie back in the bottle, and in practice a global ‘pause’ is highly unlikely. That means only answer here is to speed up research on the technical challenge of alignment, and to allow a plurality of AIs, empowering different peoples and communities to live and create according to their own value systems. That is real alignment. To that end, check out open source AI group LAION’s petition for a new internationally-funded supercomputer to train open source foundation models.

📈 Growth mindset

Also this week, a huge if true forecast on the future of the human population.

A new study commissioned by the Club of Rome forecasts that if current trends continue then the global population will hit 8.8 billion in around 2050, before declining rapidly to 7.8 billion by the end of the century.

The study, conducted by think tank Earth4All, also games out a scenario in which governments invest in policies known to curtail population growth, such as education and social services. Here, population peaks at 8.5 billion in around 2040 and falls to 6 billion by 2100.

Both projections are far below last year’s UN Population Prospects forecast, which had population peaking at 10.4 billion in the 2080s.

The Club of Rome is best known for the now (in)famous 1972 report The Limits to Growth, which warned of impending environmental crisis and social breakdown due, in part, to strains imposed by overpopulation.

The report came amid a wave of neo-Malthusian anxiety in the decades after WWII. A 1968 book called The Population Bomb — which influenced the thinking of the Club of Rome — raised the spectre of hundreds of millions of people starving to death as population growth exceeded food supply.

⚡ NWSH Take: The original Limits to Growth report is today the subject of fierce disagreement. Critics say the Club gave voice to unfounded fears motivated by an ideological distaste for modernity. Proponents point out that the report offered a number of different scenarios, and that the growth-induced systemic breakdown it envisioned may yet eventuate. // This new statement on population could end up being just as contested. The Club now accept that their population bomb won’t go off. And they celebrate their finding that population is set to peak sooner and lower than the UN expect — stressing that it’s good news for the environment. Meanwhile, though, a niche but growing school of thought says that population collapse is the real crisis coming down the track; rapidly shrinking and ageing populations, runs this line, will kill productivity and threaten economic collapse. // Where does the truth lie? Most mainstream demographers say population collapse isn’t on the cards, and that ageing populations don’t have to mean economic calamity. Meanwhile, it’s not overpopulation but intense patterns of high and damaging consumption in the rich world that are the primary drivers of climate change. As ever with demography, it seems the truth lies between the extremes.

🎭 Real life

Version five of the text-to-image tool Midjourney was released two weeks ago. And this week, users went wild.

On Reddit, Midjourney enthusiasts started sharing photorealistic, news report style images of historical events — such as 2001’s devastating Great Cascadia earthquake in Oregon:

The truth, of course, is that no such event took place; this is all fictitious — a AI-fuelled experiment in alternative history.

Meanwhile, Chinese users of the tool are creating pseudo-documentary images of the southwestern city of Chongqing in the 1990s.

All this comes days after the first truly viral AI-generated image: of Pope Francis in a white puffer coat.

⚡ NWSH Take: In his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote about hyperreality