069 - Communication Crisis

Counterintuitively, the most critical and urgent existential risk humanity faces today seems to be a matter of communication.

Humanity appears to be quickly losing the ability to communicate anything meaningfully and reliably. The consequences of this are that the viable solutions to any given problem are no longer able to compete with the torrential downpour of misinformation and disinformation polluting the internet, which humanity is now massively reliant upon.

This is a bit like everyone on the internet drinking water critically contaminated with lead, and the lead levels are quickly increasing thanks to trashbot technology. Just as lead causes brain damage and other long-term consequences for health, a massively polluted information ecosystem has the same effect.

For more than 4 years now my team has been demonstrating the cutting edge of technology, moving steadily further ahead of every big tech company and startup, while bootstrapping on volunteered time, and mostly pocket change. Criminally incompetent tech companies have continued to pour hundreds of millions and billions into fundamentally flawed technology like trashbots (LLMs), while never once achieving the SOTA status they're known for chasing, in any area we've operated in.

We could continue bootstrapping until the technology was deployed if the world wasn't already on fire, but as it stands proper funding will be required to complete the engineering workload in time to maintain a better than 50/50 chance of avoiding human extinction. Any investor competent in basic math skills should understand that their companies have a value of precisely 0 under the condition of extinction. Surprisingly, this doesn't seem to motivate them.

Fortunately for those potential investors, even if someone else comes along and invests, thereby allowing us to prevent human extinction, we'll still make sure to deliver on the demonstrated desire of the potential investors who chose not to invest. Their companies will reach a value of zero even with extinction avoided, precisely as they chose.

I make a point of calculating dispassionately, which does me no favors in communicating urgency. Humans are hard-wired with cognitive biases to react to passion, even when demonstrated passion is a red flag signaling probable flawed calculation. Passionate and flawed calculations are abundant, and very adept at the game of competing for human attention.

Once humanity completely loses the ability to communicate effectively extinction will be set in stone. Will your actions carve that stone?